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QUATTLEBAUM, Circuit Judge:
In 1761, Massachusetts lawyer James Otis exclaimed “one of the most essential
branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house. A man’s house is his castle.”
John Adams’s Reconstruction of Otis’s Speech in the Writs of Assistance Case, in
Collected Political Writings of James Otis 12–13 (Richard Samuelson, ed. 2015).
American law has embraced that principle since our nation’s founding. U.S. Const. amend.
V. But we have also long recognized that “all property in this country is held under the
implied obligation that the owner’s use of it shall not be injurious to the community.”
Mugler v. Kansas, 123 U.S. 623, 665 (1887). These values collide when private property
creates a public nuisance.
When this collision occurs in Virginia, the government has two options. It can abate
a public nuisance without paying compensation. Or it can exercise its right of eminent
domain based on the public use of blight elimination. In the latter situation, the government
may acquire title to the property, but it must pay the owner just compensation.
Here, the City of Norfolk determined that property owned by Danny W. Fox was
unsafe and uninhabitable, and thus a public nuisance. So, after repeatedly notifying Fox
over the course of several years that his property violated the statewide building code, the
city abated the nuisance by demolishing the house on the property. In response, Fox sued
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