United States v. General Motors Corporation

Decision Date08 January 1945
Docket NumberNo. 76,76
Citation323 U.S. 373,156 A.L.R. 390,65 S.Ct. 357,89 L.Ed. 311
PartiesUNITED STATES v. GENERAL MOTORS CORPORATION
CourtU.S. Supreme Court

Mr. Vernon L. Wilkinson, of Washington, D.C., for petitioner.

Mr. John Thomas Smith, of New York City, for respondent.

Mr. Justice ROBERTS delivered the opinion of the Court.

This case is one of first impression in this court. It presents a question on which the decisions of federal courts are in conflict.1 The problem involved is the ascertainment of the just compensation required by the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, where, in the exercise of the power of eminent domain, temporary occupancy of a portion of a leased building is taken from a tenant who holds under a long term lease.

Section 201 of Tit. II of the Second War Powers Act of March 27, 1942,2 provides, in part, that the Secretary of War may cause proceedings to be instituted, in any court having jurisdiction, to acquire, by condemnation, any real property, temporary use thereof, or other interest therein which shall be deemed necessary for military or other war purposes. The Act provides further that, on or after the filing of the condemnation petition, immediate possession may be taken and the property may be occupied, used, or improved.

In 1928 the respondent leased a one story warehouse building in Chicago for a term of twenty years, for the storage and distribution of automobile parts, and fitted the premises for this use. In 1942 the United States became subtenants of a portion of the floor space in the building. There remained in the possession of the respondent some 93,000 square feet. In the spring of 1942 the Secretary of War requested the Attorney General to institute proceedings for condemnation of the occupancy of the remaining space for a term ending June 30, 1943. Pursuant to the request, the United States, June 8, 1942, filed a petition in the District Court for an order condemning such temporary use and granting the Government the right of immediate possession, use, and improvement for military purposes. On the same day the court entered an order declaring the property condemned for a term ending June 30, 1943, and granting the United States the right of immediate possession. The order was served on the respondent and shortly thereafter it began removing its personal property from the area and dismantling and demolishing bins and fixtures, so that the space was available for government use by June 19.

At the trial for the ascertainment of the compensation due the respondent, the attorney for the Government, after proving the authority for the taking, called a real estate expert who gave his opinion that the fair rental value of the space was 35 cents per year per square foot. The Government then rested.

The respondent called expert witnesses who testified that, in their opinion, the fair rental value was 43 cents per square foot, and a witness was permitted to testify that the rent paid by the respondent to its landlord had varied during the years 1940 to 1942, inclusive, from 41.9 to 43.24 cents.

The respondent then offered to prove various items of cost caused by removal of the contents. These consisted, inter alia, of salaries of employees engaged in the work, compensation due employes put out of work by the removal, wages of janitors and watchmen for the protection of the building during the moving, the cost of shipping the contents of the building to other points, compensation to executives and employes whose time was required in connection with the moving of the property, freight and haulage charges, rental of storage space for articles moved out, the value of the bin equipment destroyed and the estimated original cost of the installation of fixed equipment completely lost as a result of the dismantling of the area. The court sustained an objection to the offer. The jury awarded compensation in a lump sum at a rate of approximately 40 cents per square foot for the term of one year.3

The respondent appealed to the Circuit Court of Appeals, assigning as error the refusal of its offer of proof. That court might have sustained the District Court's ruling on the ground that respondent was not entitled to prove certain of the expenditures and losses in question as independent items of damages additional to the value of the interest taken by condemnation. The court, however, considering substance rather than form, by a vote of 2 to 1, reversed the judgment, holding that items of actual loss which were the direct and necessary result of the respondent's exclusion from the leased area might be proved, not as independent items but as elements to be considered in arriving at the sum which would be just compensation for the interest which the Government condemned. The cause was remanded for trial in accordance with the ruling of the Circuit Court of Appeals. We think we should review that ruling inasmuch as it is fundamental to the further conduct of the case. The correctness of the decision of the court below depends upon the scope and meaning of the constitutional provision: 'nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation', which conditions the otherwise unrestrained power of the sovereign to expropriate, without compensation, whatever it needs.

The critical terms are 'property,' 'taken' and 'just compensation'. It is conceivable that the first was used in its vulgar and untechnical sense of the physical thing with respect to which the citizen exercises rights recognized by law. On the other hand, it may have been employed in a more accurate sense to denote the group of rights inhering in the citizen's relation to the physical thing, as the right to possess, use and dispose of it. In point of fact, the construction given the phrase has been the latter.4 When the sovereign exercises the power of eminent domain it substitutes itself in relation to the physical thing in question in place of him who formerly bore the relation to that thing, which we denominate ownership. In other words, it deals with what lawyers term the individual's 'interest' in the thing in question. That interest may comprise the group of rights for which the shorthand term is 'a fee simple' or it may be the interest known as an 'estate or tenancy for years', as in the present instance. The constitutional provision is addressed to every sort of interest the citizen may possess.

In its primary meaning, the term 'taken' would seem to signify something more than destruction, for it might well be claimed that one does not take what he destroys. But the construction of the phrase has not been so narrow. The courts have held that the deprivation of the former owner rather than the accretion of a right or interest to the sovereign constitutes the taking. Governmental action short of acquisition of title or occupancy has been held, if its effects are so complete as to deprive the owner of all or most of his interest in the subject matter, to amount to a taking.5

But it is to be observed that whether the sovereign substitutes itself as occupant in place of the former owner, or destroys all his existing rights in the subject matter, the Fifth Amendment concerns itself solely with the 'property,' i.e., with the owner's relation as such to the physical thing and not with other collateral interests which may be incident to his ownership.

In the light of these principles it has been held that the compensation to be paid is the value of the interest taken. Only in the sense that he is to receive such value is it true that the owner must be put in as good position pecuniarily as if his property had not been taken. In the ordinary case, for want of a better standard, market value, so-called, is the criterion of that value. In some cases this criterion cannot be used either because the interest condemned has no market value or because, in the circumstances, market value furnishes an inappropriate measure of actual value.

In the trial of this case the parties presented evidence of the market value of the occupancy of bare floor space for the term taken. The respondent's offer to prove additional items for which it claimed compensation was overruled. The award was therefore limited to the market value of the occupancy of a vacant building. The question is whether any other element of value inhered in the interest taken.

The sovereign ordinarily takes the fee. The rule in such a case is that compensation for that interest does not include future loss of profits, the expense of moving removable fixtures and personal property from the premises, the loss of good-will which inheres in the location of the land, or other like consequential losses which would ensue the sale of the property to someone other than the sovereign. No doubt all these elements would be considered by an owner in determining whether, and at what price, to sell. No doubt, therefore, if the owner is to be made whole for the loss consequent on the sovereign's seizure of his property, these elements should properly be considered. But the courts have generally held that they are not to be reckoned as part of the compensation for the fee taken by the Government.6 We are not to be taken as departing from the rule they have laid down, which we think sound. Even where state constitutions command that compensation be made for property 'taken or damaged' for public use, as many do, it has generally been held that that which is taken or damaged is the group of rights which the so-called owner exercises in his dominion of the physical thing, and that damage to those rights of ownership does not include losses to his business or other consequential damage.7

The question posed in this case then is, shall a different measure of compensation apply where that which is taken is a right of temporary occupancy of a building equipped for the condemnee's business, filed with his commodities, and presumably to be reoccupied and used, as before, to...

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