Menno Toews, Evelyn Toews, and Norman Meachum v. United States

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that railbank-ing does not change the analysis of whether interim trail use is within the scope of a railroad .purpose easement when a plan for future railroad use is merely speculative
• holding that railbanking and the possibility that the easement might be one day turned into a light rail system was too speculative to serve as a basis to deny the plaintiffs compensation under the Fifth Amendment
• “In the circumstances, it is unnecessary for us definitively to address the question of whether there had been an earlier abandonment of the easement....”
• “[I]t appears beyond cavil that use of these easements for a recreational trail . . . is not the same use made by a railroad . . . . The different uses create different burdens.”
• determining scope of railroad easements under California law
• “It is elementary law that if the Government uses (or authorizes the use of . . .) an existing railroad easement for purposes and in a manner not allowed by the terms of the grant of the easement, the Government has taken the landowner’s property for the new use.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).