Mayer Brown is helping a bunch of landlords challenge New York’s rent control laws, which is already an act of cartoonish super-villainy, but they’ve decided to solidify their mustache-twirling by bolstering their filing by pointing out that rent control goes against the very bedrock value of this nation — specifically, that black people are 3/5ths of a human being.
The new rent stabilization and control laws in New York add a bit more heft to a system that’s been in place since just after World War I. If the courts respected precedent as much as Susan Collins pretends they do, this wouldn’t be much of a case. But a group of landlords have decided to take the occasion of tighter regulation to argue that the whole legal regime should be junked as an unconstitutional taking of property.
Mayer Brown is representing the landlords and in a massive, 386-paragraph complaint that would make John Galt blush, leveling all sorts of libertarian nonsense about the tyrannical government stepping on the poor, downtrodden Manhattan landlords. There are definitely abuses of the system — tenants who have no business enjoying the fruits of a system designed to help the poor and elderly amount to infamous anecdotes. But we don’t make sweeping policies based on a handful of anecdotes for a reason and even if there’s a better way to implement it (bring me your “give tenants vouchers” claptrap and I’ll at least listen), the policy has mostly been a success for almost a century.
But then Mayer Brown decided to throw this into its already bloated, self-indulgent pleading:
This protection of property rights is deeply rooted in American history and traditions, and is a fundamental right on which America was founded. See, e.g., Federalist No. 10, at 78 (Madison) (C. Rossiter ed. 1961) (describing protection of property rights, especially in land, as “the first object of government”); Federalist No. 54, supra, at 339 (Madison) (government is “instituted no less for protection of the property than of the persons of individuals”).
Oh, it sure was a foundational right! That’s why Federalist No. 54 was written — to explain to worried anti-federalists that the Constitution was a fair compromise because it appropriately recognized slaves as less than human. Just take a gander at some of the paragraph that immediately precedes Mayer Brown’s quote:
Let the case of the slaves be considered, as it is in truth, a peculiar one. Let the compromising expedient of the Constitution be mutually adopted, which regards them as inhabitants, but as debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants, which regards the slave as divested of two fifths of the man.
Now, there are some who might say that of all the flowery but ultimately empty platitudes to property rights that it amounts to a spectacular research fail to include a damning tribute to America’s slaving past in a filing. On the other hand, for a lawsuit based upon kicking, by and large, poor and minority tenants out of their homes — and to do so in many cases so the landlord can gut the building and gentrify the neighborhood, pushing working people further and further from their jobs and historic communities — perhaps this was the most unintentionally appropriate citation of all.
After all, what better summary of this case could there be than to say that government should serve the interests of higher profits for mostly white, wealthy landholders at the expense of their sub-human minority tenants?
(Full filing on the next page.)
Landlords Strike Back, Suing to Dismantle Rent Regulation System [New York Times]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.