Souter remembered - "Alden" and "Kelo" decisions

As he exits the scene soon, I think about Justice Souter's dissent in a 1999 U.S. Supreme Court case involving a group of roughly 60 probation officers and a violation of 1938 Federal Standand Labor Laws (FSLA) by the State of Maine. The officers, one whose last name was Alden, had been jipped of their overtime pay and both the state and federal courts turned their backs on them. Souter dissented in the U.S. Supreme Court case.

From Wikipedia: Alden v. Maine

From Cornell University: Syllabus in Alden v. Maine (98-436) 527 U.S. 706 (1999)

And here's a June 24, 1999 article by David Savage of the LA Times, Rulings Give States Broad Immunity Against Lawsuits, which mentions the decision and others regarding federalism and the sovereign rights of states.

However, most people will remember Souter as the justice who was part of the majority in Kelo v. City of New London, and whose home in Weare, New Hampshire Clarence Darrow Clements tried to take by eminent domain and turn it into the "Lost Liberty Hotel." In Kelo, the U.S. Supreme Court decision affirmed the Connecticut Supreme Court decision which allowed the taking of private property by eminent domain, for the benefit of a developer who promised to improve the neighborhood... people's homes were leveled.

So how is the redevelopment project going? It isn't. (I edited this post when I came to it in 2025 and saw that a prior story I linked to was gone, and I replaced it with one written by the New York Times on November 12, 2009). You may need a subscription to read the entire story Pfizer to Leave City That Won Land-Use Case, but here are a few paragraphs from it:

From the edge of the Thames River in New London, Conn., Michael Cristofaro surveyed the empty acres where his parents’ neighborhood had stood, before it became the crux of an epic battle over eminent domain. 

 

Pfizer said it would pull 1,400 jobs out of New London within two years and move most of them a few miles away to a campus it owns in Groton, Conn., as a cost-cutting measure. It would leave behind the city’s biggest office complex and an adjacent swath of barren land that was cleared of dozens of homes to make room for a hotel, stores and condominiums that were never built.