US v. 8.929 Acres of Land in Arlington County, Virginia, No. 21-1352 (4th Cir. 2022)
Annotate this Case
By grant of summary judgment in favor of the United States, the district court held that the Government’s provision of substitute facilities to Arlington County, Virginia (“the County”) constituted just compensation for the taking of three parcels of property. The County appealed, contesting the district court’s application of the summary judgment standard and raising several substantive arguments in support.
The Fourth Circuit, finding error in the district court’s grant of summary judgment, vacated the district court’s ruling and remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. The court concluded that the district court circumvented the summary judgment standard when it engaged in fact-finding despite the presence of genuinely disputed material facts. The court was persuaded that the genuine disputes identified as to the nature of one of the parcels were material. It is this contested distinction of that parcel that the district court overlooked when drawing inferences in favor of the Government, effectively determining as a decision on the merits that the parcel was not a separate parcel for condemnation purposes from the rest of the take. While the district court would not have committed procedural error by making that decision under Rule 71.1, it did err as such when resolving the case in a Rule 56 proceeding.
Some case metadata and case summaries were written with the help of AI, which can produce inaccuracies. You should read the full case before relying on it for legal research purposes.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.