Bulldozed

• Overview
• Reviews
• Excerpt

“Outrage, appropriately, is the sustained effect of Carla Main’s Bulldozed, the case study of another instance of eminent-domain abuse …. Ms. Main’s legal background and reporting skills serve her well as she navigates the Gores’ messy, twisting fight against city hall.”

Johnathan V. Last
The Wall Street Journal

“[Bulldozed] offers a clear-eyed assessment of eminent domain in America, focusing on the insanity that recently engulfed a Texas town over a strip of waterfront land. Bulldozed also addresses, through history and case law, how we got to this point — and, now that the bulldozer’s out of the proverbial barn, where we go from here.”

Heather Wilhelm
RealClearPolitics.com

“…Bulldozed reads like a Grisham novel. The book is especially compelling as a local story, involving area people. The points of law might be arcane, but Main humanizes them by giving them a human face. She shows eminent domain cases are often less about land than about people’s dreams. As Bulldozed shows, when dreams collide people get hurt.”

Mark Lardas
Galveston Daily News

“Carla Main has provided us with a powerful and moving illustration of how tearing down the ‘good fences’ that private property rights establish can turn ‘good neighbors’ into enemies and good neighborhoods into dark and forlorn places.”

Timothy Sandefur
The Recorder

“It is a rare issue, in an age of partisan polarization, that can unite libertarians and liberals. The governmental power of eminent domain, now employed for private profit, is one such issue. This spreading practice pits class against class, wealth against ordinary property-owning citizens, and government power against the powerless. Carla Main’s vivid account of the history surrounding the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision should frighten every property-owning American and make us all wonder where Tom Paine is when we need him.”

Gary Hart
United States Senator (ret.)

“Like a Greek tragedy unfolding, Carla Main’s book chronicles the eminent domain struggles in Freeport, Texas, which pitted the Gore family, with its longtime shrimp business, against the machinations of an unholy alliance between city politicians and developers. If you have ever shared the Supreme Court’s unquestioned deference to the public planning process that shaped its ill-fated Kelo decision, you’ll surely change your mind as you follow this sordid saga to its bitter end. You’ll never look at eminent domain in the same way again.”

Richard A. Epstein
James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law University of Chicago
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, and author of Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain

“Bulldozed tells the people story behind the great eminent domain cases: Kelo v. New London, Poletown Neighborhood Council v. Detroit, and Western Seafood v. Freeport, Texas. To understand the impact of eminent domain on real people, read Bulldozed. A big bonus is that Carla Main has written a page-turner.”

John Norquist
President and CEO of the Congress for the
New Urbanism and former Mayor of Milwaukee

Three Felonies a Day
How the Feds Target the Innocent

(hardcover)

by Harvey Silverglate