The Takings Clause Confronts The Police Power: How the Constitution’s Well-Known Protection Failed to Protect Jobs, Businesses, and the Broader Economy in the Name of COVID-19

“This note, completed in the midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic, recounts the emergency orders issued by various levels of government in Tennessee and explains how those orders interplay with the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. As the note explains in great detail, the limitations imposed on government by way of the Takings Clause, a well-known rule that essentially requires the government to pay citizens for property it takes, are thwarted by state governments’ police powers. Analogizing the COVID-19 Pandemic to a disease that kills apple trees, the note explains how the government can take its citizens’ property to further “health, safety, and welfare”—and pay its citizens nothing.”