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- Title
ABANDONMENT ISSUES: DEFENDING THE SURFACE TRANSPORTATION BOARD'S ADVERSE ABANDONMENT AUTHORITY.
- Authors
NEELEY, JACOB AARON
- Abstract
As the railroad industry wanes, defunct railroad lines cross thousands of miles of property in the United States. If a landowner has a defunct railroad line on their property, a court cannot grant them their reversionary interest in the seemingly abandoned right-of-way. The court will tell them, "go talk to the Surface Transportation Board." But can they go talk to the STB? Recent interpretations of the STB's abandonment statute as amended by the Interstate Commerce Commission Termination Act, including Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence in City of South Bend v. Surface Transportation Board when he sat on the D.C. Circuit, threaten the ability of any third party to petition the STB for abandonment of a railroad line. This practice, called adverse abandonment, is the only way for landowners to exercise reversionary interests in de facto abandoned railroad rights-of-way, since the STB has exclusive jurisdiction over railroad lines' abandonment. Worse yet, without adverse abandonment, de facto abandoned railroad lines would permanently stand between state and local governments and public development projects. This Comment argues that the ICCTA did not extinguish the STB's adverse abandonment authority. It synthesizes the arguments for and against the STB's adverse abandonment authority as articulated by the parties in City of South Bend. It then harmonizes the abandonment statute, the ICCTA's legislative history, and other statutes related to abandonment. Next, it traces adverse abandonment's development back to its decisional-law origins and argues that adjudicators' consistent treatment of adverse abandonment petitions in favor of the STB's purpose to ensure the development and continuation of a sound rail transportation system makes extinguishing the STB's adverse abandonment authority a sheer absurdity. This Comment concludes that the post-ICCTA version of the abandonment statute needlessly threatens a vital tool in the STB's toolbox and calls for legislative change to address this oversight.
- Subjects
ABANDONMENT of railroads; RAILROADS; REVERSION; RIGHT of way; INTERSTATE commerce laws; JURISDICTION; UNITED States. Surface Transportation Board
- Publication
Wisconsin Law Review, 2022, Vol 2022, Issue 6, p1499
- ISSN
0043-650X
- Publication type
Article