• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“I don’t know,” Horton said, smiling. “I’ve never been there.”

Despite having handled hundreds of appeals cases and being admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court since 1975, Horton had never actually argued a case before the highest court.

“Well then, what the hell did we hire you for?” Londregan blurted out.

All three men broke into laughter.

“Tom,” Horton said, “the last time a civil case from the Connecticut Supreme Court made it to the U.S. Supreme Court was over thirty years ago. We weren’t even lawyers back then.”

“This place looks like Beirut,” Susette told a feature writer from People magazine as she walked her through the neighborhood, pointing out the rubble of all the homes and businesses that had been demolished by the NLDC’s wrecking balls.

Back when Bullock had first agreed to represent Susette, he had told her she’d have to get used to working with the media. She had never imagined that would mean talking to a celebrity magazine like People, not to mention reporters from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Washington Post, ABC’s World News Tonight, CNN, and NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. All had called since the Supreme Court took up her case. Some wanted to know more about the woman whose name appeared on the case. The institute had arranged for a writer and photographer from People to spend the day with Susette at her home. On December 13, 2004, the magazine ran pictures of her and her pink house with a story about the case.

Later that week Susette received a personal letter from Steve Forbes, CEO and editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine. It read, “Dear Ms. Kelo: You might be interested in one of the editorials on page 25 of the enclosed Forbes magazine. Best Wishes. Steve Forbes.”

The enclosed editorial, “Don’t Junk Property Rights,” had been written by Forbes himself and included a photograph of Susette’s house. Forbes’s essay called on the Supreme Court to do the right thing.

Susette didn’t know Forbes’s name and she had never read his magazine. But she appreciated his support.

Tom Londregan got almost as many media inquiries as Susette. Only his weren’t nearly as flattering. Reporters from around the country were calling his office with questions he felt were unfair, such as, “I hear you’re taking an eighty-seven-year-old woman and throwing her out of her house?” which one writer from Texas asked.

Trained to ignore the media and focus on the law, Londregan nevertheless finally agreed to sit down with a television interviewer and tell his side of the case. Tired of sitting back while the Institute for Justice framed the case for the media, Londregan spent over an hour being interviewed.

When he watched the news report a few nights later, he discovered that his entire interview had been reduced to a ten-second sound bite. The reporter had completely ignored all the legal arguments Londregan had used to justify the exercise of eminent domain. Instead, the entire segment focused on plaintiff Byron Athenian and the fact that he and his elderly mother were being driven from their home.

“Oh my God,” Londregan said. “This is a nightmare, an absolute nightmare.”

Despite all the negative publicity the city faced in the national press, nothing outraged Londregan as much as a short letter-to-the-editor that appeared in his hometown paper, the Day. After the NLDC publicly criticized the Institute for Justice for its public-relations efforts, Scott Bullock had submitted a five-paragraph letter to the editor. In it he said his clients could hold their heads high knowing they had fought for the rights of every homeowner in America. “In contrast, New London city councilors, NLDC members and their lawyers should hang their heads in shame at what they have done to Fort Trumbull property owners, the citizens of their city and state, and to the Constitution of the United States,” Bullock wrote.

The suggestion that he should hang his head in shame pushed Londregan over the edge. He called up Bullock and ripped into him for what