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Another guy, from nearby Rhode Island, said he had an Uzi and a boat. He offered to sail his boat down the river in front of her home and protect her place at gunpoint if necessary. “I’m serious,” he said. “I’m ready and I’ll be there.”

So many calls came in that Susette never broke free to call Bullock back. Soon reporters and photographers were on her doorstep asking for her reaction.

“I’m tough,” she told the reporters, fighting back emotion. Her bottom line was that she wasn’t prepared to give up. There was too much at stake. “This isn’t about me keeping my house anymore,” she said. “It’s about people’s property rights all over the United States. I’ve gotten a lot of calls today from people who are disgusted—really disgusted.” She paused. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I’m not going anywhere!”

A journalist asked what Susette and the others could do. After all, the Supreme Court had ruled.

“We’ll fight,” she said. “I know we will. We can’t quit now.”

Vindication. Tom Londregan and the city finally had it. The highest court in the land had endorsed their redevelopment plan and their methods for implementing it, including the use of eminent domain. The margin was razor thin: 5–4. But a win is a win. Wes Horton had done his job and the city didn’t even owe him a legal fee, thanks to the deal Londregan had struck with him earlier on. Could things get any better?

With no more courts left to appeal to, Londregan figured the city could finally get on with its development.

With the mood at his law firm resembling that of a wake, Chip Mellor ducked into his private office and shut the door. For an hour he took no calls and accepted no visitors while he carefully read the decision.

He wasn’t altogether surprised. Before the oral arguments he had polled some experts around Washington who were plugged in to the Supreme Court. He had been told privately that the outcome would be 7–2 in favor of the city. “You’ve got Scalia and Thomas,” one source had told him. “But the rest is uphill. You’ll be lucky to get Rehnquist.”

Yet Rehnquist had voted the institute’s way. And so had O’Connor, the justice that Mellor had been told would never end up on their side. Mellor reread her dissent. One paragraph jumped out at him. “Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party,” O’Connor wrote. “But the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more.”

In his career, Mellor couldn’t remember reading a dissenting opinion that cried out for action more than O’Connor’s. And judging from the majority opinion, the only way to fix the problem was to get all the states to reform their eminent-domain laws to specifically prohibit taking private property for the purpose of economic development. The Supreme Court’s ruling said that “public use” was defined very broadly and that economic development could be considered a public use under the Fifth Amendment. But states remained free to define “public use” more narrowly under their respective state Constitutions.

The more he thought about it, Mellor couldn’t accept walking away empty after getting so close to victory. We can’t just take this defeat, Mellor thought. We have to rally. We have to figure out how to take this fight to the states.

At three that afternoon he emerged from his office and called a staff meeting. Mellor faced his troops and complimented them on their herculean effort over the previous four and a half years. He reminded them that their mission was twofold: litigation and public education. In four years’ time they had taken a subject that most Americans had known nothing about, eminent domain, and put it on the tongues and minds of people all across the nation. In their journey to the Supreme Court, they had changed things