Ten years ago this month, the U.S. Supreme Court deliberated on an eminent domain case that stuck a nerve across the nation and is still an enigma in terms of liberal versus conservative interpretations of the proper role of government.

The case was called Kelo vs. The City of New London 545 U.S. 469 (2005) and was, in summary, a condemnation of private homes in an established residential neighborhood – including the home of Susette Kelo – for the purpose of private redevelopment (by Pfizer Corp.).

The details of the case were this: Pfizer had approached the city of New London, Conn., with a plan to open a new research center on an abandoned segment of the city’s industrial waterfront. A city committee was re-inaugurated as a nonprofit corporation to negotiate the plan with Pfizer and was given eminent domain authority by the city to condemn properties as it saw fit. Pfizer envisioned new higher-value homes to replace the older homes of the nearby Fort Trumbull neighborhood, and so it sought and received the right to seize these lived-in homes under eminent domain and re-sell the property for private redevelopment.

Resident Susette Kelo summarized the case succinctly: “They are simply taking our property from us private owners and giving it to another private owner to develop.”

The nexus of eminent-domain takings rests in the interpretation of “public use.” The courts have long decided that “public use” can include “public benefit,” and if that “public benefit” is justified by government-enforced transfer of private property, then such seizures are permissible under the “Takings Clause” of the Fifth Amendment. What made the Kelo case different from previous cases was that the “public benefit” was only the hoped-for trickle-down effects of economic development. Kelo lost her case in a close, but not partisan, 5-4 ruling.

Justice O’Conner wrote for the dissenting judges that, “the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more,” and that, “nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, any farm with a factory.” In a separate dissent, Justice Thomas likened this power to the “negro removal” of the 1950s.

Two sad epilogues followed. For one, had the court known that Pfizer was so intimately involved in the process from the outset, at least one justice, Justice Kennedy, would have ruled against New London based on flawed due process. But this intimate involvement was only discovered after the decision was rendered. For another, and more sadly, Pfizer pulled out of the deal shortly after the ruling. The waterfront remains undeveloped to this day and the Fort Trumbull neighborhood is a ghost town of razed homes, including Susette Kelo’s.

Presently in Nebraska the rights of landowners are being challenged in the courts over the Keystone XL pipeline. There, the powerfully lawyered-up TransCanada Corp. and its allies, including those lawmakers whose candidacy they sponsored in the state’s unicameral legislature, have been forging ahead with the KXL plan. Similar battles in Maine over natural gas pipelines have yet to rage, but already Gov. LePage has promised to fast-track eminent domain actions, and in so doing to silence and disempower landowners in the process.

The deep cultural question in all of these battles is who “the public” is in receiving the “public benefits” of eminent domain. The Maine State Constitution forbids eminent domain action for economic development alone, but this hardly clarifies the “public benefit” that is wrapped up in some vague future discount in fossil fuel prices.

There is a flipside. “Public benefit” can be motivated by environmental concerns. Infrastructure that enables the burning of fossil fuels and increases atmospheric CO2 is a dubious public benefit as our own government increasingly acknowledges. And so eminent domain takings can, at least theoretically, be justified as a way to shut down such developments rather than enable them.

Our current national political climate seems concerned with corporate control of government while at the same time about the overarching power of government generally. If “we” are the government, then eminent domain can be used as a check on private (corporate) interpretations of “public benefit.” If “they” are the government, then landowners beware.

Eben Rose lives in South Portland.