Professor Shelley Saxer, The Truth About Midkiff Justifies Kelo’s Reversal -- Ohio State Law Journal Online

Professor Shelley Ross Saxer's article, The Truth About Midkiff Justifies Kelo’s Reversal, is published in the Ohio State Law Journal Online, 86 OSLJ Online 2025.  The article is a response to Ezra Rosser, Progress and the Taking of Indigenous Land, 85 Ohio St. L.J. 623 (2025).

Introduction to The Truth About Midkiff Justifies Kelo’s Reversal

Professor Ezra Rosser’s article on Hawai’i Housing Authority v. Midkiff encourages us to look at the use of eminent domain power as another one of the many guises under which Indigenous peoples have been deprived of their rightful property. To do so, Rosser draws back the curtain to provide a closer look at the landowners who constituted the “evil oligarchy” that the Hawai’i Land Reform Act of 1967 (HLRA) aimed to disrupt. Who were these land hoarders? In 1967, the three largest landowners on Oahu––the most populous island and thus the focus of the HLRA––consisted of the federal government, owning 36.74 percent; the state government, owning 14.88 percent; and the Bernice P. Bishop Estate, owning 15.50 percent. Because the Bishop Estate was the largest private landowner and leased out more of its land for residential purposes than any other large private landowners, it was therefore subject to more than half of the lease-to-fee conversions targeted by the Act. But what is not evident in the Midkiff opinion is that the Bishop Estate held land originally belonging to the indigenous Hawaiian people in trust for the benefit of Native Hawaiian children and their education.

The article may be found at OSLJ Online (page 12)