In the 1990s, an all-out assault on property rights was well underway, lead by a radical environmental movement, resulting in massive federal land grabs in the name of conservation. As one can imagine, courts across the nation were flooded with cases of people attempting to defend their property rights from government takings. In the state of Washington, one of the major targets for such programs, the state Supreme Court realized it didn’t have an adequate definition of property rights to use in considering such cases. That’s when State Supreme Court Justice Richard B. Sanders wrote a “Fifth Amendment” treatise which included the following definition of property rights:
