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20 Vt. L. Rev. 687 (1995-1996)
The Background of Mount Laurel I

handle is hein.journals/vlr20 and id is 707 raw text is: THE BACKGROUND OF MOUNT LAUREL I Norman Williams and Anya Yates The long story on the background of the Mount Laurel case provides many lessons on how to bring major land use cases-and even more lessons on how not to bring such lawsuits.' New Jersey has always been of special importance in planning law for two reasons. To begin with, it is the most crowded state, with the largest' number of persons per square mile, so that inevitably more people keep bumping into each other and thus creating land use conflicts. Moreover, the highly respected New Jersey court has long had a stable membership, including four of the ablest judges in the country: Chief Justice Weintraub and Justices Hall, Jacobs and Francis-and they have provided more penetrating analysis than other courts. As a result, an extraordinary number of the leading cases on land use have come from New Jersey. Historically, the New Jersey courts were one of the last in the country to accept the idea of public control of land use; unlike most other states, they did not do so until after Euclid.2 Even after formal acceptance of the zoning principle, the New Jersey Supreme Court continued right through the 1930s and 1940s to resist implementation of zoning in specific cases; during this period it was always possible to bring a laugh at a planning conference by a sarcastic reference to zoning case law in New Jersey. However, with the adoption of a new state constitution' in 1947, the situation was precisely reversed. After this, the New Jersey court went all out to enforce zoning regulations, so much so that it was rather difficult for a town to lose a zoning case brought by a developer. Under the standard formula, so long as the issue was fairly debatable-that is, so long as a municipal lawyer could manage to keep on making a noise like a lawyer-the regulation in question was upheld.4 The policy basis for this was quite clear: this represented an explicit adoption by the New Jersey Supreme Court of the proposition that since the free market in land development had made such a mess of northern New Jersey-a proposition 1. One acerbic observer commented at the time that, since courts were obviously ready for a major reversal on the exclusionary issue, if the anti-exclusionary lawyers managed to lose such a case, they had no one to blame but themselves. 2. Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926). For how this decision came about, written by one of the most extreme right-wing of judges, see Alfred McCormack, A Law Clerk's Recollections, 46 COLUM. L. REV. 710, 712 (1946). The opinion leans heavily on other favorable opinions which had already come down at the state level. 3. The text of which provides a specific presumption in favor of land use regulation. See N.J. CONST. art. IV, § 7, 11. 4. The brilliant demonstration of this was in Justice Frederick Hall's famous dissent in Vickers v. Gloucester Township, 181 A.2d 129, 140 (1962), appeal dismissed, 371 U.S. 233 (1963).

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