ABSTRACT
Around the world, governments use the power of expropriation to acquire land from private citizens. This power is at least as old as the Bible, in which King Ahab exercised his sovereignty to take the vineyard of Naboth. According to a number of scholars, the two central concerns of the United States' Takings Clause are efficiency and justice. Compared with the empirically unconfirmed arguments from Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, arguments grounded in the goal of maintaining an appearance of justice offer a more compelling justification for compensating lost subjective value. A formula could be worked up to estimate the average subjective value of an owner of a parcel having certain attributes. Brain imaging or other scientific advances will make it possible to get inside the owners' heads and determine how to adjust market value in order to reach average subjective value. Until that day, normal neutral compensation will have to be approximated with other tools, including economics, psychology and biology.
