62 
most critically acclaimed work on American new communities to date, 
the following conclusions about public land acquisition were made: 
By purchasing strategically located land, States and large local jurisdictions 
can give direction and form to future urban growth. They can encourage large- 
scale urban development by assembling parcels of land which might not otherwise 
be available and without which costly bypassing would be required. [I]t seems 
clear that for State land development agencies #4 to accomplish their objective of 
carefully planned acquisition of land for future urban use, they must be able to 
aequire land considerably in advance of development. 
In support of the quoted conclusions, ACIR offers a number of 
very compelling reasons why advance public acquisition of land is 
needed, but as to whether such actions are legally permissible, virtu- 
ally nothing is said. There are at least two possible explanations for 
the lack of the report’s emphasis on the legal issues. It is possible 
that its authors felt that the law, as an institution, is completely 
rational and, since presumably their report is rational, the two must 
coincide. A more realistic interpretation is that the authors recognized 
the wide divergence in the laws of the various States, and yet felt 
their case could only be effectively made by presenting the most 
favorable interpretations of State law. If the latter explanation is 
true, then a serious problem will conceivably arise m those cases when 
their conclusions are applied to a State which subscribes to a very 
narrow view of permissible government involvement. . 
Other authors, when considering the subject of public land acquisi- 
tion, treat it more as a political or ideological problem rather than a 
legal problem. Charles Abrams, the noted attorney and planner, 
exemplified this position when he wrote: 
Not the least of the obstacles is that new town programs have been too often 
associated with the romanticized conceptions of the ‘‘city ideal’”’ instead of resting 
on the realistic need for assembling fragmented land and providing well-balanced 
schools, streets, and utilities in advance of homebuilding rather than after the 
fact. The notion that it is ‘‘socialism” (derived from foreign programs where the 
state continues owning the land) is absurd—it is anything but that when implicit 
in the plan is the withdrawal of the public from land ownership and the reservation 
in public ownership only of the schools, streets, and other traditional public serv- 
ices. If anything, its main premise is “‘desocialization.” 
The point is, in short, that when scholars consider both land control 
and acquisition aspects of new community development, they devote 
very little time to the underlying legal problems. To make this point is 
not to denigrate the quality and scope of their work; on the contrary, 
it only serves to indicate the vast complexity of the land-acquisition 
issue. 
The principal legal problem normally overlooked in these studies is 
the extent to which government involvement in these types of activi- 
ties satisfies the requirements of the legal ‘‘public purpose doctrine.”’ 
The public purpose doctrine 
The public purpose doctrine originated in early English law with 
the Magna Carta, which imposed a due process limitation on the 
King’s inherent power of eminent domain. The due process restric- 
2 ACIR, “Urban and Rural America,” p. 152. 
*% For an elaboration on what ACIR means by “State land development agency” see “ACIR State 
Legislative Program: New Proposals for 1969,’’ sec. 507 et seq. (1968). , 
2 Charles Abrams, ‘‘A Land Development Program for California’? in Eldredge’s edition of “Taming 
Megolopolis,’’ Doubleday, Garden City (1967), pp. 850-851. 
