West Covina v. Perkins, 525 U.S. 234, 8 (1999)

Page:   Index   Previous  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  Next

Cite as: 525 U. S. 234 (1999)

Opinion of the Court

notice of the deprivation—the city's condemnation of certain water rights—which created the property owner's right to pursue damages claims and triggered the statute of limitations on those claims). Individualized notice that the officers have taken the property is necessary in a case such as the one before us because the property owner would have no other reasonable means of ascertaining who was responsible for his loss.

No similar rationale justifies requiring individualized notice of state-law remedies which, like those at issue here, are established by published, generally available state statutes and case law. Once the property owner is informed that his property has been seized, he can turn to these public sources to learn about the remedial procedures available to him. The City need not take other steps to inform him of his options. Cf. Reetz v. Michigan, 188 U. S. 505, 509 (1903) (holding that a statute fixing the time and place of meetings of a medical licensing board provided license applicants adequate notice of the procedure for obtaining a hearing on their applications because: "When a statute fixes the time and place of meeting of any board or tribunal, no special notice to parties interested is required. The statute is itself sufficient notice"); Atkins v. Parker, 472 U. S. 115, 131 (1985) (noting that "[t]he entire structure of our democratic government rests on the premise that the individual citizen is capable of informing himself about the particular policies that affect his destiny"). In prior cases in which we have held that post-deprivation state-law remedies were sufficient to satisfy the demands of due process and the laws were public and available, we have not concluded that the State must provide further information about those procedures. See, e. g., Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U. S. 517 (1984).

Memphis Light, the case on which the Court of Appeals relied, is not to the contrary. In Memphis Light, the Court held that a public utility must make available to its customers the opportunity to discuss a billing dispute with a utility

241

Page:   Index   Previous  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  Next

Last modified: October 4, 2007