734
Opinion of Souter, J.
verse condemnation suit for obtaining just compensation when the government took property without invoking formal condemnation procedures. Like the Court, I am accordingly remitted to a search for any analogy that may exist and a consideration of any implication going to the substance of the jury right that the results of that enquiry may raise. But this common launching ground is where our agreement ends.
II
The city's proposed analogy of inverse condemnation proceedings to direct ones is intuitively sensible, given their common Fifth Amendment constitutional source and link to the sovereign's power of eminent domain. Accord, e. g., New Port Largo, Inc. v. Monroe County, 95 F. 3d 1084, 1092 (CA11 1996) ("We have discovered no indication that the rule in regulatory takings cases differs from the general eminent domain framework"); Northglenn v. Grynberg, 846 P. 2d 175, 178 (Colo. 1993) ("Because an inverse condemnation action is based on the 'takings' clause of our constitution, it is to be tried as if it were an eminent domain proceeding"). See Grant, A Revolutionary View of the Seventh Amendment and the Just Compensation Clause, 91 Nw. U. L. Rev. 144, 191-205 (1996).
The intuition is borne out by closer analysis of the respective proceedings. The ultimate issue is identical in both direct and inverse condemnation actions: a determination of "the fair market value of the property [taken] on the date it is appropriated," as the measure of compensation required by the Fifth Amendment. Kirby Forest Industries, Inc. v. United States, 467 U. S. 1, 10 (1984). It follows, as Justice Brandeis said in Hurley v. Kincaid, 285 U. S. 95 (1932), that "[t]he compensation which [a property owner] may obtain in [an inverse condemnation] proceeding will be the same as that which he might have been awarded had the [government] instituted . . . condemnation proceedings," id., at 104. This, indeed, has been our settled understanding, in cases
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