Cite as: 533 U. S. 606 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
There is controlling precedent for our conclusion. Nollan v. California Coastal Comm'n, 483 U. S. 825 (1987), presented the question whether it was consistent with the Takings Clause for a state regulatory agency to require ocean-front landowners to provide lateral beach access to the public as the condition for a development permit. The principal dissenting opinion observed it was a policy of the California Coastal Commission to require the condition, and that the Nollans, who purchased their home after the policy went into effect, were "on notice that new developments would be approved only if provisions were made for lateral beach access." Id., at 860 (Brennan, J., dissenting). A majority of the Court rejected the proposition. "So long as the Commission could not have deprived the prior owners of the easement without compensating them," the Court reasoned, "the prior owners must be understood to have transferred their full property rights in conveying the lot." Id., at 834, n. 2.
It is argued that Nollan's holding was limited by the later decision in Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 505 U. S. 1003 (1992). In Lucas the Court observed that a land-owner's ability to recover for a government deprivation of all economically beneficial use of property is not absolute but instead is confined by limitations on the use of land which "inhere in the title itself." Id., at 1029. This is so, the Court reasoned, because the landowner is constrained by those "restrictions that background principles of the State's law of property and nuisance already place upon land ownership." Ibid. It is asserted here that Lucas stands for the proposition that any new regulation, once enacted, becomes a background principle of property law which cannot be challenged by those who acquire title after the enactment.
We have no occasion to consider the precise circumstances when a legislative enactment can be deemed a background principle of state law or whether those circumstances are present here. It suffices to say that a regulation that other-
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