The Constitution pledges that the government cannot take your property without "just compensation." So if that happens, and no statute passed by the legislature applies to your specific case, can you sue?
That this is even a question may sound, at a minimum, harebrained. After all, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. But whether or not that promise—as found in the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause—is effectively an empty one when it is not paired with a relevant law is a matter of active legal debate.
A federal court attempted to answer it last week in a case that hinged on, of all things, a local "urban cowboy."
