For nearly 30 years, Connecticut beverage distributors received the unclaimed refund value of recycled bottles as part of the state’s Bottle Bill, which set up a refund system for used bottles as an attempt to encourage recycling. As in other states, the law requires beverage dealers to pay refunds for every bottle turned in.

Fiscal troubles in 2008 prompted Connecticut to amend the law, however, to require a “deposit account” from which distributors were to pay the refunds. This requirement was intended to aid the state environmental agency to study the rates of deposit payments and returns. The following year, the fiscal situation worsened, and the Bottle Bill was again amended, this time to require the remaining funds in the deposit accounts (after returns were paid out) to be paid to the state—retroactively including any unpaid remainder funds since the accounts went into effect in 2008.

A. Gallo & Co. and other beverage distributors in Connecticut saw this as an uncompensated taking of their property and sued the state. They took their case through the state court system, but even the Connecticut Supreme Court turned a blind eye, holding that beverage distributors never had a property right in the remainder funds in the first place. The distributors have now asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their case, and Cato joined the New England Legal Foundation, the Southeastern Legal Foundation, and the National Federation of Independent Business on a brief supporting their petition.

We argue that Connecticut’s budgetary troubles are no excuse for violating a longstanding property right without compensation. Moreover, by twisting its statutory interpretation to satisfy political pressures, the Connecticut Supreme Court has made itself complicit in the uncompensated taking. It’s bad enough when strapped-for-cash legislatures unfairly force public burdens onto the shoulders of private parties to feed their spending addictions, but when all three government branches — including the one entrusted with soberly interpreting the law, especially in times of fiscal emergency — get drunk on power and deny even the existence of a property right, it’s time for a Supreme Court intervention.

The Supreme Court will decide by winter’s end whether to take the case of A. Gallo & Co. v. Esty.