New York State officials offered to use the power of eminent domain to seize private property for Amazon's "HQ2" project, according to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal.
It's not clear whether, in the end, that power will be needed to amass the office space needed. But Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is literally the richest person in the world, at least by Bloomberg's reckoning, so it seems odd that, rather than paying a market-clearing price for some property in Queens, he'd need to enlist the power of the state to take it for him, even under the Fifth Amendment's provision that private property shall not be taken for public use "without just compensation." Whether a private company's project counted as a "public use" was one of the issues in the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Kelo v. New London.