At the Connecticut Bar Association’s 2019 Legal Conference, the environmental law section presented “Ethical Considerations in Environmental Law,” moderated by Nancy K. Mendel of Winnick Ruben Hoffnung Peabody & Mendel, with panelists Christopher P. McCormack of Pullman & Comley and me. I had occasion to briefly discuss the concept of fundamental fairness.

My career-long friend and fellow land-use lawyer David Royston of Dzialo, Pickett & Allen commented to me afterwards that fundamental fairness has a unique place in Connecticut’s administrative law. I had sometimes thought this was so and did a word search of the entire 91 chapters of the land use law treatise I co-edit, Rathkopf’s “The Law of Zoning and Planning.” The term appears in only six chapters and then only as a test for takings and procedural due process.