INVERSE CONDEMNATION

'Inverse condemnation' is a term used in the law to describe a situation in which the government takes private property but fails to pay the just compensation required by the Constitution. In order to be compensated, the owner must then sue the government. In such cases the owner is the plaintiff and that is why the action is called inverse -- the order of parties is reversed, as compared to direct condemnation where the government is the plaintiff who sues a defendant-owner to take his property.
The taking can be physical (i.e. land seizure, flooding, removal of ground support) or regulatory when regulations are so onerous that they make it unusable by the owner for any reasonable or economically viable purpose.
An inverse taking need not be a taking of land or rights in land (such as easements). It can be a taking of personal property (e.g. supplies for the army in wartime), patents and copyrights, as well as contracts.

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★ "Regulatory Taking" and "Inverse Condemnation" Explained
Inverse condemnation is a term used to characterize an uncompensated government taking of private property. This is in contrast with the usual situation (direct condemnation) where it is the government that sues the owner to acquire his or her property and to have the courts fix the required just compensation. The most difficult and contentious form of inverse condemnation occurs where the government regulates private property so severely that its owner is deprived of economically viable use of it
Inverse takings (or in some states whose constitutions so provide) can be brought for damaging of private property. Takings can take the form of physical seizures, retention of possession after a lease to the government expires, deprivation of access, deprivation of land support that causes landslides, flooding, or prolonged or otherwise unreasonable threats of condemnation that drive tenants away and otherwise blight the targeted property, often driving its owners into foreclosure. It can also occur where the government uses patents or copyrights without their owner's permission and without compensation.
The most controversial form of inverse condemnation occurs in cases where the government purports to regulate the subject property, but the regulation is so severe that it goes "too far," as Justice Holmes put it in ''Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon'', 260 U.S. 393 (1922), and deprives the owner of the property's value, utility or marketability, denying him or her the benefits of property ownership thus accomplishing a constitutionally forbidden de facto taking without compensation.