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tory taking rests on the property owner. To establish a regulatory taking, the owner must show that sale of the property "as is" would be "impracticable or impossible" and that he or she has been "deprived of any profitable use" of his or her property. The decision also further dem- onstrates the difficulty of succeed- ing on vagueness claims with re- spect to historic preservation laws. Courts have consistently found preservation laws to meet constitu- tional standards despite claims to the contrary. For specific examples, see "A Survey of State Cases Ad- dressing the Vagueness Issue," 15 PLR 1155 (Oct. 1996). I 4 4 Wisconsin Supreme Court Rejects Segmentation of Property Interests to Assess Takings Claims Rules Courts Must Look at the "Parcel as a Whole" In a case considered by many land use experts to have wide spread significance, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin ruled that the rezoning of a portion of property for conser- vation use did not result in an unlawful taking requiring compensation under the Unit- ed States and Wisconsin con- stitutions. Overturning an appeals court ruling, the state supreme court concluded that the entire parcel must be con- sidered in determining wheth- er a regulation has denied "the landowner all or substantially all practical uses of a property in order to be considered a taking for which compensa- tion is required." The question of whether courts may "segment" property interests in conducting takings assessments has received con- siderable attention in recent years. The principal precedent in this area is the U.S. Su- preme Court's decision in Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York, 438 U.S. 104 (1978), a landmark decision upholding the consti- tutionality of historic preser- vation ordinances in this country. The Court ruled that "`taking' jurisprudence does not divide a single parcel into discrete segments and attempt to determine whether rights in a particular segment have been entirely abrogated." However, in a subsequent decision, Lucas v. South Caro- lina Coastal Council, 505 U.S. 1003 (1992)[11 PLR 11851, Supreme Court justice Scalia, in writing for the majority, commented in footnote 7 on the difficulty of determining the property interest at stake for purposes of undertaking a takings analysis. Significantly, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the non -seg- mentation principal of Penn Central in a subsequent deci- sion, Concrete Pipe and Prod- ucts v Construction Laborers Pension Trust, 508 U.S. 602 (1993)[12 PLR 1085]. The "parcel as a whole" theory has long been consid- ered important to historic Jan. -Mar. 1997 Preservation Law Re orter 16 PLR 1011