(Bloomberg Law) — The US Constitution doesn’t provide a right to clean drinking water or accurate information from public officials, a divided federal appeals court ruled.
The decision affirms the dismissal of a lawsuit over alleged lead-contaminated drinking water in Jackson, Mississippi.
The full US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found that the lawsuit from the Jackson residents alleged violations of due process rights not granted by the Constitution.
In a majority opinion by Judge Kurt Engelhardt, the appeals court said there was no historical basis to find such rights fall under that clause. “The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Engelhardt said.
A lawyer for the resident and representatives for the city of Jackson didn’t immediately return requests for comment.
Engelhardt, a Donald Trump appointee, said the residents have other options, like pursuing tort claims, electing officials who will better manage the water system, and petitioning representatives for other solutions.
Residents of the city have claimed that officials deliberately allowed lead to contaminate the drinking water, harming those who drank it. Jackson has denied those allegations.
A divided Fifth Circuit panel in 2025 revived the residents’ claim against the city of Jackson, over their right to bodily autonomy. That ruling was vacated when the en banc Fifth Circuit took up the case.
Engelhardt said while the residents raised a right to bodily integrity, that right applies in instances like sexual assault by a police officer and forced medication of prisoners. Mismanagement of a water system, he said, is “wholly different.”
And while the Supreme Court has found some due process rights to fall under the common-law right to informed consent, Engelhardt said those cases don’t include a right to accurate information from public officials.
He said that even if the residents had established a violation of due process rights, the city officials would still be granted qualified immunity from the claims because no clearly established right was violated.
Engelhardt’s opinion was joined by nine other Republican-appointed members of the court.
Judge Catharina Haynes, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote an opinion that dissented and concurred in part, joined by four liberal members of the court. She said the standard of review at this stage of litigation means the claims must be taken as true, and that the residents should at least be granted discovery.
“At bottom, the well-pleaded factual allegations in Plaintiffs’ complaint, which we must accept as true, mirror in various ways one of the worst public health crises in recent American history — the Flint water crisis,” Haynes said.
Haynes said the residents had also alleged a state-created danger claim, which the majority opinion ignored. She said that while other courts have addressed the theory, the Fifth Circuit “stands practically alone in its decades-long fence-sitting, declining to either adopt or definitively rule out the state-created danger doctrine.”
She would adopt the doctrine, Haynes said, and she would find the residents plausibly alleged a violation of their right to bodily integrity.
A group of parents whose children died in last year’s deadly floods at Camp Mystic in Texas had also urged the circuit to recognize a state-created danger theory, which would allow cases to proceed against public entities and officials alleged to have increased residents’ risk of harm.
The case is: Sterling v. City of Jackson, 5th Cir. en banc, No. 24-60370, 9/4/26
To contact the reporter on this story: Jacqueline Thomsen at jthomsen@bloombergindustry.com
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Adam M. Taylor at ataylor@bloombergindustry.com
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