5th Circuit: No Constitutional Right to Clean Water or Truthful Officials
Jackson residents cannot use the 14th Amendment to sue city officials over lead-contaminated drinking water, a divided federal appeals court ruled Friday. Nor, the court held, do public officials have a constitutional duty to tell residents the truth during a “public-health crisis.”
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 10-to-5 decision, upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing Jackson, Mississippi, officials of worsening lead contamination and then misleading residents about whether the water was safe.
The ruling comes as communities are increasingly resisting data centers. Part of that opposition centers on their enormous water demands and the wastewater their cooling systems can return to local water systems, rendering that water more polluted, harder to treat, and potentially unsafe for reuse.
That broader dispute sharpens the tension at the heart of the case. The Declaration of Independence holds that governments are instituted to secure God-given rights, beginning with life itself. Yet the 5th Circuit has now held that the Constitution provides no remedy when government helps make one of life’s most basic necessities unsafe, if not outright poisonous.
Jackson Residents Take the City to Court
The Jackson case, Sterling v. City of Jackson, began in 2022.
Plaintiffs Priscilla Sterling, Raine Becker, Shawn Miller, and John Bennett alleged that city officials knew the municipal water system had serious problems. They said officials knew it was vulnerable to corrosion, failed to make necessary repairs, switched part of the city from groundwater to more corrosive surface water, and later falsely assured residents that the water was safe.
Testing cited in the litigation showed Jackson’s lead levels climbing sharply between 2010 and 2013.
The plaintiffs said the city knew by 2013 that low-pH water and a malfunctioning lime treatment system were allowing lead to leach from aging pipes.
A federal district court dismissed the constitutional claims in 2024. But a three-judge 5th Circuit panel revived much of the case in November 2025, finding that the allegations plausibly implicated residents’ right to bodily integrity.
The appeals court then reheard the case en banc, meaning the full court reconsidered the earlier decision.
On Friday, it reversed course.
No Constitutional Right to Clean Water
Judge Kurt Engelhardt, writing for the 10-judge majority, framed the case around two claimed rights: freedom from exposure to water contaminated by public officials, and truthful information from those officials about contaminants in municipal drinking water.
On the central question, Engelhardt was unequivocal:
It is undisputed that the Constitution does not guarantee clean water.
More broadly, the court said, “a State is under no constitutional duty to provide substantive services for those within its border” absent a special relationship.
The majority reasoned that although the 14th Amendment prohibits government from depriving people of life, liberty, or property without due process, it generally does not require municipalities to provide public services “competently.”
The plaintiffs argued that their claim went deeper. Drinking lead-contaminated water physically injured them, they said, implicating the constitutional right to bodily integrity.
The majority rejected that argument.
Courts have applied the right to bodily integrity to direct government intrusions. The majority cited “instances of sexual assault by a police officer,” “forced surgical examination,” and “forced surgery, involuntary medicating, and assault.”
Jackson’s alleged conduct, the court said, was “different.” Engelhardt wrote:
We are skeptical that the right to not be harmed by lead-contaminated water fits within the right to bodily integrity, and Plaintiffs point us to no historical tradition or Supreme Court precedent.
No Truth From Officials
The court reached a similarly stark conclusion about officials misleading residents,
We find no deeply rooted history or tradition establishing a constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public-health crisis.
The plaintiffs said city officials told residents the water was safe despite knowing that it likely was not. Engelhardt acknowledged that,
of course, public officials are expected to be honest with their constituents, especially when the constituents’ safety is at risk.
But, he wrote, “without a historical analog,” the court could not recognize a constitutional right to accurate information from public officials.
The court also rejected the argument that the deception violated residents’ right to informed consent. Accurate information might have allowed them to obtain drinking water elsewhere, the majority admitted. But that did not transform the misinformation into a 14th Amendment violation.
The judges nevertheless described the alleged deprivations as “grievous.” For relief, they pointed residents instead to state tort claims, lawmakers, regulators, and the ballot box.
“State-created Danger”
Five judges disagreed with the majority’s analysis.
Judge Catharina Haynes, joined by four other judges, argued that the majority had stripped a crucial element from the plaintiffs’ case.
The residents were not merely alleging that Jackson failed to protect them from an existing hazard. They argued that city officials themselves created or increased the danger, a theory known as “state-created danger.”
Haynes noted that 10 other federal appeals courts have adopted some version of that doctrine. The 5th Circuit, by contrast, remains “practically alone in its decades-long fence-sitting” over whether to recognize it.
For Haynes, the issue was hardly peripheral. State-created danger was “squarely before us,” she wrote.
She also rejected the majority’s narrow treatment of bodily integrity. Quoting Supreme Court precedent, she wrote that “No right is held more sacred” than a person’s control over his own body.
The plaintiffs, she argued, alleged far more than poor management. Despite knowing the risks created by changes to the water system, officials continued telling residents that the water was “not unsafe to drink.” The city also allegedly withheld a 2020 EPA emergency order detailing numerous violations.
“Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged a cognizable claim for a constitutional injury in this case,” Haynes wrote.
She also pointed to Supreme Court precedent recognizing a person’s right to refuse lifesaving hydration and nutrition. If bodily integrity protects that choice, she reasoned, involuntary exposure to lead contaminated water warrants constitutional scrutiny as well.
The dissent agreed that individual city officials were protected by qualified immunity because the asserted rights were not clearly established. But Haynes would have allowed the claims against the city itself to proceed.
At minimum, she wrote, the plaintiffs were “entitled to discovery.”
Life, but No Water?
The 5th Circuit’s ruling draws a clear legal line. The Constitution, the majority said, does not recognize a substantive due process right to be free from contaminated municipal water.
But the decision raises a more fundamental question about the purpose of government itself.
The American founding was built on the premise that rights do not originate with government. The Declaration of Independence holds that people possess unalienable rights endowed by their Creator. That includes “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Governments are instituted specifically to secure those rights.
Water makes that principle unusually concrete.
Life is not an abstract legal concept. It depends on physical necessities, and few are more basic than access to water that does not poison the person drinking it. The 5th Circuit may be correct that the Constitution does not expressly guarantee clean municipal water. But that leaves an uncomfortable gap between the narrow rights courts are willing to enforce and the much broader purpose for which the Founders said government exists.
That gap becomes harder to ignore when viewed against the federal government’s long unconstitutional expansion into environmental regulation. The resulting apparatus has swung between sweeping, ideology-driven policies imposed (“climate change”) and, at other times, a version of “deregulation” that allows industries to pollute at genuinely dangerous levels while overriding state efforts to impose stricter safeguards.
In that context, the Mississippi case raises a grave question: If government exists to secure the right to life, what responsibility does it bear when one of life’s most indispensable resources becomes dangerous through government action itself?
