A federal appeals court has ruled that clean drinking water is not a right protected by the United States Constitution. The decision came down September 4 from the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which voted 10 to 5 to throw out a lawsuit brought by four residents of Jackson, Mississippi, a city that is more than 80 percent Black and has spent years fighting a water system that keeps failing the people who depend on it.
The case is Sterling v. City of Jackson. Priscilla Sterling, Raine Becker, Shawn Miller and John Bennett filed suit in 2022, arguing that city officials knew lead was leaching into the municipal water system and let residents keep drinking it anyway. Testing conducted by the Mississippi State Department of Health between 2010 and 2013 showed elevated lead levels in the water.
They sued under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the part of the Constitution that limits what the government is allowed to do to you. The specific right they pointed to is called bodily integrity, meaning the government cannot physically harm your body without justification. Their argument was that knowingly allowing lead into somebody’s tap is exactly that kind of harm, and that the absence of clean drinking water in their homes was a constitutional injury and not just a municipal failure.
The majority disagreed. Judge Kurt Engelhardt, appointed to the court by Donald Trump, wrote the opinion. “The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” he wrote. The court found no history or tradition in American law that would support reading a right this broad into the due process clause, and said it was skeptical that harm from lead-contaminated water fits inside the right to bodily integrity at all.
The ruling went further than water. The court also found there is no constitutional right to truthful information from government officials during a public health crisis. In practical terms, that means even if Jackson officials told residents the water was fine while knowing it was not, that lie by itself is not a federal constitutional violation anywhere the Fifth Circuit has authority.
The court added a second layer on top of that. Even if the residents had proven a constitutional violation, the individual officials named in the suit would have been protected by qualified immunity. That is the legal doctrine that shields government employees from being sued personally unless they broke a rule that earlier court decisions had already made unmistakably clear. Because no prior case had established that failing to deliver clean drinking water violates the Constitution, the court reasoned, nobody in Jackson city government could have been on notice that they were breaking federal law.
Judge Haynes, writing separately, flagged something worth understanding. Ten other federal appeals courts around the country have recognized some version of what is called the state-created danger doctrine, the principle that the government can be held responsible when it creates the danger that ends up hurting you. The Fifth Circuit has repeatedly declined to either adopt that doctrine or formally reject it. The result is that people living in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi have less ability to hold their governments accountable in federal court than people living in most of the rest of the country.
This was not the first time the case reached the appeals court. A three-judge Fifth Circuit panel revived the residents’ bodily autonomy claim in 2025, which would have let the lawsuit move forward. That decision was wiped out when the full court agreed to rehear the case, a process called going en banc, where every active judge on the circuit participates instead of the usual panel of three.
What the ruling does not do is erase drinking water law. The Safe Drinking Water Act still applies, and Jackson’s system has separately faced federal enforcement under it. The city’s water operation currently runs under court-ordered third-party management while infrastructure repairs and compliance work continue. What the decision takes away is a specific tool: the ability of residents to sue city officials in federal court on constitutional grounds over what comes out of their faucets.
Engelhardt pointed residents toward other options. He wrote that they could pursue tort claims, which are ordinary personal injury lawsuits filed in state court, elect officials who would manage the water system better, and petition their representatives for solutions. For families who have been buying bottled water for years, that reads less like a remedy and more like a list of things to try.
Clarence Webster III, a partner at Jones Walker who represented the city, called the decision one of the most significant constitutional rulings the Fifth Circuit will issue this year, and said the city was pleased the court affirmed its position and set out limits on constitutional liability. Jackson has consistently denied that officials deliberately allowed lead to contaminate the supply.
Jackson’s water problems became national news in 2022, when the city’s main treatment plant failed and residents went weeks without reliable running water, but the crisis had been building for far longer than that. Boil water notices had become routine. Families with the means to do it stopped drinking from the tap entirely.
The Fifth Circuit covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, a region of roughly 30 million people. For all of them, the question of whether clean drinking water is something the Constitution guarantees now has an answer, and the answer is no.
