A federal appeals court has ruled that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to clean drinking water, rejecting claims brought by Jackson, Miss., residents over the city's long-running lead contamination problems.
In a Sept. 4 decision, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of federal civil rights claims brought against Jackson and several current and former city officials. The plaintiffs alleged that government actions and failures caused lead to enter their drinking water and that officials subsequently misrepresented the safety of the supply.
The residents sought to make their case under the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, arguing in part that exposure to lead-contaminated water violated their constitutional right to bodily integrity.
The court disagreed.
Writing for the majority in Sterling v. City of Jackson, Judge Kurt Engelhardt said neither protection from government-caused exposure to contaminated municipal water nor a right to truthful information about contaminants is sufficiently rooted in U.S. history and tradition to constitute a substantive due process right. The en banc court ruled 10-5.
"It is undisputed that the Constitution does not guarantee clean water," Engelhardt wrote.
The distinction is important for water utilities. The ruling does not eliminate federal or state drinking-water requirements, nor does it say utilities are free from liability when water is contaminated. Instead, the court found that the federal Constitution itself does not create the specific rights asserted by the Jackson plaintiffs, meaning those alleged injuries could not support their federal civil rights claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The majority pointed instead to mechanisms including tort litigation, regulation and the legislative process.
The case stems from Jackson's years-long drinking-water crisis. The plaintiffs filed suit in 2022, alleging that the city's actions contributed to widespread lead contamination and that residents were told the water was safe despite known problems. A federal district court dismissed their claims in 2024.
The Fifth Circuit's decision was not unanimous. Dissenting judges argued that the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged a violation of the already-recognized constitutional right to bodily integrity, rather than asking the court to establish an entirely new constitutional right to clean water.
For utilities, the ruling draws a significant legal boundary between drinking-water regulation and constitutional law. Safe drinking water remains governed by federal and state regulatory requirements, while the Fifth Circuit has now held that contaminated municipal water, even under the circumstances alleged in Jackson, does not by itself create the constitutional claim these residents sought to pursue.
