This ruling seems obviously correct to me? The plaintiffs claimed this was a 14th amendment issue, but at the time the 14th was added cholera outbreaks were still somewhat common in the US and there was no remote notion of safe drinking water provided universally by municipal governments.
Hopefully there is some other legal redress under a different law or EPA regulation, but the courts can't just give in to faulty reasoning like that because people were wronged by the government.
That'd require them explaining why "the 14th Amendment predates germ theory" is a reasonable argument but not "the Second Amendment predates machine guns".
Germ theory originated in Europe and it took a couple of decades before the knowledge transfer made it to the US and started getting accepted. It took a while for it to be come generally accepted in Europe too. I'm hazy on the exact dates, but even accepting the 1860 date, it's far too close to 1868 to assume politicians and the general public in the US (or even in Europe in 8 years) would have passed a constitutional amendment with full acceptance or understanding of germ theory.
So do you or do you not believe the First Amendment protects speech on this website? Or does it only protect quill pens and moveable type printing presses?
Machine guns are banned at the federal level, though, and it's been consistently upheld by the courts. I'm not sure I follow the argument anyway; the US constitution consists of negative rights (e.g. freedom to do something) rather than positive rights (e.g. entitlements)
> I'm not sure I follow the argument anyway; the US constitution consists of negative rights (e.g. freedom to do something) rather than positive rights (e.g. entitlements)
If there was documented, provable harm done to the residents from the lead poisoning (not saying there isn’t, I just don’t know), they could surely win a civil case claiming negligence by the city and/or water treatment facilities/etc… There may also be laws or regulations in Jackson or Mississippi that were broken. Perhaps there aren’t, but there maybe should be. Which are all points brought up by Engelhardt:
> The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing. Rather, the remedy for Plaintiffs’ injuries lies in pursuing tort claims, electing representatives who will better manage the public-water system, and petitioning their representatives for other remedies. And Plaintiffs have not been left to go at it alone. The State of Mississippi and federal government have worked for years, and continue today, to improve the City of Jackson’s drinking water quality through regulations, investigations, and compliance plans. These already-established-and-undertaken avenues are the proper course for rectifying the lead contamination. We will not expand the Fourteenth Amendment to create novel theories of constitutional liability.
And now people who don’t take the time to actually read, or just can’t understand, are gonna be yelling and screaming about how the courts are corrupt, etc… (some courts may very well be corrupt! But this would not be a good example why).
Dependence on "interpretation of the day" of the US Constitution seems to have overtaken regular maintenance of the law in a lot of high profile issues for the last many decades.
- the US law making process is fundamental and deeply broken to a point of it feels comparable to the Weimar Republic (the Germany between WW1 and Hitler taking over, around it's end it was pretty much dysfunctional when it comes to passing laws)
- instead things which should be law changes, and should be pursued bipartisan, are squeezed into other things. Like the budged bill, wider interpretations(1) of the existing law etc.
- or bundled into absurdly large bills covering docents of things which should not be one bill (which is very un-democratic and likely harmful for the US citizens. It allows corrupt politicians to forces less corrupt ones to vote for bad laws, because they are bundled with very essential needed changes, it also has shown to pose a very realistic risk of "sneaking" in something bad etc.)
- other cases often get stuck or even for topics which should be bipartisan held hostage to push some other goals
- with the current president this seems to have gotten even worse as he and the people close to him have attacked changes otherwise pursued by a wider bipartisan support. So even iff you can onboard both sides it might not mean enough in this legislation. But while I'm pretty sure I have seen such cases I can't remember details, so take with a grain of salt.
- to add in on top of all of that: Consumer and environmental protection in the US has always been a bit weak, a bit too slow, and often lacking precautionary approaches (most thing being reactive to enough people suffering harm, even if it was clear for a long time that idk. a product isn't safe or similar). And in some aspects this has been further crippled by the current administration, but idk. if such aspects apply here. That means even iff the current state is caused by a crime, it likely will take years to make stop the criminal from committing it. If it's seen as a breach of constitution things likely would move faster, and corrupt local governments have a much harder time undermining it.
---
(^1): Which isn't always bad, some degree of "vagueness" to handle the complexity of constant changing IRL is often desirable (as a dump example you also would make a law to forbid killing, instead of a law which explicitly lists and forbids every imaginable way you might kill someone). But what I mean goes far beyond that. In general some recognition of "basic human right" on a constitutional level should be something any citizen should ask their country to have. And I mean that independent of the international human rights court and the specific interpretation of human rights common with it. Not recognizing it is one thing, but insistently not recognizing any form of human rights is another, IMHO pretty evil, thing.
It seems nonsensical that the government could have the power to lie to and defraud the people while poisoning them. That just renders other rights meaningless.
sure, but that's not the 14th amendment. Maybe the guarantee clause. It MIGHT touch the 14th amendment via incorporation. That's not what the attorneys argued.
> Surely knowingly letting people drink lead contaminated water breaks other laws rather than their constitutional rights?
The legality of poisoning people with toxic water in the US seems to depend upon how black they are (based on clear patterns of where this is allowed to happen).
It's interesting how a lot of newer countries just put the right to water directly in the constitution. South Africa says some stuff about the government having an obligation toward "progressive realization" of the goal [1], whereas Slovenia just straight says water is a right [2].
The problem with the US is Americans treating their Constitution like some kind of Bible, untouchable and beyond reproach, when in reality it should have been a constantly evolving document.
South Africa has one of the best constitutions in the world on paper because the authors very recently had to reconcile with and forgo their apartheid past. And they had a number of templates to adapt from, including the US, France, Germany, India, etc. Older countries tend to have shittier constitutions.
As a not American, why does freedom of speech include corporations giving money that are not citizens nor talking. But even that Congress has the power to spend "to provide for the common defence and general welfare" given by the constitution it still not a right to receive any of that.
I have a feeling that there is a interpretation bias in favor of corporations over human life.
The court ruling is here [1]. While this article is way better than the one from yesterday, it does have some big problems.
Better to just take a look at the ruling itself. Note that it contains two opinions. First is the majority opinion, joined be 10 judges on the 15 judge panel. Then is an opinion joined by 5 judges that dissents in part and concurs in part.
Constitutional right? No. But, it's an abject failure of the local government overseeing the infrastructure to fix or solicit help to fix. Jackson, MS government failed. Targeting them on the grounds of a constitutional violation seems like borderline legal malpractice, but probably an unfortunate standard time wasting legal protocol, for lawyers to suggest this was a viable route to begin with.
This is a double edged sword right? Allowing judges to interpret the “spirit of the law” more widely would create a different set of absurdities, I think.
And then entities litigate to have those laws overturned on highly abstract theoretical grounds, alleging that they violate the framers' intent in drafting the Constitution, or exceed enumerated powers or whatever.
Never once tried to argue that it should be included in the Constitution. I suppose one of those "other laws" will cover when the government deliberately gives people lead poisoning? I wonder why they didn't go with that one...
You said it was absurd for the judge to rule it wasn't in the constitution, and advocated for a "spirit of the law" court. If that court's going to find any differently, don't they need to say it's part of the spirit of the constitution? That counts as including.
Correct. You may demand clean water from your local government, in return for taxes, but it isn't any sort of basic right. And certainly is not mentioned in the US Constitution.
Much like food or medical care: fundamental rights can never depend on the work of other people. Otherwise you can demand that work, which imposes on their rights.
> fundamental rights can never depend on the work of other people
It is the government’s responsibility to ensure the people who provide those services are hired and paid. Nobody is demanding anyone to work for free or to be forced to work on something they don’t want.
At some point, we might get there and mechanisms to compel society to work enough so that society doesn’t collapse will be considered some sort of civic duty.
The article left off part of part of what the court said, which was (emphasis added):
> Rather, the remedy for Plaintiffs’ injuries lies in pursuing tort claims, electing representatives who will better manage the public-water system, and petitioning their representatives for other remedies.
Suing the government is indeed one of the things the court said they could do. They just can't sue alleging a violation of the particular federal statute they used in this suit.
At most that will just get it dismissed against some individual plaintiffs. It won't affect their case against the city and any companies such as the engineering firm that was a defendant in this particular lawsuit.
It'll come out of their taxes, which the city will either have to raise, or cut costs somewhere to pay for. The people responsible will be neither criminally nor civilly liable, leaving zero disincentive to others.
If the engineering firm is acting as an 'agent of the state' then the protections extend to them as well. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to protect private prisons, etc from being sued, and we can't have that happening in America. So the court invented a fake protection (qualified immunity), and then invented a fake protected class called 'agents of the state'.
Yes? Why would there be? This is a nation built on negative rights. If you pay taxes/fees to some institution for a service and the the institution fails to provide it, that's already covered by some contract law, no?
I know this will be read as me saying they shouldn't have clean water. What I'm saying is that declaring a positive right is not an effective approach to satisfying that right in this country, or anywhere that I'm aware. But especially this country. If I was in that jurisdiction I would be kind of insulted if this was presented as a reasonable approach to secure clean water.
At the risk of an analogy, this is like finding that the Linux kernel provides no guarantee that a process won’t contain buffer overflow vulnerabilities. While buffer overflows are bad, and it would be a good idea to try to prevent them, enforcing against them at the kernel level would be a far-reaching prospect with many consequences, intended and unintended.
The judge is opining that other layers of protection are available.
well first off, nobody asked for a constitutional right to clean water, what the court said was that not providing clean water did not violate rights to bodily integrity under due process.
Furthermore they said lying and saying the water was clean was fine because "there was no constitutional right to “truthful information from officials during a public health crisis.”"
which is a stupid statement because everybody knows there is no such constitutional right, the question would be if not giving truthful information during a health crisis could violate some constitutional right.
I would have dug to see if they told somebody with money and power, hey don't drink that water because then that would violate equal protections (or at least that's what I would argue), but since nobody went there maybe it's not quite as sure a proposition as I would suppose.
> In the majority decision, Judge Kurt Engelhardt wrote that while the deprivation of clean water was “grievous,” it did “not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.” “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 convincing us,” he wrote.
The Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
It's the Fifth Circuit, so I'm not shocked they haven't heard of it.
I strongly suspect the Fifth Circuit would considered their bodily integrity to have been impinged upon if someone snuck lead into their drinks.
I'm not sure why you think the Ninth Amendment is relevant here. It just establishes that there are rights not listed in the Constitution. It provides no help whatsoever in determine what those rights are.
If you want to know more on how that is done you want to look into "Substantive Due Process". There are a couple approaches that courts might use. One is looking to see if the alleged right is deeply rooted in history and tradition and implicit in the idea of ordered liberty. Another is the so-called "penumbras and emanations" test where they look at existing rights and infer some broader unlisted right that is needed to make the listed rights meaningful.
A lot of people also forget that the Bill of Rights is a list of thou shalt nots addressed to the government. In other words it doesn't just claim to not be a list of everyone's rights, it is structured and written to not be such a list.
That sentence just says why we're making a national government (i.e. giving up some of our rights). It does not create some unlimited requirement for governments (especially state) to do whatever they can to promote general welfare, whatever that means. It doesn't even grant unlimited authority to do so. Or really say anything at all except state a very general purpose for why a national government is a sensible thing to have.
> We the People... in order to... [do establish] this Constitution
I disagree. The Preamble explicitly states that the Constitution is for these six things. "in Order to" makes it clear what the ends of the document are, and what they’re meant to serve.
That it doesn’t confer unlimited power is orthodox constitutional law. But the Preamble explicitly states the constitutional purposes that should guide the interpretation and exercise of the powers enumerated. And it doesn’t follow that the purposes it states are legally meaningless. The’re part of the constitutional text and inform how the powers actually conferred by the Constitution are construed. As Story commented:
“One of the best established rules of interpretation, one, which common sense and reason forbid us to overlook, is, that when the object of a power is clearly defined by its terms, or avowed in the context, it ought to be construed, so as to obtain the object, and not to defeat it. The circumstance, that so construed the power may be abused, is no answer. All powers may be abused; but are they then to be abridged by those, who are to administer them, or denied to have any operation? If the people frame a constitution, the rulers are to obey it. Neither rulers, nor any other functionaries, much less any private persons, have a right to cripple it, because it is according to their own views inconvenient, or dangerous, unwise or impolitic, of narrow limits, or of wide influence.”
Give how vague constitutional clauses have been (ab)used to sneak in legislation through the judicial system (eg. roe v wade, or louisiana v. callais), the last thing we need are even more avenues to sue the government just because the plaintiff doesn't think the government is acting in the way they think is best.
Can’t say that I follow. What does a king have to do with forming a more perfect Union, establishing Justice, insuring domestic Tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general Welfare, and securing the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity?
If you allow justifying government power according to some ambiguous notion of general welfare, then all you need to say is that something promotes general welfare. There is more to the structure of the US system than the preamble to the constitution.
US residents are only allowed to buy and drink brawndo (TM), for safe and clean consumption, they can even use it to irrigate the crops because it has electrolytes!!
> the Court ruled, 7–2, that a town and its police department could not be sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for refusing to enforce a restraining order, even though the refusal led to the murders of a woman's three children by her estranged husband
Hard to see where we go from here as a society where arbitrary laws that bind us all are essentially written on the fly by whatever judges happen to be in the Supreme Court, circuit courts, state courts, etc.
How is it possible to have a democracy under these conditions?
Hopefully there is some other legal redress under a different law or EPA regulation, but the courts can't just give in to faulty reasoning like that because people were wronged by the government.
Oh wait, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz...
Germ Theory starting -only- 8 years prior doesn't really mean much here...
From the government, yes. From @dang, no.
Similarly, I think it's a clear Constitutional violation for a city government to knowingly give people lead poisoning.
Semiautomatics, if you prefer. (And plenty of Second Amendment purists feel that limit is unconstitutional, and SCOTUS may well soon agree. As they just did with silencers - https://www.npr.org/2026/08/17/nx-s1-5935562/firearms-law-la...)
> I'm not sure I follow the argument anyway; the US constitution consists of negative rights (e.g. freedom to do something) rather than positive rights (e.g. entitlements)
That's what the Ninth Amendment is for.
Surely knowingly letting people drink lead contaminated water breaks other laws rather than their constitutional rights?
> The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing. Rather, the remedy for Plaintiffs’ injuries lies in pursuing tort claims, electing representatives who will better manage the public-water system, and petitioning their representatives for other remedies. And Plaintiffs have not been left to go at it alone. The State of Mississippi and federal government have worked for years, and continue today, to improve the City of Jackson’s drinking water quality through regulations, investigations, and compliance plans. These already-established-and-undertaken avenues are the proper course for rectifying the lead contamination. We will not expand the Fourteenth Amendment to create novel theories of constitutional liability.
And now people who don’t take the time to actually read, or just can’t understand, are gonna be yelling and screaming about how the courts are corrupt, etc… (some courts may very well be corrupt! But this would not be a good example why).
- the US law making process is fundamental and deeply broken to a point of it feels comparable to the Weimar Republic (the Germany between WW1 and Hitler taking over, around it's end it was pretty much dysfunctional when it comes to passing laws)
- instead things which should be law changes, and should be pursued bipartisan, are squeezed into other things. Like the budged bill, wider interpretations(1) of the existing law etc.
- or bundled into absurdly large bills covering docents of things which should not be one bill (which is very un-democratic and likely harmful for the US citizens. It allows corrupt politicians to forces less corrupt ones to vote for bad laws, because they are bundled with very essential needed changes, it also has shown to pose a very realistic risk of "sneaking" in something bad etc.)
- other cases often get stuck or even for topics which should be bipartisan held hostage to push some other goals
- with the current president this seems to have gotten even worse as he and the people close to him have attacked changes otherwise pursued by a wider bipartisan support. So even iff you can onboard both sides it might not mean enough in this legislation. But while I'm pretty sure I have seen such cases I can't remember details, so take with a grain of salt.
- to add in on top of all of that: Consumer and environmental protection in the US has always been a bit weak, a bit too slow, and often lacking precautionary approaches (most thing being reactive to enough people suffering harm, even if it was clear for a long time that idk. a product isn't safe or similar). And in some aspects this has been further crippled by the current administration, but idk. if such aspects apply here. That means even iff the current state is caused by a crime, it likely will take years to make stop the criminal from committing it. If it's seen as a breach of constitution things likely would move faster, and corrupt local governments have a much harder time undermining it.
---
(^1): Which isn't always bad, some degree of "vagueness" to handle the complexity of constant changing IRL is often desirable (as a dump example you also would make a law to forbid killing, instead of a law which explicitly lists and forbids every imaginable way you might kill someone). But what I mean goes far beyond that. In general some recognition of "basic human right" on a constitutional level should be something any citizen should ask their country to have. And I mean that independent of the international human rights court and the specific interpretation of human rights common with it. Not recognizing it is one thing, but insistently not recognizing any form of human rights is another, IMHO pretty evil, thing.
Surely intentional lead poisoning counts?
The legality of poisoning people with toxic water in the US seems to depend upon how black they are (based on clear patterns of where this is allowed to happen).
[1]: https://www.gov.za/documents/constitution/chapter-2-bill-rig...
[2]: https://www.uradni-list.si/glasilo-uradni-list-rs/vsebina/12...
South Africa has one of the best constitutions in the world on paper because the authors very recently had to reconcile with and forgo their apartheid past. And they had a number of templates to adapt from, including the US, France, Germany, India, etc. Older countries tend to have shittier constitutions.
I have a feeling that there is a interpretation bias in favor of corporations over human life.
Better to just take a look at the ruling itself. Note that it contains two opinions. First is the majority opinion, joined be 10 judges on the 15 judge panel. Then is an opinion joined by 5 judges that dissents in part and concurs in part.
[1] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pd...
We should have "spirit of the law" courts. This is absurd.
Much like food or medical care: fundamental rights can never depend on the work of other people. Otherwise you can demand that work, which imposes on their rights.
It is the government’s responsibility to ensure the people who provide those services are hired and paid. Nobody is demanding anyone to work for free or to be forced to work on something they don’t want.
At some point, we might get there and mechanisms to compel society to work enough so that society doesn’t collapse will be considered some sort of civic duty.
Is suing the government not essentially a petition for remedies? How else do you get the gov to listen?
> Rather, the remedy for Plaintiffs’ injuries lies in pursuing tort claims, electing representatives who will better manage the public-water system, and petitioning their representatives for other remedies.
Suing the government is indeed one of the things the court said they could do. They just can't sue alleging a violation of the particular federal statute they used in this suit.
Which certainly won't get thrown out over qualified immunity.
(And if they win a case against the city, it's coming out of their own pockets!)
Which again, if they win, they pay for!
It'll come out of their taxes, which the city will either have to raise, or cut costs somewhere to pay for. The people responsible will be neither criminally nor civilly liable, leaving zero disincentive to others.
The polite answer to that is JFK's line, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
I know this will be read as me saying they shouldn't have clean water. What I'm saying is that declaring a positive right is not an effective approach to satisfying that right in this country, or anywhere that I'm aware. But especially this country. If I was in that jurisdiction I would be kind of insulted if this was presented as a reasonable approach to secure clean water.
The judge is opining that other layers of protection are available.
Furthermore they said lying and saying the water was clean was fine because "there was no constitutional right to “truthful information from officials during a public health crisis.”"
which is a stupid statement because everybody knows there is no such constitutional right, the question would be if not giving truthful information during a health crisis could violate some constitutional right.
I would have dug to see if they told somebody with money and power, hey don't drink that water because then that would violate equal protections (or at least that's what I would argue), but since nobody went there maybe it's not quite as sure a proposition as I would suppose.
The Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
It's the Fifth Circuit, so I'm not shocked they haven't heard of it.
I strongly suspect the Fifth Circuit would considered their bodily integrity to have been impinged upon if someone snuck lead into their drinks.
If you want to know more on how that is done you want to look into "Substantive Due Process". There are a couple approaches that courts might use. One is looking to see if the alleged right is deeply rooted in history and tradition and implicit in the idea of ordered liberty. Another is the so-called "penumbras and emanations" test where they look at existing rights and infer some broader unlisted right that is needed to make the listed rights meaningful.
> We the People... in order to... [do establish] this Constitution
That it doesn’t confer unlimited power is orthodox constitutional law. But the Preamble explicitly states the constitutional purposes that should guide the interpretation and exercise of the powers enumerated. And it doesn’t follow that the purposes it states are legally meaningless. The’re part of the constitutional text and inform how the powers actually conferred by the Constitution are construed. As Story commented:
“One of the best established rules of interpretation, one, which common sense and reason forbid us to overlook, is, that when the object of a power is clearly defined by its terms, or avowed in the context, it ought to be construed, so as to obtain the object, and not to defeat it. The circumstance, that so construed the power may be abused, is no answer. All powers may be abused; but are they then to be abridged by those, who are to administer them, or denied to have any operation? If the people frame a constitution, the rulers are to obey it. Neither rulers, nor any other functionaries, much less any private persons, have a right to cripple it, because it is according to their own views inconvenient, or dangerous, unwise or impolitic, of narrow limits, or of wide influence.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzale...
> the Court ruled, 7–2, that a town and its police department could not be sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for refusing to enforce a restraining order, even though the refusal led to the murders of a woman's three children by her estranged husband
It's clear at this point that judges pick the outcome they want then find ways to interpret the case, precedent, etc. to fit. You can see it in the dissent here. https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pd...
Hard to see where we go from here as a society where arbitrary laws that bind us all are essentially written on the fly by whatever judges happen to be in the Supreme Court, circuit courts, state courts, etc.
How is it possible to have a democracy under these conditions?