The Supreme Court ruled unanimously for Texas property owners flooded by a state highway project in a decision handed down on April 16.
The new 9-0 ruling, the latest pro-property rights decision by the court, will allow the landowners to pursue their claims for compensation in state court under the U.S. Constitution’s Takings Clause. In the ruling, the nation’s highest court rebuffed the conservative-leaning U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit for holding the lawsuits could not proceed.
The case, Devillier v. Texas, came out of a series of inverse-condemnation cases filed in Texas state courts, which claimed a specific highway project caused widespread flooding. Inverse condemnation is when a government takes or damages property for public use without going through an eminent domain proceeding.
The lead petitioner, Richie Devillier, and his family have lived on their farm in Winnie, Texas, since his grandfather purchased the property in the 1930s. And for most of that history, the land never flooded. Then, in the early 2000s, the Texas Department of Transportation renovated nearby U.S. Interstate Highway 10, increased its height, added two lanes, and installed a concrete barrier in the median.
The median barrier created a low-head dam that kept rainfall on the north side. Water that would otherwise have moved south into the Gulf of Mexico stopped on Highway 10.
The project ensured that part of the road remained navigable even in flood conditions, but caused flooding of the south side of the highway in times of heavy rainfall, which damaged local properties.
Now, whenever there is a heavy rainfall, Mr. Devillier’s land becomes a lake. Crops and farm animals have been destroyed.
Mr. Devillier and more than 120 other petitioners who own property north of Highway 10 between Houston and Beaumont, Texas, sued. Texas had the lawsuits removed to federal court. The cases were then consolidated into a single proceeding. The federal district court ruled that the landowners could proceed, reasoning that the Takings Clause in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was self-executing, meaning the state could be sued even in the absence of specific legislation authorizing the filing of such lawsuits.
The 5th Circuit reversed, holding that the state could not be held liable because Congress has never passed a law allowing citizens to sue states for taking property. In other words, the Fifth Amendment guarantee of “just compensation” was not enforceable.
The Fifth Amendment states: “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
After Mr. Devillier claimed Texas “took his property for stormwater storage,” the court agreed to review the case to consider whether “a person whose property is taken without compensation [may] seek redress under the self-executing Takings Clause even if the legislature has not affirmatively provided them with a cause of action.”
Although the question assumes the property owner has “no separate cause of action under which to bring a claim based on the Takings Clause[,]” that is not the case in this instance, the justice wrote.
Texas law offers a cause of action that permits property owners to vindicate their rights under the Takings Clause, and Mr. Devillier must be allowed to move forward under the Texas state-law cause of action, he wrote.
In 2017, Hurricane Harvey visited heavy rainfall on southeast Texas. The new median barrier performed as promised, keeping open the south side of the highway, but it flooded the property owners’ land to the north, “displacing them from their homes, damaging businesses, ruining crops, killing livestock, and destroying family heirlooms.”
This tragedy repeated itself in 2019 when Tropical Storm Imelda kept the south side open by restraining the stormwater, which then inundated property north of the highway. And it is bound to happen again. “Because heavy rainfall is not uncommon in southeast Texas, the median barrier will continue to cause flooding on Devillier’s land during future storms,” Justice Thomas wrote.
The landowners may move forward with their suits because “a property owner acquires an irrevocable right to just compensation immediately upon a taking” because of the “self-executing character of the Takings Clause ‘with respect to compensation,’” he wrote, citing prior precedent.
“Texas does not dispute the nature of the substantive right to just compensation. This case presents only a question regarding the procedural vehicle by which a property owner may seek to vindicate that right.”
It is wrong to say that Texas left the petitioners without a cause of action to seek the compensation assured by the Takings Clause, he wrote.
“Texas state law provides a cause of action by which property owners may seek just compensation against the State.” As Texas acknowledged during the oral argument, “its state-law inverse-condemnation cause of action provides a vehicle for takings claims based on both the Texas Constitution and the Takings Clause.”
Even though Texas claimed that moving forward under the state-law cause of action would require an amendment to the legal complaint, it also assured the Supreme Court that it would not oppose an attempt by the petitioners to make one, he wrote.
“This case therefore does not present the circumstance in which a property owner has no cause of action to seek just compensation,” and the petitioners must be allowed to pursue their claims under the Takings Clause by way of the cause of action already available under Texas law, he wrote.
The Supreme Court vacated the decision of the 5th Circuit and remanded the case to that court “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
