A U.S. federal court recently ruled that residents of Jackson, Mississippi, don’t have a constitutional right to truthful information from public officials, nor the right to municipal drinking water that is free of lead, a neurotoxin.
“The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, who was appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump, wrote in the majority opinion.
The case was brought by a group of Jackson residents in 2022 who alleged that the city allowed lead to enter the municipal water system and then lied to residents saying the water was safe, though they knew it was not.
“Knowing what is in our water is fundamental to protecting public health,” Caroline Leary, general counsel at the U.S.-based nonprofit Environmental Working Group, told Mongabay by email.
Jackson is home to roughly 150,000 people. Nearly a quarter of them are children under 18 who are particularly vulnerable to the potentially life-long toxic impacts of lead exposure including seizures, lowered IQ, impaired brain development and even death.
The plaintiffs alleged that several of their children have been diagnosed with lead poisoning and now require special educational, medical, sociological, occupational and disability services. The plaintiffs also argued that exposure to contaminated water and the failure to be informed about the risks violated their 14th amendment due process right to bodily integrity.
A November 2025 ruling by a three-judge panel of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowed these claims against the city to proceed.
However, on Sept. 4, 2026, the full court ruled against the plaintiffs, stating that the court could not recognize two new constitutional rights, “the right to be free from exposure to contaminated water and the right to accurate information from public officials.”
Writing for the dissent, Judge Catharina Haynes argued that the plaintiffs’ allegations were plausible, and the court should recognize the “state-created danger” doctrine, which allows people to sue the government if it created, or made a person more vulnerable to, danger. It has been adopted by 10 other federal appeals courts.
“The dissent is exactly right,” Pat Parenteau, an emeritus law professor with Vermont Law School told Mongabay by email. “The courts have uniformly recognized a constitutional right to be protected from state sponsored danger creation and violation of bodily integrity.”
He said the majority decision is “a travesty.”
“At a minimum, plaintiffs are entitled to discovery to prove that the city deliberately endangered the health of the plaintiffs and their children from lead poisoning,” Parenteau said. The dissent opinion said the same.
However, the majority opinion said the plaintiffs should instead pursue a tort claim, a civil legal action to receive compensation for damages and elect “representatives who will better manage the public-water system, and petitioning their representatives for other remedies.”
Banner image: A glass of tap water. Image courtesy of Margaret Barse via Flickr (CCO 1.0)
