9 ms·

You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules

237 points by vrganj 1mo ago

randyrand 1mo ago
I'm not sure what a right to water really means. A lot of rural cities don't even provide water. People have wells and you pay for them yourself.
- cumshitpiss 1mo ago
  [dead]
- OJFord 1mo ago
  I suppose it means that has to be available to you somehow, the easiest example perhaps being that if you're renting in such a place, the landlord is obligated to ensure access.
- exe34 1mo ago
  The first paragraph of tfa: > lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water. The "right" here is about other people not contaminating your well for their profit. You don't have that right. They can contaminate your well for their profit and you have to find another source of water at your own cost.
- passwordreset 1mo ago
  I think it's covered under that "right to life" section of the Constitution. Deliberately poisoning people through their water supply seems like a sure-fire way to deny the right to life of your citizens.
  - defrost 1mo ago
    It hasn't counted when it's "accidental" - eg: pretty much all of the US uranium leach well mining resulted in tainted water in a "yeah we know, but don't care" process. Also radioactive tailings dam collapses and hard rock mining consequences: On Poisoned Ground The largest accidental release of radioactivity in the United States did not occur in 1979 at Three-Mile Island. That very same year a collapsing dam released a flood of radioactive debris into the Navajo Nation. ~ https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/on-poisoned-ground/ https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/on-poisoned-... 'We didn't know we were poisoning ourselves': the deadly legacy of the US uranium boom Tsosie was one of thousands of Navajos who took jobs in the mines, starting in the 1940s. They worked without masks or ventilation to disperse the lethal radon gas, and they were never told the rocks they were handling – leetso in the Diné language, or yellow dirt – were deadly. ~ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/20/navajo-dine-uraminum-mining-poison https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/20/navajo-dine-ur...
  - ButlerianJihad 1mo ago
    > that "right to life" section of the Constitution The US Constitution? Perhaps you are thinking of the Declaration of Independence? Or the Fifth Amendment, formulating it in the negative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_... I believe it is important for us to consider where rights derive from. The Constitution and Bill of Rights are designed to protect rights that humans already have ("endowed by their Creator") and prevent the government from taking them away, or infringing on them. The law can grant ordinary civil rights, above and beyond intrinsic human rights, but if the Constitution isn't protecting the latter, then there is a problem.
  - TFNA 1mo ago
    As the other poster mentions, "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is not from the Constitution but from the Declaration of Independence. As much as it might be part of American civic lore, the Declaration of Independence is not legally binding, it is a product from two whole legal regimes before the USA's current one was founded.
    - sagarm 1mo ago
      The current court has made it clear "civic lore" is fundamental to interpreting the Constitution, though curiously this seems to only apply to certain causes.
- latexr 1mo ago
  Could we please not? In the first sentence of the article: > (…) alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water. Knowingly let residents drink unsafe water. Surely you can see an issue there? Can we please make a collected effort to comment beyond the title? If you don’t know what “a right to safe water” means, then could you please do a web search to try to be minimally informed about the matter before commenting? Took me two seconds to find a UN page. https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/human-rights-water-and-sanitation https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/human-rights-water-and-s... Again, on the first sentence, in bold: > Access to water and sanitation are recognized by the United Nations as human rights – fundamental to everyone’s health, dignity and prosperity. And on the second paragraph: > Governments must take a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to water and sanitation improvements There’s your right to water. It means that because it’s something fundamental to human life, nations have an (at a minimum moral, often legal) obligation to provide it or protect access to it to everyone under them that lacks it. Just for good measure, here’s the Wikipedia page on Human Rights too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights Again, the first sentence already explains a lot.
  - randyrand 1mo ago
    It needs more qualifications IMO. "reasonable access" perhaps? I mean how would you handle someone who drives their car into the desert or climbs to the top of a mountain and demands water?
    - latexr 1mo ago
      > It needs more qualifications IMO. What it needs is for us to not make up extreme scenarios to excuse not handling the obvious ones, which are extensively covered in the sources I linked you to. Obviously “reasonable” is implied; “unreasonable” is, by definition, absurd. We can only do what’s within our means. That’s the thought behind the “Could we please not?”. Who, exactly, are those the people in your scenarios in the proverbial middle of nowhere going to “demand” water from? That is obviously not the same thing as not caring for the infrastructure under your control or letting people knowingly be contaminated.
- pvaldes 1mo ago
  > I'm not sure what a right to water really means. Right to safe water. It means that the water in your kitchen faucet is expected/guaranteed to be safe to drink. It must not have: noxious bacteria causing diarrhea, or liver parasite eggs, or mud, or mercury/heavy metals, or remains of faeces, or fracking methane, or pesticides, or medicines, or obesogens [1]. It must had been professionally filtered and treated to assure that none of those reach your home. If you pay for water classified as "drinking water", you should not receive grey water, soapy bubbles, oily mud or anything else. This is the standard in all first country nations and I assume that it should be the same in US. [1] And if in your small town everybody is obese, before to blame everybody for eating too much, or being lazy couch potatos, look for chemicals in the drinking water, leading to a broken satiety system, causing people to eat huge amounts of food. This is why the right to have safe drinking water is so important.
  - JuniperMesos 1mo ago
    > And if in your small town everybody is obese, before to blame everybody for eating too much, or being lazy couch potatos, look for chemicals in the drinking water, leading to a broken satiety system, causing people to eat huge amounts of food. This is why the right to have safe drinking water is so important. I don't think there's any reason to assume that obesity is caused by any specific chemical found in some but not all drinking water, in such a way that explains differences in obesity rates. If that were the case we probably would've figured that out by now and would be systematically treating drinking water to remove that chemical.
    - pvaldes 1mo ago
      > I don't think there's any reason Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration used to think the opposite when they were at charge of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Sadly EPA and FDA are being back-stabbed and slowly murdered by Republicans since 2025 (Yes, like with Voldemort, is important not to be afraid to say it loud). And the death by a thousand cuts had been surgically designed to destroy any capability to prosecute crimes related with the TSCA. So if you live in USA you are alone on this. You better do your homework and learn as fast as you can. Scientific Journals are your friends. There is an incredible increase of unexpected knowledge about digestive regulation published since the 90's. Forget about miraculous fruits and start your journey with the adipokines. Meanwhile the world keeps moving. In Europe, since Jan 2026, water suppliers will be required to comply with a parametric value of 2.5μg/L for BisPhenol-A in drinking water, after scientists discovered than it can leak in the hot-water faucets. People sometimes refill their teapots with hot water before to turn on the kitchen. What is RFK up to lately? Any exciting changes? He found another racoon?
- wood_spirit 1mo ago
  Imagine your well becomes contaminated. That might be natural, or it might be caused by eg fracking. If the latter, do you have any rights and recourse and does it make a difference if the poisoner is state, federal or private? (I’m curious of my own situation as a European with my own well and also not so far from a well documented case against the government because their airbase fire fighting had contaminated groundwater with PFAS.)
- bamboozled 1mo ago
  If the ground water is contaminated with industrial waste ?
- deleted 1mo ago
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impossiblefork 1mo ago
I think this is a ruling that's hard to justify. There are many frameworks under which the judge could have chosen to rule, it could be treated as assault, or some type of aggravated assault/battery, if the lead can be measured in the people who consumed it, it could be treated as fraud, since the water is presumably sold, etc. and reasoning about that it would ordinarily be a punishable tort would make it clear that the government can't impose that sort of thing either, just as it can't send anyone out to punch people.
- JackFr 1mo ago
  The argument is the choice of the plaintiff. It’s not the role of the judge to argue the plaintiff’s case and find the most compelling argument.
  - tchalla 1mo ago
    This is something that is always fundamentally misunderstood. Of course, judges can extend courtesy but most modern systems are designed on pretty much the accuser arguing their case against the defender with the judge deciding based on law plus arguments presented in court.
  - impossiblefork 1mo ago
    What I'm saying though, is that he has room enough to interpret things so that a dismissal isn't necessary. It isn't the job of the courts to make minimal rulings and avoiding all substantial questions, but to solve disputes. Here we have a case where the government has harmed people in a way that would be a tort if it had been done by anybody else, and people arguing that the government by doing so breached a right. There is presumably a right which can be interpreted as guaranteeing that people's bodies won't be messed with, or things in the US would be quite strange, so there's room to do something useful here, and the judge's choice is not forced.
    - petcat 1mo ago
      The judge can only rule on the arguments and evidence presented in their court.
Smaug123 1mo ago
Misleadingly provocative headline, right? The actual ruling from the article is that the US Constitution does not by itself grant US citizens that right. As the article itself points out, there’s nothing stopping other agreements from granting the right, and indeed several states do so explicitly.
- IsTom 1mo ago
  On the other hand it means that states can just not do that and leave their citizens without clean drinking water.
  - Smaug123 1mo ago
    Does it? I think that conclusion requires observing additionally that all federal law also fails to grant a right to safe drinking water, doesn’t it?
    - gavinsyancey 1mo ago
      Many municipal water systems are wholely in one state. Does the Constitution grant Congress the right to control municipal water quality? Also it's kind of a moot point if federal law has not granted that right and does not seem likely to.
      - rascul 1mo ago
        Isn't that what the safe drinking water act is for?
  - u1hcw9nx 1mo ago
    Page 2 second paragraph."Rather, the remedy for Plaintiffs’ injuries lies in pursuing .." https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pdf https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pd...
    - IsTom 1mo ago
metalman 1mo ago
Guess what folks, you now have anti rights.Sometimes I hate America and some americans for the bad things they do, but not like that. A good deal of what america is doing to itself these days looks just as insane as what they are doing to other countrys, or at least other countrys that are not doing it to themselves. There used to be metaphors about poison, and wells, but no one imagined that is could or would leap past that, and become ledgislated policy.
- mschuster91 1mo ago
  > A good deal of what america is doing to itself these days looks just as insane as what they are doing to other countrys, or at least other countrys that are not doing it to themselves. America voted for unrestrained rabid turbocapitalism not just once but twice. They knew what MAGA and Project 2025 were about, both announced their intentions clear as day, and now they're getting unrestrained rabid turbocapitalism - a world where corporations can do whatever the hell they want and people either have no rights at all or the rights they have on paper are de facto meaningless.
  - bamboozled 1mo ago
    Can’t really see how it can be reigned in and once it’s done with America it’s coming for everyone else. Australia with one nation and UK with reform for example. My honest assessment is the tech bros felt threatened from potential regulation and decided to do use their platforms and influence to encourage more of the same destruction everywhere else. I cannot explain it any other way. Why would nearly all of them have backed the orange boy ?
    - mschuster91 1mo ago
      > Can’t really see how it can be reigned in By political revolution. The coming, inevitable AI bubble implosion and the resulting chaos will provide for it. We are already seeing the first signs with local anti datacenter movements.
      - 1mo ago
mbeavitt 1mo ago
This headline is not correct. The ruling was that a constitutional lawsuit was not successful, not that the the US government has carte blanche to poison its citizens drinking water… So, the correct headline would be “safe drinking water ruled not to be covered by the US constitution”. There are other binding agreements and regulations than the constitution in the US.
- mdp2021 1mo ago
  Still not that simple: > The Jackson plaintiffs alleged that their city government deliberately withheld information about the water’s toxicity, and exacerbated the problem through a series of boil-water notices - a practice that can eliminate some bacterial contamination, but also concentrates lead in water. Engelhardt stated there is no “constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis” The constitutional question (and note that state Constitutions, e.g. Massachusetts, may instead cover it) is just one piece of the mess.
  - quotemstr 1mo ago
    Where is the constitution does it say the state can't do that?
    - mdp2021 1mo ago
      We would ask you to rephrase - and, if we interpreted correctly, to reread.
      - quotemstr 1mo ago
        "We"? Yeah, okay, Your Highness. As for the content: the law says what it says. Where in the constitution of the United States of America and its amendments does it say that a state government must be truthful about public health statements? The law says what it says. A behavior might be rotten, evil, illegal under other documents, and an all-round bad idea and still not a violation of, in particular, the constitution of the United States of America and its amendments
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lukan 1mo ago
"Engelhardt stated there is no “constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis.” " " “Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”" He basically says, the constitution does not care, whether the government lies to citizens, so they continue to drink poison water. Well, I always though trust of citizens in government is the main thing a constitution should provide and establish, but the "Donald Trump-appointed judge Kurt Engelhardt" apparently thinks different.
- mdp2021 1mo ago
  I hope an analyst e.g. from the umbrella of Eugene Volokh will write about this case.
- jvdvegt 1mo ago
  So from now on you can safely assume your government is lying (especially the current administration). Worrisome...
  - rascul 1mo ago
    Governments lie all the time. This is not new.
    - lukan 1mo ago
      New to me is that judges openly confirm and accept it.
  - PepperdineG 1mo ago
    You could have assumed that since practically inception, especially when it came to treaty signing.
themgt 1mo ago
Plaintiffs ... seek recognition of two new constitutional rights lacking any foundation in the history and tradition of our Nation—the right to be free from exposure to contaminated water and the right to accurate information from public officials. This is like filing a bug report that the Linux kernel allowed your Thunderbird to receive SPAM email containing false information. It's just a fundamental misunderstanding of how the US government is designed to work. Closed by Fifth Circuit as WONTFIX, file request for constitutional amendment (RFC) if desired.
- raverbashing 1mo ago
  100% this These headlines is just press fodder for the grievances-industrial-complex to cry about how the gov is incompetent Of course drinking water is important - I'm not questioning that But there's a difference between a meaningless statement of "everybody should have the right to cleaning water" which is a vapid statement and actually building towards it (with regulation on the quality of water, EPA, working on water treatment, etc) "Right to cleaning water" is like saying "you should move more" to a fat person
  - noja 1mo ago
    Why is someone who wants non-contaminated drinking water incompetent?
    - dotancohen 1mo ago
      Not everything you want - or need - is a right. And establishing a new right is not the only way to get what you want or need.
      - stuartjohnson12 1mo ago
        I am absolutely mindboggled at the idea that you think the US should not guarantee safe drinking water everywhere for everyone. Unless this comment is pedantic legal snark.
ButlerianJihad 1mo ago
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/docu... Laudato Si' by Pope Francis: On Care for Our Common Home 30. Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity. This debt can be paid partly by an increase in funding to provide clean water and sanitary services among the poor. But water continues to be wasted, not only in the developed world but also in developing countries which possess it in abundance. This shows that the problem of water is partly an educational and cultural issue, since there is little awareness of the seriousness of such behaviour within a context of great inequality.
shevy-java 1mo ago
The judge evidently is just a tool employed by Trump - against the people. Interesting that there may still be anyone who is not super-rich be a supporter of Trump if you give them factual evidence like this here. But ignoring this for the moment, the judge says that damage by drinking is exempt from other damage. This makes no sense. Even the USA has protection laws against harm. For instance, liability claims of medical damage and what not; even with the current administration, e. g. damage caused by a vaccine (in rare cases). So the judge is totally inconsistent here - the argument that damage via contaminated water should not be considered, makes objectively no sense. AI would do a better job than this "judge".
- tzs 1mo ago
  > The judge evidently is just a tool employed by Trump - against the people. Interesting that there may still be anyone who is not super-rich be a supporter of Trump if you give them factual evidence like this here. It depends on if they click the link in the article to the actual ruling and read it. If they do all they will conclude is that the article's author is completely incompetent when it comes to writing on court rulings. First, it was a ruling by 10 judges on a panel of 15, with the other 5 judges dissenting in part and concurring in part. The judge named in the article was the judge who the chief judge assigned the task of writing up the majority opinion. Second, the court did not say those things that the crappy article made you think they said. Briefly, they said that the harms to the plaintiffs are not covered under the specific statute that plaintiffs used, which covers violations of certain Constitutional rights. By the way this doesn't mean the plaintiffs are done. This is just their Constitutional claim. They also sued on various other grounds, such as state laws. Those state claims had been dragged along into federal court due to supplemental jurisdiction, and so were dismissed by the lower federal courts when the Constitutional claims were dismissed, because with the federal claims gone the federal courts no longer had jurisdiction over the state claims. Such as dismissal is "without prejudice", which means plaintiffs can refile those in state court.
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lampe3 1mo ago
Crazy that the comments are about the title and the how the legal system should work or does not work but no one cares if the water they need to survive is drinkable or not. I am out of words for this comment section.
- TitaRusell 1mo ago
  For a long time having non sick and stinky servants was a boon but I suppose that with AI and robots the American elites no longer need the poors?
- djsjxndo3838bd 1mo ago
  [flagged]
- jkahrs595 1mo ago
  Neckbeards arguing semantics of language, it’s like I never left Reddit.
- deleted 1mo ago
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ReptileMan 1mo ago
The armchair lawyer in me thinks that this is as clearcut state issue as possible. Why is federal even involved?
Brian_K_White 1mo ago
You can have any number of mandates that aren't state or federal constitutional rights. "Right" is the wrong word here. I think it's entirely correct that you have no "right" to clean or safe drinking water. You have a right to persue that and all your other needs. And you have a right to tell the government (collectively) to make drinking water a goal, collect taxes to pay for it, and issue mandates to whatever organizations needed to be responsible for making it happen. Presumably all of that was already in effect since a long time ago, and the problem is various people not doing their jobs in good faith. Somewhere along the way the people voted for officials who would establish safe municiple water. Somewhere along the way officials set the goals and hired the contractors and set up ongoing operation & maintainance, and that all involved some sort of official mandate with terms and goals written down. And somewhere along the way one or more people are guilty of not performing a duty they were responsible for. We may not, but we should, have a right to good faith discharge of duties.
Eddy_Viscosity2 1mo ago
US courts have no problem inventing new rights for sitting US presidents. But if the people want something, they can just go die in a ditch (full of contaminated water, while being lied to about it by government officials). Classic USA.
drfloyd51 1mo ago
This is the signal the the government no longer serves the people. Delivering water is a basic government function. If they won’t make water a right, expect large numbers of dead.
- EgregiousCube 1mo ago
  If government supplied clean water hasn't been considered a right, and there's no change in that now, wouldn't you expect the number of dead in the future from this to be proportionally equal to the number of dead in the past?
- tantalor 1mo ago
  "basic government functions" and "your rights under the constitution" are apples and oranges.
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alexfromapex 1mo ago
Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator had come to replace water, virtually everywhere. Water, the basic component of all life, had been deemed a threat to Brawndo's profit margin.
openasocket 1mo ago
Ok, so the article buries a lot of the context here. To clarify: plaintiffs can 100% sue the city for this under tort law (I believe the clean water act, but there’s probably other causes of action). This particular case was about suing the city officials in their personal capacity. So making those individuals pay, instead of/in addition to the city. Government officials are generally protected under qualified immunity. One exception to qualified immunity is 42 USC 1983: deprivation of rights under color of law. But that requires them to prove that these officials violated some constitutional right, beyond just some statute. The victims can sue the city/state. They might already be doing so in parallel. And honestly that’s the only way to be made whole: these city officials don’t have the tens of millions that would be required to compensate victims. This is more about holding government officials individually accountable.
- doom2 1mo ago
  > This is more about holding government officials individually accountable. The state can also file criminal charges against the officials, although given that the Flint water crisis didn't result in any criminal convictions despite the evidence, I'm not holding my breath. Not to mention that the state could choose _not_ to file charges. In which case, what avenue for justice is left? Financial compensation is only part of it.
xyzelement 1mo ago
A pretty bad article. In the American system we constantly test the boundaries of legal definition and it makes sense to test whether "how a water system is managed by a town" and "the right to bodily integrity are overlapping or not, and which way the decision falls is not aprioi obvious. So it's normal for a judge to have decided this way. Doesn't mean "Americans don't like clear water" The other thing annoying about the article is the racial angle. The author goes out of her way to mention that the affected town is heavily African American. She doesn't mention that the list of officials that are named as the defendants (including the mayor) are also African American. I am not sure either fact is actually significant, but it's annoying to only have half the story mentioned.
iambateman 1mo ago
I think there is a difference between a right to safe drinking water and a right to provided water which is safe. The government cannot have a responsibility to provide every person with water, since some people will choose to live in places which are incompatible with that mandate. But if the government does provide water, it must be clean. It’s just the government holding itself to its own standard —— if my bottle of Pepsi turned out to have lead in it, the EPA would go to the ends of the earth to pull every bottle from the shelf until the company fixes it. We should expect nothing less from the water in our pipes.
tzs 1mo ago
The article makes it sound like this was a ruling from one judge. In fact it was a 15 judge panel. The article is talking about the majority ruling, which was joined by 10 judges. The judge they name is the judge the chief judge assigned to write the majority opinion. The other 5 judges wrote a separate opinion dissenting in part and concurring in part. The article did do something quite well that way too many articles on court rulings fail to do. That is link to the actual ruling [1]. It is probably best to just read that directly if you want to actually understand what is going on. [1] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pdf https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pd...
beej71 1mo ago
It is a little weird that the government is allowed to distribute for sale a poisonous product without warning consumers, but private industry is not.
MillionY 1mo ago
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237 points by vrganj 1mo ago

I'm not sure what a right to water really means. A lot of rural cities don't even provide water. People have wells and you pay for them yourself.

cumshitpiss 1mo ago
[dead]
OJFord 1mo ago
I suppose it means that has to be available to you somehow, the easiest example perhaps being that if you're renting in such a place, the landlord is obligated to ensure access.
exe34 1mo ago
The first paragraph of tfa: > lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water. The "right" here is about other people not contaminating your well for their profit. You don't have that right. They can contaminate your well for their profit and you have to find another source of water at your own cost.
passwordreset 1mo ago
I think it's covered under that "right to life" section of the Constitution. Deliberately poisoning people through their water supply seems like a sure-fire way to deny the right to life of your citizens.
- defrost 1mo ago
  It hasn't counted when it's "accidental" - eg: pretty much all of the US uranium leach well mining resulted in tainted water in a "yeah we know, but don't care" process. Also radioactive tailings dam collapses and hard rock mining consequences: On Poisoned Ground The largest accidental release of radioactivity in the United States did not occur in 1979 at Three-Mile Island. That very same year a collapsing dam released a flood of radioactive debris into the Navajo Nation. ~ https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/on-poisoned-ground/ https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/on-poisoned-... 'We didn't know we were poisoning ourselves': the deadly legacy of the US uranium boom Tsosie was one of thousands of Navajos who took jobs in the mines, starting in the 1940s. They worked without masks or ventilation to disperse the lethal radon gas, and they were never told the rocks they were handling – leetso in the Diné language, or yellow dirt – were deadly. ~ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/20/navajo-dine-uraminum-mining-poison https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/20/navajo-dine-ur...
- ButlerianJihad 1mo ago
  > that "right to life" section of the Constitution The US Constitution? Perhaps you are thinking of the Declaration of Independence? Or the Fifth Amendment, formulating it in the negative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_... I believe it is important for us to consider where rights derive from. The Constitution and Bill of Rights are designed to protect rights that humans already have ("endowed by their Creator") and prevent the government from taking them away, or infringing on them. The law can grant ordinary civil rights, above and beyond intrinsic human rights, but if the Constitution isn't protecting the latter, then there is a problem.
- TFNA 1mo ago
  As the other poster mentions, "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is not from the Constitution but from the Declaration of Independence. As much as it might be part of American civic lore, the Declaration of Independence is not legally binding, it is a product from two whole legal regimes before the USA's current one was founded.
  - sagarm 1mo ago
    The current court has made it clear "civic lore" is fundamental to interpreting the Constitution, though curiously this seems to only apply to certain causes.
latexr 1mo ago
Could we please not? In the first sentence of the article: > (…) alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water. Knowingly let residents drink unsafe water. Surely you can see an issue there? Can we please make a collected effort to comment beyond the title? If you don’t know what “a right to safe water” means, then could you please do a web search to try to be minimally informed about the matter before commenting? Took me two seconds to find a UN page. https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/human-rights-water-and-sanitation https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/human-rights-water-and-s... Again, on the first sentence, in bold: > Access to water and sanitation are recognized by the United Nations as human rights – fundamental to everyone’s health, dignity and prosperity. And on the second paragraph: > Governments must take a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to water and sanitation improvements There’s your right to water. It means that because it’s something fundamental to human life, nations have an (at a minimum moral, often legal) obligation to provide it or protect access to it to everyone under them that lacks it. Just for good measure, here’s the Wikipedia page on Human Rights too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights Again, the first sentence already explains a lot.
- randyrand 1mo ago
  It needs more qualifications IMO. "reasonable access" perhaps? I mean how would you handle someone who drives their car into the desert or climbs to the top of a mountain and demands water?
  - latexr 1mo ago
    > It needs more qualifications IMO. What it needs is for us to not make up extreme scenarios to excuse not handling the obvious ones, which are extensively covered in the sources I linked you to. Obviously “reasonable” is implied; “unreasonable” is, by definition, absurd. We can only do what’s within our means. That’s the thought behind the “Could we please not?”. Who, exactly, are those the people in your scenarios in the proverbial middle of nowhere going to “demand” water from? That is obviously not the same thing as not caring for the infrastructure under your control or letting people knowingly be contaminated.
pvaldes 1mo ago
> I'm not sure what a right to water really means. Right to safe water. It means that the water in your kitchen faucet is expected/guaranteed to be safe to drink. It must not have: noxious bacteria causing diarrhea, or liver parasite eggs, or mud, or mercury/heavy metals, or remains of faeces, or fracking methane, or pesticides, or medicines, or obesogens [1]. It must had been professionally filtered and treated to assure that none of those reach your home. If you pay for water classified as "drinking water", you should not receive grey water, soapy bubbles, oily mud or anything else. This is the standard in all first country nations and I assume that it should be the same in US. [1] And if in your small town everybody is obese, before to blame everybody for eating too much, or being lazy couch potatos, look for chemicals in the drinking water, leading to a broken satiety system, causing people to eat huge amounts of food. This is why the right to have safe drinking water is so important.
- JuniperMesos 1mo ago
  > And if in your small town everybody is obese, before to blame everybody for eating too much, or being lazy couch potatos, look for chemicals in the drinking water, leading to a broken satiety system, causing people to eat huge amounts of food. This is why the right to have safe drinking water is so important. I don't think there's any reason to assume that obesity is caused by any specific chemical found in some but not all drinking water, in such a way that explains differences in obesity rates. If that were the case we probably would've figured that out by now and would be systematically treating drinking water to remove that chemical.
  - pvaldes 1mo ago
    > I don't think there's any reason Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration used to think the opposite when they were at charge of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Sadly EPA and FDA are being back-stabbed and slowly murdered by Republicans since 2025 (Yes, like with Voldemort, is important not to be afraid to say it loud). And the death by a thousand cuts had been surgically designed to destroy any capability to prosecute crimes related with the TSCA. So if you live in USA you are alone on this. You better do your homework and learn as fast as you can. Scientific Journals are your friends. There is an incredible increase of unexpected knowledge about digestive regulation published since the 90's. Forget about miraculous fruits and start your journey with the adipokines. Meanwhile the world keeps moving. In Europe, since Jan 2026, water suppliers will be required to comply with a parametric value of 2.5μg/L for BisPhenol-A in drinking water, after scientists discovered than it can leak in the hot-water faucets. People sometimes refill their teapots with hot water before to turn on the kitchen. What is RFK up to lately? Any exciting changes? He found another racoon?
wood_spirit 1mo ago
Imagine your well becomes contaminated. That might be natural, or it might be caused by eg fracking. If the latter, do you have any rights and recourse and does it make a difference if the poisoner is state, federal or private? (I’m curious of my own situation as a European with my own well and also not so far from a well documented case against the government because their airbase fire fighting had contaminated groundwater with PFAS.)
bamboozled 1mo ago
If the ground water is contaminated with industrial waste ?
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impossiblefork 1mo ago

I think this is a ruling that's hard to justify. There are many frameworks under which the judge could have chosen to rule, it could be treated as assault, or some type of aggravated assault/battery, if the lead can be measured in the people who consumed it, it could be treated as fraud, since the water is presumably sold, etc. and reasoning about that it would ordinarily be a punishable tort would make it clear that the government can't impose that sort of thing either, just as it can't send anyone out to punch people.

JackFr 1mo ago
The argument is the choice of the plaintiff. It’s not the role of the judge to argue the plaintiff’s case and find the most compelling argument.
- tchalla 1mo ago
  This is something that is always fundamentally misunderstood. Of course, judges can extend courtesy but most modern systems are designed on pretty much the accuser arguing their case against the defender with the judge deciding based on law plus arguments presented in court.
- impossiblefork 1mo ago
  What I'm saying though, is that he has room enough to interpret things so that a dismissal isn't necessary. It isn't the job of the courts to make minimal rulings and avoiding all substantial questions, but to solve disputes. Here we have a case where the government has harmed people in a way that would be a tort if it had been done by anybody else, and people arguing that the government by doing so breached a right. There is presumably a right which can be interpreted as guaranteeing that people's bodies won't be messed with, or things in the US would be quite strange, so there's room to do something useful here, and the judge's choice is not forced.
  - petcat 1mo ago
    The judge can only rule on the arguments and evidence presented in their court.

Smaug123 1mo ago

Misleadingly provocative headline, right? The actual ruling from the article is that the US Constitution does not by itself grant US citizens that right. As the article itself points out, there’s nothing stopping other agreements from granting the right, and indeed several states do so explicitly.

IsTom 1mo ago
On the other hand it means that states can just not do that and leave their citizens without clean drinking water.
- Smaug123 1mo ago
  Does it? I think that conclusion requires observing additionally that all federal law also fails to grant a right to safe drinking water, doesn’t it?
  - gavinsyancey 1mo ago
    Many municipal water systems are wholely in one state. Does the Constitution grant Congress the right to control municipal water quality? Also it's kind of a moot point if federal law has not granted that right and does not seem likely to.
    - rascul 1mo ago
      Isn't that what the safe drinking water act is for?
- u1hcw9nx 1mo ago
  Page 2 second paragraph."Rather, the remedy for Plaintiffs’ injuries lies in pursuing .." https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pdf https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pd...
  - IsTom 1mo ago

metalman 1mo ago

Guess what folks, you now have anti rights.Sometimes I hate America and some americans for the bad things they do, but not like that. A good deal of what america is doing to itself these days looks just as insane as what they are doing to other countrys, or at least other countrys that are not doing it to themselves. There used to be metaphors about poison, and wells, but no one imagined that is could or would leap past that, and become ledgislated policy.

mschuster91 1mo ago
> A good deal of what america is doing to itself these days looks just as insane as what they are doing to other countrys, or at least other countrys that are not doing it to themselves. America voted for unrestrained rabid turbocapitalism not just once but twice. They knew what MAGA and Project 2025 were about, both announced their intentions clear as day, and now they're getting unrestrained rabid turbocapitalism - a world where corporations can do whatever the hell they want and people either have no rights at all or the rights they have on paper are de facto meaningless.
- bamboozled 1mo ago
  Can’t really see how it can be reigned in and once it’s done with America it’s coming for everyone else. Australia with one nation and UK with reform for example. My honest assessment is the tech bros felt threatened from potential regulation and decided to do use their platforms and influence to encourage more of the same destruction everywhere else. I cannot explain it any other way. Why would nearly all of them have backed the orange boy ?
  - mschuster91 1mo ago
    > Can’t really see how it can be reigned in By political revolution. The coming, inevitable AI bubble implosion and the resulting chaos will provide for it. We are already seeing the first signs with local anti datacenter movements.
    - 1mo ago

mbeavitt 1mo ago

This headline is not correct. The ruling was that a constitutional lawsuit was not successful, not that the the US government has carte blanche to poison its citizens drinking water… So, the correct headline would be “safe drinking water ruled not to be covered by the US constitution”. There are other binding agreements and regulations than the constitution in the US.

mdp2021 1mo ago
Still not that simple: > The Jackson plaintiffs alleged that their city government deliberately withheld information about the water’s toxicity, and exacerbated the problem through a series of boil-water notices - a practice that can eliminate some bacterial contamination, but also concentrates lead in water. Engelhardt stated there is no “constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis” The constitutional question (and note that state Constitutions, e.g. Massachusetts, may instead cover it) is just one piece of the mess.
- quotemstr 1mo ago
  Where is the constitution does it say the state can't do that?
  - mdp2021 1mo ago
    We would ask you to rephrase - and, if we interpreted correctly, to reread.
    - quotemstr 1mo ago
      "We"? Yeah, okay, Your Highness. As for the content: the law says what it says. Where in the constitution of the United States of America and its amendments does it say that a state government must be truthful about public health statements? The law says what it says. A behavior might be rotten, evil, illegal under other documents, and an all-round bad idea and still not a violation of, in particular, the constitution of the United States of America and its amendments

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lukan 1mo ago

"Engelhardt stated there is no “constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis.” " " “Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”" He basically says, the constitution does not care, whether the government lies to citizens, so they continue to drink poison water. Well, I always though trust of citizens in government is the main thing a constitution should provide and establish, but the "Donald Trump-appointed judge Kurt Engelhardt" apparently thinks different.

mdp2021 1mo ago
I hope an analyst e.g. from the umbrella of Eugene Volokh will write about this case.
jvdvegt 1mo ago
So from now on you can safely assume your government is lying (especially the current administration). Worrisome...
- rascul 1mo ago
  Governments lie all the time. This is not new.
  - lukan 1mo ago
    New to me is that judges openly confirm and accept it.
- PepperdineG 1mo ago
  You could have assumed that since practically inception, especially when it came to treaty signing.

themgt 1mo ago

Plaintiffs ... seek recognition of two new constitutional rights lacking any foundation in the history and tradition of our Nation—the right to be free from exposure to contaminated water and the right to accurate information from public officials. This is like filing a bug report that the Linux kernel allowed your Thunderbird to receive SPAM email containing false information. It's just a fundamental misunderstanding of how the US government is designed to work. Closed by Fifth Circuit as WONTFIX, file request for constitutional amendment (RFC) if desired.

raverbashing 1mo ago
100% this These headlines is just press fodder for the grievances-industrial-complex to cry about how the gov is incompetent Of course drinking water is important - I'm not questioning that But there's a difference between a meaningless statement of "everybody should have the right to cleaning water" which is a vapid statement and actually building towards it (with regulation on the quality of water, EPA, working on water treatment, etc) "Right to cleaning water" is like saying "you should move more" to a fat person
- noja 1mo ago
  Why is someone who wants non-contaminated drinking water incompetent?
  - dotancohen 1mo ago
    Not everything you want - or need - is a right. And establishing a new right is not the only way to get what you want or need.
    - stuartjohnson12 1mo ago
      I am absolutely mindboggled at the idea that you think the US should not guarantee safe drinking water everywhere for everyone. Unless this comment is pedantic legal snark.

ButlerianJihad 1mo ago

https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/docu... Laudato Si' by Pope Francis: On Care for Our Common Home 30. Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity. This debt can be paid partly by an increase in funding to provide clean water and sanitary services among the poor. But water continues to be wasted, not only in the developed world but also in developing countries which possess it in abundance. This shows that the problem of water is partly an educational and cultural issue, since there is little awareness of the seriousness of such behaviour within a context of great inequality.

shevy-java 1mo ago

The judge evidently is just a tool employed by Trump - against the people. Interesting that there may still be anyone who is not super-rich be a supporter of Trump if you give them factual evidence like this here. But ignoring this for the moment, the judge says that damage by drinking is exempt from other damage. This makes no sense. Even the USA has protection laws against harm. For instance, liability claims of medical damage and what not; even with the current administration, e. g. damage caused by a vaccine (in rare cases). So the judge is totally inconsistent here - the argument that damage via contaminated water should not be considered, makes objectively no sense. AI would do a better job than this "judge".

tzs 1mo ago
> The judge evidently is just a tool employed by Trump - against the people. Interesting that there may still be anyone who is not super-rich be a supporter of Trump if you give them factual evidence like this here. It depends on if they click the link in the article to the actual ruling and read it. If they do all they will conclude is that the article's author is completely incompetent when it comes to writing on court rulings. First, it was a ruling by 10 judges on a panel of 15, with the other 5 judges dissenting in part and concurring in part. The judge named in the article was the judge who the chief judge assigned the task of writing up the majority opinion. Second, the court did not say those things that the crappy article made you think they said. Briefly, they said that the harms to the plaintiffs are not covered under the specific statute that plaintiffs used, which covers violations of certain Constitutional rights. By the way this doesn't mean the plaintiffs are done. This is just their Constitutional claim. They also sued on various other grounds, such as state laws. Those state claims had been dragged along into federal court due to supplemental jurisdiction, and so were dismissed by the lower federal courts when the Constitutional claims were dismissed, because with the federal claims gone the federal courts no longer had jurisdiction over the state claims. Such as dismissal is "without prejudice", which means plaintiffs can refile those in state court.

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lampe3 1mo ago

Crazy that the comments are about the title and the how the legal system should work or does not work but no one cares if the water they need to survive is drinkable or not. I am out of words for this comment section.

TitaRusell 1mo ago
For a long time having non sick and stinky servants was a boon but I suppose that with AI and robots the American elites no longer need the poors?
djsjxndo3838bd 1mo ago
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jkahrs595 1mo ago
Neckbeards arguing semantics of language, it’s like I never left Reddit.
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ReptileMan 1mo ago

The armchair lawyer in me thinks that this is as clearcut state issue as possible. Why is federal even involved?

Brian_K_White 1mo ago

You can have any number of mandates that aren't state or federal constitutional rights. "Right" is the wrong word here. I think it's entirely correct that you have no "right" to clean or safe drinking water. You have a right to persue that and all your other needs. And you have a right to tell the government (collectively) to make drinking water a goal, collect taxes to pay for it, and issue mandates to whatever organizations needed to be responsible for making it happen. Presumably all of that was already in effect since a long time ago, and the problem is various people not doing their jobs in good faith. Somewhere along the way the people voted for officials who would establish safe municiple water. Somewhere along the way officials set the goals and hired the contractors and set up ongoing operation & maintainance, and that all involved some sort of official mandate with terms and goals written down. And somewhere along the way one or more people are guilty of not performing a duty they were responsible for. We may not, but we should, have a right to good faith discharge of duties.

Eddy_Viscosity2 1mo ago

US courts have no problem inventing new rights for sitting US presidents. But if the people want something, they can just go die in a ditch (full of contaminated water, while being lied to about it by government officials). Classic USA.

drfloyd51 1mo ago

This is the signal the the government no longer serves the people. Delivering water is a basic government function. If they won’t make water a right, expect large numbers of dead.

EgregiousCube 1mo ago
If government supplied clean water hasn't been considered a right, and there's no change in that now, wouldn't you expect the number of dead in the future from this to be proportionally equal to the number of dead in the past?
tantalor 1mo ago
"basic government functions" and "your rights under the constitution" are apples and oranges.

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alexfromapex 1mo ago

Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator had come to replace water, virtually everywhere. Water, the basic component of all life, had been deemed a threat to Brawndo's profit margin.

openasocket 1mo ago

Ok, so the article buries a lot of the context here. To clarify: plaintiffs can 100% sue the city for this under tort law (I believe the clean water act, but there’s probably other causes of action). This particular case was about suing the city officials in their personal capacity. So making those individuals pay, instead of/in addition to the city. Government officials are generally protected under qualified immunity. One exception to qualified immunity is 42 USC 1983: deprivation of rights under color of law. But that requires them to prove that these officials violated some constitutional right, beyond just some statute. The victims can sue the city/state. They might already be doing so in parallel. And honestly that’s the only way to be made whole: these city officials don’t have the tens of millions that would be required to compensate victims. This is more about holding government officials individually accountable.

doom2 1mo ago
> This is more about holding government officials individually accountable. The state can also file criminal charges against the officials, although given that the Flint water crisis didn't result in any criminal convictions despite the evidence, I'm not holding my breath. Not to mention that the state could choose _not_ to file charges. In which case, what avenue for justice is left? Financial compensation is only part of it.

xyzelement 1mo ago

A pretty bad article. In the American system we constantly test the boundaries of legal definition and it makes sense to test whether "how a water system is managed by a town" and "the right to bodily integrity are overlapping or not, and which way the decision falls is not aprioi obvious. So it's normal for a judge to have decided this way. Doesn't mean "Americans don't like clear water" The other thing annoying about the article is the racial angle. The author goes out of her way to mention that the affected town is heavily African American. She doesn't mention that the list of officials that are named as the defendants (including the mayor) are also African American. I am not sure either fact is actually significant, but it's annoying to only have half the story mentioned.

iambateman 1mo ago

I think there is a difference between a right to safe drinking water and a right to provided water which is safe. The government cannot have a responsibility to provide every person with water, since some people will choose to live in places which are incompatible with that mandate. But if the government does provide water, it must be clean. It’s just the government holding itself to its own standard —— if my bottle of Pepsi turned out to have lead in it, the EPA would go to the ends of the earth to pull every bottle from the shelf until the company fixes it. We should expect nothing less from the water in our pipes.

tzs 1mo ago

The article makes it sound like this was a ruling from one judge. In fact it was a 15 judge panel. The article is talking about the majority ruling, which was joined by 10 judges. The judge they name is the judge the chief judge assigned to write the majority opinion. The other 5 judges wrote a separate opinion dissenting in part and concurring in part. The article did do something quite well that way too many articles on court rulings fail to do. That is link to the actual ruling [1]. It is probably best to just read that directly if you want to actually understand what is going on. [1] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pdf https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pd...

beej71 1mo ago

It is a little weird that the government is allowed to distribute for sale a poisonous product without warning consumers, but private industry is not.

MillionY 1mo ago

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