The U.S. Supreme Court will take up the case of a Texas farmer who sued the state’s Department of Transportation for damaging his farm.
The Supreme Court judges unanimously agreed on September 29 to take up the farmer’s petition in Devillier v. Texas. Richie Devillier sued the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) in 2020 in response to the installation of a highway concrete barrier that he said caused flooding on his family farm.
The TxDOT began renovating Interstate 10 in the early 2000s as it increased its height, added two lanes, and installed a concrete barrier, according to Devillier’s legal representation, the Institute for Justice. The barrier works as a dam to ensure rainfall does not flood the highway, but the lawsuit alleges the barrier redirects that rainwater onto nearby farmland and causes severe damage.
Devillier claims he had not experienced issues with flooding prior to the renovations, which have since decimated his property whenever there is heavy rain in the area.
“These floods have destroyed countless crops and killed several animals,” the Institute for Justice claimed, per The Epoch Times. “When the DeVilliers sought to be paid for the destruction, the state refused. And when the family sued, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that they couldn’t — because Congress has never passed a law allowing citizens to sue states for taking property, the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of ‘just compensation’ was unenforceable.”
Devillier was joined by 80 property owners as plaintiffs in the case. A federal district court ruled in their favor that the barrier violated the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, which protects private property from public use without just compensation.
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed the ruling to side with Texas, stating it does not have to follow federal understandings of the Fifth Amendment. The court ruled that the Takings Clause “as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment does not provide a right of action for takings claims against a state.”
The Fourteenth Amendment says, in part, that “No state shall … deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
The Supreme Court will now take up the farmers’ appeal.
Robert McNamara, Devillier’s attorney with the Institute for Justice, praised the Supreme Court for taking up the case.
“If there is one basic principle in property law, it’s the Pottery Barn Rule: You break it, you buy it,” he said in a statement, per The Epoch Times. “The Fifth Circuit’s decision in this case amounts to ‘you pay if you feel like it.’ But the Constitution’s Takings Clause demands more.”
