DeVillier v. Texas
The Supreme Court declined to decide whether the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause automatically gives property owners the right to sue the government for compensation, sending a Texas flooding case back to lower courts to proceed under Texas state law instead.
The ruling leaves open a significant constitutional question — whether the Fifth Amendment creates its own lawsuit right when no state remedy exists — because Texas law already provided a legal path for the flooded landowners here.
How it got here: Texas removed the state-court suits to federal court; the District Court denied Texas's motion to dismiss; the Fifth Circuit reversed and ruled against the landowners; the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Richard DeVillier and more than 120 neighbors own land north of Interstate 10 between Houston and Beaumont, Texas. After the state installed a roughly three-foot barrier along the highway median to keep the road open during storms, the barrier worked as designed — but it diverted floodwaters onto the landowners' property during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and Tropical Storm Imelda in 2019, destroying homes, businesses, crops, livestock, and personal property. The landowners sued Texas, arguing the barrier amounted to a government taking of their land for which the Constitution requires payment.
The question before the Court
When the government floods private land and refuses to pay for the damage, can property owners sue the government directly under the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of just compensation — or do they need a separate law to give them the right to sue?
The Court's answer
The Court did not answer whether the Takings Clause itself creates a cause of action — the legal vehicle that lets a person file a lawsuit. Instead, the Court found that the underlying premise of the question did not apply here: Texas law already provides its own inverse-condemnation process, a legal mechanism that lets property owners sue the state government over takings, and it covers claims based on both the Texas Constitution and the federal Fifth Amendment. Because DeVillier had a ready avenue for his claim under Texas law, the Court had no need to decide whether the Fifth Amendment itself would supply the lawsuit vehicle in the absence of any state remedy.
The Court sent the case back to the lower courts so DeVillier and the other landowners can pursue their claims through Texas's existing legal process. Texas also agreed not to oppose an amendment to the complaint to allow this path forward.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
More than 120 Texas landowners whose property was repeatedly flooded by a state-built highway barrier can continue pursuing compensation claims, just through Texas's own legal process rather than a direct federal constitutional lawsuit. For property owners in other states facing similar government flooding or seizures, the bigger question — whether the Fifth Amendment itself supplies a right to sue when no state remedy exists — remains unanswered.
What changes now
The case returns to the lower federal courts, where DeVillier and the other landowners will pursue their claims through Texas's state-law inverse-condemnation process. Texas agreed not to oppose an amendment to the complaint to allow this. The larger constitutional question — whether the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause itself provides a cause of action in jurisdictions where state law offers no adequate remedy — remains open and will have to be resolved in a future case presenting that circumstance directly.
What this does not decide
The Court explicitly refused to decide whether the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause itself creates a cause of action for property owners to sue when no state-law remedy exists. That question — potentially important in states with weaker property-owner protections — was left entirely open for a future case.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment guarantees that private property cannot be taken for public use without just compensation, and the Court has held that a property owner's right to that compensation springs into existence the moment a taking occurs — a quality the Court calls the Clause's 'self-executing' character. Texas did not dispute that the substantive right to compensation exists; the dispute was only about the procedural vehicle for enforcing it.
- Constitutional rights generally do not come with their own built-in right to sue; they are normally enforced defensively (as a shield in an existing case) or offensively through a separately enacted cause of action — such as 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the federal civil rights statute that lets people sue state officials for constitutional violations. DeVillier argued the Takings Clause was an exception to that rule, relying on prior cases to claim that the Clause itself authorizes a lawsuit.
- The Court reviewed DeVillier's cited precedents — including First English Evangelical Lutheran Church v. County of Los Angeles — and found that none of them had actually decided whether the Takings Clause creates its own cause of action. Crucially, First English itself had proceeded under a state-law cause of action, not directly under the Constitution.
- The question the Court agreed to answer assumed that DeVillier had no separate legal vehicle through which to bring a Takings Clause claim. The Court found that assumption false: Texas state law provides an inverse-condemnation cause of action that lets property owners seek just compensation from the state based on both the Texas Constitution and the federal Takings Clause.
- Because an adequate state-law remedy already existed, the case did not present the scenario the certified question was designed to address — one where a property owner has no other avenue for relief. Deciding the broader constitutional question without that factual premise in place would have been premature, so the Court declined to reach it and sent the case back instead.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Knick v. Township of Scott (588 U.S. 180)
Reaffirmed that property owners gain an immediate, irrevocable right to just compensation the moment a taking occurs.
Distinguishes First English Evangelical Lutheran Church of Glendale v. County of Los Angeles (482 U.S. 304)
Clarified that First English never decided whether the Takings Clause creates its own cause of action; it proceeded under state law.