Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States
The Court ruled that temporary, repeated flooding caused by the government can count as a taking of property requiring compensation, rejecting a blanket rule that only permanent flooding qualifies.
The decision sends a wildlife agency's compensation claim back to the lower appeals court, which must now weigh the specific facts of the flooding's foreseeability and severity rather than dismiss the claim automatically because the flooding was temporary.
How it got here: A trial court awarded the agency compensation for a taking; the Federal Circuit reversed, holding temporary flooding can never be a taking; the agency appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Arkansas's game and fish agency manages a 23,000-acre wildlife area along the Black River, prized for its hardwood timber and hunting. For several years, the Army Corps of Engineers changed how it released water from an upstream dam at farmers' request, extending flooding into the area's tree-growing season despite the agency's objections, eventually killing millions of board feet of timber.
The question before the Court
If the government floods someone's land only temporarily but repeatedly, could that still count as taking the property under the Constitution?
Why it matters
Landowners near dams, levees, and flood-control projects gain a clearer path to seek compensation when government water-release decisions damage their property, even if the flooding isn't permanent. Agencies managing flood control must now weigh potential compensation liability when making temporary operational changes that foreseeably harm downstream land.
What changes now
The case returns to the Federal Circuit, which must now apply the correct legal standard and consider the government's remaining challenges to the trial court's findings on causation, foreseeability, the severity of the damage, and the compensation amount. The Court did not decide whether the agency actually suffered a compensable taking — that determination still depends on facts the lower court has not yet resolved.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether the flooding here actually amounted to a compensable taking, nor did it address the government's separate argument that downstream flooding damage is merely incidental and not aimed at a specific landowner, or how Arkansas water-rights law might affect the outcome — those issues remain for the lower court.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court explained that determining whether government action counts as a taking requiring compensation under the Fifth Amendment usually depends on weighing case-specific facts rather than applying one fixed rule, except for a few narrow bright-line categories like permanent physical occupation.
- Reviewing its past flooding cases, the Court found it had already recognized that both government-caused flooding and takings of only temporary duration can be compensable, so nothing in its precedent supported treating flooding as categorically different from other government intrusions on property.
- The Court examined the government's main precedent, a 1924 case involving canal overflow, and concluded that its passing reference to 'permanent' invasion was not meant to create a rule barring all temporary-flooding claims, especially since later cases developed compensation rules for temporary takings that the 1924 case never addressed.
- The Court rejected the government's practical argument that allowing temporary-flooding claims would open the floodgates to liability for ordinary flood-control operations, noting it has rejected similar slippery-slope arguments in other takings cases without disrupting government functions.
- Applying its established factors for temporary-takings claims — duration, foreseeability, the character of the land and owner's expectations, and the severity of interference — the Court noted the trial court's findings that the flooding was foreseeable and severe, but left factual disputes about causation and damages unresolved.
- Because the appeals court had rejected the claim solely on the ground that the flooding was temporary, the Court concluded that the correct legal standard required sending the case back to weigh the remaining disputed facts.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Limits Sanguinetti v. United States (264 U. S. 146)
The Court said its reference to 'permanent' flooding in that case was not a rule barring temporary-flooding takings claims.