WINNIE - Yesterday, the Institute for Justice scored a unanimous win in the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Texas rancher Richie DeVillier, who is fighting for compensation after the state built a barrier along a nearby highway, allegedly causing his ranch to flood.
Styled Richard Devillier et al v. State of Texas, the case centers on the state's liability to property owners under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The high court found that Texas state law provides a cause of action by which property owners may seek just compensation against the state.
“As Texas explained at oral argument, its state-law inverse-condemnation cause of action provides a vehicle for takings claims based on both the Texas Constitution and the Takings Clause…,” the opinion states. “And, although Texas asserted that proceeding under the state-law cause of action would require an amendment to the complaint, it also assured the Court that it would not oppose any attempt by DeVillier and the other petitioners to seek one.”
Earlier this year, IJ presented a question to the Supreme Court: “May a person whose property is taken without compensation seek redress under the self-executing Takings Clause even if the legislature has not affirmatively provided them with a cause of action?”
In 2020, several Chambers County residents filed suit against Texas, alleging that the state’s decision to install a solid concrete traffic barrier in the highway’s median causes flooding on properties along the north side of I-10.
On its website, IJ writes that Texas can, if it needs to, turn a ranch into a lake, but the Takings Clause says it cannot do so without paying for the land.
At the center of the issue is DeVillier, who lives on the same patch of Texas land where his father was born – a cattle ranch that has been in his family since his great-grandfather, according to IJ.
“And, for all the time his family has worked this land, it hasn’t flooded,” IJ wrote about the case. “There has been rain—outside of Houston, there’s plenty of rain—but water flowed naturally south into the Gulf of Mexico.
“That all changed a few years ago when the Texas Department of Transportation renovated IH-10, the highway that runs just south of Richie’s ranch. The state raised the highway, but it also installed a three-foot-high, watertight concrete barrier all along the middle of it—basically a dam.”
When Hurricane Harvey hit the area in 2017, the dam worked, but DeVillier’s land, along with his neighbors’ land, spent days submerged in feet of water that could not get past the wall in the middle of the highway, causing animals and trees to die, IJ writes.
When Tropical Storm Imelda came a couple years later, the land flooded again.
Supreme Court case No. 22–913