No, Texas Did Not Win at the U.S. Supreme Court Today

ARLINGTON, Va.—This afternoon, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed that he won a unanimous decision at the United States Supreme Court in a case concerning a Texas rancher whose land was flooded after the state raised a nearby highway. Following the attorney general’s statement, Robert McNamara of the Institute for Justice, which represented the rancher, issued the following statement clarifying what occurred at the court today:

“When a federal district court ruled that Richie DeVillier could sue Texas under the Fifth Amendment, Texas filed a special appeal urging the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse. And it succeeded: It got the appeals court to issue a shocking ruling that said Texas can’t be sued under the Fifth Amendment at all.  If Texas had won today, the Supreme Court would have affirmed that ruling.

“Instead, the Court did the opposite: Today’s ruling makes clear that Texas can be sued under the Fifth Amendment and that the claims Texas wanted thrown out will instead go to trial in that same federal district court—in other words, after Texas spent untold amounts of time and taxpayer dollars trying to get Richie’s Fifth Amendment claims dismissed, Richie will get to litigate his Fifth Amendment claims. The party that gets what he wants is the party that won. What Texas did is called losing. Only a politician would claim to have won a case he lost.”