A Trump-appointed judge also said Americans have no “constitutional right to truthful information” during a public health crisis.

On Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.

The lawsuit, first filed in 2022, says the contamination violated Jacksonians’ constitutional right to bodily integrity. Donald Trump-appointed judge Kurt Engelhardt disagreed. “The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Engelhardt said.

“Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”

  • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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    17 hours ago

    The preamble to US constitition has zero legal bearing on the US. There has never been a legal case in the US where “preamble based natural justice” was accepted as a legitimate basis for complaint. If your complaint was only based on the preamble, normal judicial practice would be to dismiss it as frivolous, and force you to pay defendants’ court costs.

    • TronBronson@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      That’s not even in the preamble of the constitution, that quote is from the Declaration of Independence. It also went on to say all men were created equal forgetting slavery

    • 4am@lemmy.zip
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      15 hours ago

      Well it does explain that the enumerated rights are a non-exclusive, non-exhaustive list. So while it doesn’t have any direct legal weight, it certainly explains how they expected the document to be interpreted