Richie DeVillier is trapped in both a literal and legal swamp made by the state of Texas. But in January the Supreme Court will hear his case, which could affect whether property owners across the U.S. get fair compensation when the government damages their property or are, like Richie, stuck in a lake without a paddle.

Richie’s family has ranched and farmed the same land in Winnie, Texas, for around a century. Up until a few years ago, it never had a problem with flooding. But the Texas Department of Transportation changed that when it renovated Interstate 10. The state raised the road and built a three-foot-high, impenetrable concrete barrier along the middle of it.

Now instead of water draining to the nearby Gulf of Mexico, the road creates a dam. A tropical storm in 2017 left the ranch flooded for days, killing cattle and crops. Two years later, it happened again when another storm passed over. Richie and many of his neighbors, fed up with having their land turned into a retention pond, sued Texas in state court claiming both violations of their rights as Texans and under the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.

Most Americans are familiar with “pleading the Fifth,” which is invoking the right not to incriminate yourself in a criminal trial. But the final clause of the amendment states clearly, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The government can take your home to build a road, but it has to pay. Texas can build a dam to keep the south side of I-10 from flooding, but it has to pay for the land onto which the water has been diverted.

Lawyers for the state of Texas asked for and were granted the right to move the case to a federal court. They then argued that federal courts don’t allow individuals to sue states under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, only individual state officials. While a district court scoffed at the state’s argument, with one judge calling it “pretzel logic,” the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals bought it.

In a very short order by normal standards, the three-judge panel held that citizens may only enforce the Constitution if a law authorizes them to enforce the Constitution. But that determination runs counter to both the principle at stake in the Fifth Amendment and the long history of how courts have dealt with demands for fair compensation.

First, there is little doubt about what the Founding Fathers wanted to protect. Even before Magna Carta was signed, the principle of just compensation for taking property existed in English law. The Magna Carta strengthened that right by requiring immediate compensation.

Second, American legal precedent over the past two centuries has recognized that the Fifth Amendment is one of only two rights in the Constitution that also contains a remedy for when the right is violated. When property right of private property is taken away by the government for a public use, people get “just compensation.”

There should simply be no way around it, and it’s distressing that an appeals court covering tens of millions of Americans sees it differently. In Louisiana, the peculiar nature of its law about enforcing judgments in state courts could mean that the state never has to pay for what it takes if property owners cannot go to federal court.

Richie and his neighbors are not standing alone in their effort to get into court to fight for compensation. A wide variety of national groups filed briefs with the Supreme Court in their support, including U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Realtors, the American Farm Bureau, and the National Federation of Independent Business. Other legal nonprofits and law professors also have offered their support.

But the Fifth Amendment is clear: when the government breaks it or takes it, it has to buy it. Texas may think it’s found “one weird trick” to avoid paying Richie, but the Supreme Court should tell it that these Americans are entitled to their day in court to argue for what they are owed.