When Jefferson County, Indiana, built its new jail, it needed a water provider. The jail fell within an area served by a rural water association called Dupont Water Company, and the county spent more than two years seeking to coordinate water service from Dupont. As construction neared completion, Dupont still hadn’t taken the first steps to determine whether it could supply an adequate flow of water, so the county secured its water supply from the City of Madison. Relying on a federal law protecting federally indebted rural water associations from certain forms of competition, Dupont sued Madison in federal district court seeking damages and attorneys’ fees.

A Taft team led by Manny Herceg and including Jeff Parker, Sydney Darnall, Alexis Krauter, and Catie Francek won summary judgment on Madison’s behalf. The district court held that the county had requested service from Dupont and that Dupont failed to make service available in a reasonable time — something federal law required it to do if it asserted its monopoly rights.

Donnie Morgan joined the team to lead the appeal. The Seventh Circuit agreed with Taft’s lead argument that Dupont didn’t provide service in a reasonable time. It then wrote three pages of dicta signaling that it also agreed with the backup argument Taft crafted — an argument that the law Dupont relied on doesn’t actually prohibit municipalities from serving customers in a rural water association’s territory so long as the municipality doesn’t annex the territory. That argument asked the court to overturn 40 years of circuit precedent and to create a circuit split in the process. Although every federal circuit to have decided the question has adopted the position Taft argued against, the Seventh Circuit’s dicta suggests it is poised to reshape this area of law should a future case require it to decide the issue.

Learn more about the case here and here.