Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

There'll Be No Justice in Flint Water Crisis

Government agencies are immune to class-action lawsuits.

January 22, 2016 at 7:22 PM UTC

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

You can't sue the water.
Photographer: Sarah Rice/Getty Images

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If a private company distributed thousands of bottles of water with high levels of lead and other contaminants, lawsuits would chase it toward bankruptcy. So why should authorities in Michigan get a pass?

Seriously.