⚖ Oral Arguments, with Context

This is oral argument before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Quadvest against San Jacinto River Authority. At the heart of the case is whether an arrangement among dozens of water utilities in Montgomery County, Texas, violates federal antitrust law. Quadvest is an investor-owned utility that pumps groundwater and sells drinking water to retail customers in the county. The River Authority runs a groundwater reduction program, born of county-wide conservation mandates: participating utilities signed contracts that include a volume-based pumpage fee and give the Authority the right to require connections to its surface water system. Quadvest claims the Authority orchestrated a scheme linking some eighty utilities. It says the contracts equalized costs between groundwater and surface water. It says prices rose and customers were allocated. And it alleges the conservation rationale was pretext. The River Authority counters that its program simply offered the most economical path to meet mandatory conservation requirements, and that Quadvest itself chose to participate and benefited from doing so. Quadvest frames the relevant market as wholesale raw water in Montgomery County. The core legal issues on appeal are whether Quadvest has antitrust standing to challenge the arrangement, and whether the agreements amount to horizontal price fixing and market allocation subject to per se condemnation, or instead are ancillary to a lawful joint compliance program.

Quadvest v. San Jacinto River Auth (No. 25-20415) — U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, argued August 5, 2026.