⚖ Oral Arguments, with Context

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit hears oral argument in Harward versus City of Austin. The core legal issue is whether a federal district court properly abstained under the Pullman doctrine from deciding a dispute over the jurisdictional status of properties along the shoreline of Lake Austin. The plaintiffs are more than two hundred and fifty homeowners along that shoreline. For more than a century before 2019, the city did not collect taxes on their properties, and a 1986 city ordinance directed that they keep being treated under the tax policy that had prevailed since 1891, until city services were available to them. In 2019 the city repealed that ordinance, recited in the new one that the shoreline properties had been within the city's full-purpose jurisdiction since 1891, and began taxing them. The homeowners call that an illegal annexation by fiat. They allege it violated their federal due process and equal protection rights because the city changed their status without notice or a hearing. They also allege it was unconstitutionally retroactive; their counsel calls it rewriting a hundred and twenty-eight years of history. The city's position is that the 1986 ordinance was in substance a tax exemption rather than a declaration of limited-purpose status, that the exemption may itself have been invalid under the Texas Constitution's requirement that taxation be equal and uniform, and that repealing an invalid exemption cannot violate the federal Constitution. The city also argues that all of this turns on unsettled questions of Texas and municipal law. The district court agreed. In February 2025 it adopted a magistrate judge's recommendation to abstain and dismissed the case without prejudice, so that Texas courts could address the state-law questions first. The panel must decide whether that abstention was proper or whether the plaintiffs' civil rights claims should proceed to the merits in federal court.

Harward v. City of Austin (No. 25-50160) — U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, argued August 3, 2026.