Limitations, Nuisance, and Injunctions: Family Dollar Stores of Texas, LLC v. JLMH Investments, LLC

Runoff from a neighboring development has been flooding my property for years. If it is too late to sue for damages, can I still ask a court to order the neighbor to stop?

The Supreme Court of Texas addressed that question on June 26, 2026, in Family Dollar Stores of Texas, LLC v. JLMH Investments, LLC, No. 24-0543, — S.W.3d —, 2026 WL 1871092 (Tex. June 26, 2026).

What happened. JLMH owns commercial property in Fort Worth. Between 2014 and 2016, a Family Dollar store was built on the lot next door. According to the summary-judgment record, JLMH’s property had not taken on water from that lot before the store was built. Afterward, it flooded every time it rained, leaving silt and trash behind, turning part of the property “into something resembling a swamp,” and eventually damaging JLMH’s building and parking lot. JLMH’s president spent about two years trying to get the City to address the problem. Engineers later traced the water to the store’s drainage system. Id. at *1–2.

JLMH sued in 2020 for trespass, negligent and intentional diversion of water, and violation of the Water Code provision that prohibits diverting surface water onto another’s property. It asked for damages and for an injunction requiring the defendants to stop the flooding. The trial court granted summary judgment for the defendants on limitations. Id. at *2.

The court of appeals agreed that the damages claims were too late: the flooding was a permanent nuisance (it recurred with every rain and came from permanent structures), so the claims accrued once, in 2016 or 2017, and the two-year limitations period had run before JLMH sued. But it held that the injunction request survived. It relied on a line of Texas cases, going back to the 1890s, saying that limitations “is not a defense to an injunction requesting abatement of a nuisance.” Id. at *3.

The holding: the claim, not the remedy, sets the deadline. The Supreme Court reversed and reinstated the trial court’s judgment. Justice Busby’s opinion for the Court began from a basic principle: “There is no stand-alone right to abate a nuisance or obtain an injunction.” An injunction is a remedy, and “remedies are available only if liability is established under a cause of action.” A nuisance, the Court explained, is not itself a cause of action. It is a kind of injury — interference with the use and enjoyment of land — that can give rise to claims such as trespass or negligence. Id. at *7.

From there the result followed. In Texas, where law and equity are administered by the same courts, statutes of limitations apply to equitable claims just as they do to legal ones. Everyone agreed that the two-year statute for injury to property governed each of JLMH’s claims. In the Court’s words, “[b]ecause it is the claim itself that determines which limitations period applies, JLMH’s addition of a request for injunctive relief to its claims for injury to land does not alter the two-year limitations period.” Id. at 7 (citing Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003(a)). The two-year statute therefore barred JLMH’s claims “seeking both damages and an injunction.” Id.* at *8.

What the Court did not decide. The opinion notes that JLMH did not argue the flooding was a public nuisance, so the Court did not address how limitations applies to public nuisances. Id. at *8 n.15.

Justice Busby, joined by Justices Lehrmann and Devine, also wrote a concurrence to flag a second open question. Texas has a separate ten-year statute for suits to recover real property from someone using it adversely. That is the period that must run before a continuing use of someone’s land can ripen into a “prescriptive easement.” Some older cases, he suggested, may rest on that statute. A landowner who brings a claim to stop an adverse use of the land before it ripens into an easement might therefore have ten years, not two. Because JLMH agreed the two-year statute applied, the Court did not reach the issue. Id. at *8–15 (Busby, J., concurring).

Justice Young, joined by Justices Bland and Huddle (and by Chief Justice Blacklock on the merits), wrote that the decision puts everyone “on notice that if they seek to redress a nuisance through litigation, they must sue within two years of accrual, period.” He also emphasized that the ruling does not give Family Dollar a “right” to flood its neighbor. JLMH could still take steps on its own, such as redirecting the water, or seek government enforcement. And “an old nuisance does not excuse a new and different one.” Id. at *15–20 (Young, J., concurring in part and in the judgment).

A procedural footnote worth noting. Much of the opinion addresses whether the Court had jurisdiction at all. After granting summary judgment in an order stating it was “final, dispose[d] of all parties and all claims, and is appealable,” the trial court signed a second order “clarifying” the first. The second order granted a permissive interlocutory appeal and stayed “all proceedings.” A plurality held that an order made final by express language stays final unless a later order undoes that finality expressly, and this one did not. Justice Sullivan, joined by Chief Justice Blacklock and Justice Hawkins, dissented on that point. He would have read the second order as reopening the case and dismissed the appeal. Id. at 3–6; id.* at *20–24 (Sullivan, J., dissenting). For litigants, the dispute seems to illustrate how much can turn on the precise wording of a trial court’s orders.

What it appears to mean. On the Court’s framing, asking for an injunction does not extend the time to sue. For a property owner dealing with recurring flooding, runoff, or a similar permanent nuisance from a neighbor, the two-year clock appears to run from when the injury begins and is discovered, whatever relief the owner wants. That seems to hold even when the owner wants only to make the problem stop. The opinion leaves open how limitations applies to public nuisances, and whether a ten-year period may govern a suit to stop an adverse use of land before it becomes a prescriptive easement.

See also our post on quantum meruit when a contract exists, another recent decision on the limits of equitable relief.