Eureka! Water Flows Downhill

An Apex, North Carolina landowner sued an uphill neighbor in trespass for water and sediment material that flowed into a creek along their property line killing the landowner's cypress trees. At issue in Banks v. Dunn (North Carolina Lawyers Weekly No. 06-16-0506) was whether expert testimony was needed to establish that runoff from a hill of fill dirt caused the creek to overflow. The North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled that the causal relationship between the fill dirt dumped on the hillside above the creek and the subsequent flooding of the creek onto the landowner's yard "implicates no scientific principle more complex than the truism that water flows downhill, and will carry loose material in its flow."

It is nice to know a layperson's intelligence can be trusted to conclude that water flows downhill. See North Carolina Lawyers Weekly, May 1, 2006 edition.