Short answer. Yes. Civil Code Article 707 makes anyone who abates a nuisance on their own liable for damages if the courts later decide it was not actually a nuisance, and also if the abatement caused injury beyond what was necessary — even if the thing genuinely was a nuisance.
What the law says
If an alleged nuisance is later declared by the courts to be not a real nuisance.
Civil Code, Article 707 — Liability for Abating a Nuisance Yourself. Read the full provision →
You are betting on being right
Article 707 puts the risk of a wrong call squarely on the person who acts. It provides that a private person “extrajudicially abating a nuisance shall be liable for damages” if “an alleged nuisance is later declared by the courts to be not a real nuisance.” Being genuinely convinced that the neighbor's activity qualifies is not enough. If a court later disagrees with your assessment, that disagreement alone exposes you to liability, regardless of how reasonable your belief was at the time.
Getting it right does not fully protect you either
Article 707 also makes you liable if you act on a real nuisance but “cause unnecessary injury.” So even a correct judgment that something is a nuisance does not give you a free hand in how you deal with it. Damage that goes beyond what was actually necessary to remove or stop the nuisance can be charged to you separately, on top of whatever risk you already carried from having made the call yourself instead of going to court.
Why the law is built this way
Taking matters into your own hands skips the process where a court, not a private individual, decides whether something rises to the level of a nuisance and what should be done about it. Article 707 is the price of skipping that step: it lets you act without waiting for a judgment, but it shifts the consequences of a mistaken or heavy-handed abatement onto you rather than leaving them where a court proceeding would have absorbed the uncertainty in advance.
The Code does not leave self-help unregulated, either. Article 704 sets conditions before a private person may abate a public nuisance without going to court — among them that the nuisance be specially injurious to him, and that a demand to abate it be made on the owner and refused. Article 706 governs abating a private nuisance and requires that it be done without breach of the peace or unnecessary injury. Article 707 is what happens when those limits are overshot.
What this means before you act
If there is genuine room for disagreement about whether something is a nuisance, extrajudicial abatement carries real exposure — you are not shielded simply by acting in good faith on your own assessment. Where the situation is doubtful, or where stopping it will require force or destruction of property, that risk is worth weighing carefully against the alternative of having a court settle the question first, before you remove anything yourself.
Note that the two grounds in Article 707 operate independently, so it is possible to be right about the nuisance and still liable for how it was removed, or careful in the removal and still liable because the thing was never a nuisance at all. Before acting, it is worth writing down what the nuisance is doing to you specifically, what you demanded of the owner and what answer you got — that record is as useful to a defence as it is to a claim.