Water Law and Policy for the Twenty-First Century

• Semester: Spring 2026
• Course ID: 391F
• Credit Hours: 3
• Unique: 29690

Description

This survey course in American water law, policy, and the normative principles that underlie them is designed to welcome a multi-disciplinary cohort of students, including those from law, engineering, earth sciences, government, public policy, and community and regional planning, into a highly collaborative learning environment. The shared pursuit of knowledge and insight from multiple contributory disciplines enlivens and enriches this course every year.

The course will pay its deepest respects to the essentiality of water for the maintenance, as well as the flourishing, of life and to the earth's systematic reliance on water's cyclical stocks and flows.

 The main body of the course will examine the law's highly-fragmented regulation of surface and groundwater allocation within its two historically-divided, regionally-distinct, state-law-dependent regimes, as well as its regulation of water quality under federal statutory initiatives that have lost their political shine and are now considerably vexed. The conventional kinds of conflicts that have driven and molded water law and policy throughout almost all of its history will illustrate the terms and functions of this over-all body of fractured institutional design.

We will then consider some of the fraught practical issues of our current moment, one in which water law's conventional rationales and outcomes face conflicts of extreme social and economic importance  within new or long unresolved policy frames. These are likely to include, by example: extraordinary water demands for data-centers; water demands for thirsty agricultural uses in increasingly-populated states that are challenged by dwindling or unsteady supplies; governmental responses to floods, droughts, chemical pollution, and to historically unanswered tribal needs.

Interstate compacts and rivalries, issues of local control, uncooperative federalism--all these and other examples of law on the hoof will enter the course, as we test the capacities of this heavily challenged field of chronically-inertial law to rise to new needs for principled, coherent, sometimes innovative response.

Our methods of approach will rely on a mix of readings and lecture; individual- and team-led class participation; and visits from expert guests. Class members are encouraged to apply their diversity of disciplinary training and interests throughout the course and to adopt a special topic for the term, if they wish. All course materials, other than optional student-supplied contributions, will be available on Canvas; no purchases will be required.

There will be a very brief written assignment and a final research paper on an instructor-approved topic--the latter may be a group effort-- in lieu of an exam. Honesty in all aspects of the production of these papers and graduate-level proficiency in the research and writing are the major criteria on which these projects will be judged. They are not to be based on AI use.

 Learning Outcomes:

 1—This course intends to offer a gateway introduction to the kinds of issues, outcomes, doctrines, rationales, statutes, and stresses that contemporary water law, politics, and policies sweep in. Rational inquiry, analytic reasoning, and normative analysis will be our primary means of address.

2—Students will be steadily exposed to the concepts and vocabularies of hydrology and hydrogeology, equity and justice, law and policy.

3—Students will develop a familiarity with the foundations and institutional frameworks of water law and policy and the complexities of contemporary decision-making.

4—Law student class members will gain extensive exposure to the critical analysis of legal materials.  All students will develop critical skills in their approach to policy analysis.

5--Non-law students will not be expected to complete written or oral assignments or to offer voluntary in-class contributions as if they have had the same professional training as law students. They will be expected to make valuable use of the training they are receiving in their graduate field of choice.

6—Each student will pursue one or two course-related topics of personal interest and will write about these in the form of, first, a brief “opinion” essay and, second, a research-based paper. Through these means, each student will be encouraged to strive for original thought, a unique writing voice, and a personal-best effort at graduate-level scholarship through the production of clear, correct, and lively written exposition and adequately-framed and cited research.  (Note: Method of citation will follow the practice in each student’s home field.)

7—Class members will practice the skills necessary for the effective oral presentation of the course materials--and their own ideas.

8—Class members will gain the benefits of collaborative engagement, which they’ll practice within presentations in pairs and within class-presentation groups.