Land and Water Workshop: Natural Resource Uses and Conflicts

• Semester: Spring 2027
• Course ID: 196V
• Credit Hours: 1
• Unique: 29818

Registration Status: Waitlisted

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Description

This course will only meet in person on the following dates:

First meeting: Thursday, Mar. 25; Second meeting: Thursday, Apr. 1; Third meeting: Thursday, Apr. 8; Fourth meeting: Friday, Apr. 9.

The considerable uses of land and water--especially, freshwater--have deep legal, social, ethical, and philosophical taproots. These uses, roots and all, have been blanketed in conflict since long before the founding of the Republic. Conflicts endure, though what's under the blanket keeps colliding, enlarging, and shape-shifting, as if natural resource determinations are animated by the ghosts of the past, the present, and the future.

In this highly-focused short-course, we will consider three of the most consequential of the current conflicts--two involving festering past histories--that demand the extensive and intensive uses of land and water. These conflicts are saturating the economic development and the politics of nearly every U.S. state, forcing confrontations with the capabilities, limitations, and over-all architecture of federal, state, and local sources of law and the fragmented institutional dependencies and inter-dependencies of the legal system itself.

The conflicts we will pursue concern the law, politics, policies, and ethical and philosophical underpinnings and implications of:

(1) forested lands and the broken model of public land use;

(2) farming and ranching, centered on the industrial-scale production of non-domestic livestock and poultry; and

(3) data center development and its federal, state, and local legal controls.

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I have conceived this course as a miniature capstone for Law students and as an invitation to inter-disciplinary learning and collaboration.

There will be one or two written exercises. No AI is to be used in the production of what is turned in, unless under explicit written guidelines to be provided.

"Full attendance" at all four meetings includes both reasonable attentiveness at all times and reasonable active participation in the discussions that are integral to the course. The reasonableness of active participation depends on apt commentary clearly informed by the course readings. The sharing of pertinent outside knowledge, such as that which is derived from other courses, other readings, and from volunteer and professional experience is warmly encouraged.