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Problems Of Groundwater Rights In Ohio, Alan H. Coogan

Akron Law Review

TO A NOVICE IN THE LAW, the problems of groundwater rights seem to straddle awkwardly the physical and social realms. The law-a formal set of rules by which society is ordered-seems to the physical scientist a strangely confusing and confused tool with which to define, even in a social context, the parameters and limits of a physical continuum. For example, on the basis of attorney's briefs, bolstered even by expert testimony, judges have legally defined "subterranean streams"' and erected criteria for recognizing such streams that sound more like the rhetoric of Humpty Dumpty than a description of a body of …