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Water Law

University of Colorado Law School

University of Colorado Law Review

Climate change

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Law

Force Majeure And The Law Of The Colorado River: The Confluence Of Climate Change, Contracts, And The Constitution, Mary Slosson Jan 2024

Force Majeure And The Law Of The Colorado River: The Confluence Of Climate Change, Contracts, And The Constitution, Mary Slosson

University of Colorado Law Review

Climate change is causing significant, permanent changes to the natural world. In the Colorado River Basin, experts forecast that rising temperatures will cause the spread of a drier, more arid climate across the region. The effects of this desertification are already being felt: less rainfall, the loss of deciduous forests, wildfires that engulf urban areas, and a projected 20 to 30 percent reduction in flows on the Colorado River by mid-century. The net effect is an existential crisis for the forty million people that reside in the Colorado River’s watershed. Mitigating the effects of climate change requires swift action. However, …


The Colorado River Revisited, Jason Anthony Robison Jan 2017

The Colorado River Revisited, Jason Anthony Robison

University of Colorado Law Review

Fifty years ago, former Stanford Law School Dean Charles Meyers published The Colorado River, 19 STAN. L. REV. 1 (1966), arguably the most famous piece of legal scholarship ever written on this vital water source and the complex body of laws governing its flows-colloquially, the "Law of the River." That piece and a companion, The Colorado River: The Treaty with Mexico, 19 STAN. L. REV. 367 (1967), offered seminal accounts of the legal histories, doctrinal features, and unresolved perplexities of the Law of the River's international and interstate allocation framework. Five decades later, between thirty-five and forty million U.S. residents …


Powering The Tap Dry: Regulatory Alternatives For The Energy-Water Nexus, Amy Hardberger Jan 2013

Powering The Tap Dry: Regulatory Alternatives For The Energy-Water Nexus, Amy Hardberger

University of Colorado Law Review

In 2008, while Atlanta residents freely watered their lawns, several nuclear power plants in Georgia almost shut down due to drought-induced water scarcity. This absurd reality stemmed from the misunderstood and almost wholly unregulated relationship between energy and water. Water and energy are indivisibly linked and interwoven into every aspect of our culture and lifestyle. Large quantities of water are required to generate energy, and energy is required at all stages of the water supply process including pumping, treating, and end uses. While much has been written recently on the numeric relationship between these sectors, little has been proposed from …


Climate Change, Regulatory Fragmentation, And Water Triage, Robin Kundis Craig Jan 2008

Climate Change, Regulatory Fragmentation, And Water Triage, Robin Kundis Craig

University of Colorado Law Review

Viewed from a watershed perspective, we are unconsciously sacrificing many marine ecosystems because upstream fresh water is a regulatorily fragmented resource. That is, water is subject to multiple assertions of regulatory authority and to multiple types of use-right claims that those authorities regulate. As freshwater supplies become increasingly unequal to the task of meeting the multiple demands for both consumptive and in situ use, and as consumptive and in situ uses of water come increasingly into irreconcilable conflict, the various regulatory schemes governing water use have also increasingly come into legal conflict. These courtroom battles have revealed many tensions, overlaps, …