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Full-Text Articles in Law
Addressing Interstate Ground Water Ownership: Mississippi V. Tennessee, Alec Sweet
Addressing Interstate Ground Water Ownership: Mississippi V. Tennessee, Alec Sweet
Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy Sidebar
Contemporaneous with significant climate change and heightened environmental concerns, the Supreme Court has seen an increasing number of water-related lawsuits between states. These lawsuits include disputes over water storage and water compacts as well as disputes over water usage affecting aquaculture. Scientists predict that in the future, the United States could face rising temperatures, droughts, and natural disasters. If states cannot cooperate to conserve the water they share, these catastrophes could cause immense suffering and numerous conflicts between states. The Supreme Court needs a consistent doctrine to apply in water disputes.
In prior disputes over surface water, the Court has …
Navassa: Property, Sovereignty, And The Law Of The Territories, Joseph Blocher, Mitu Gulati
Navassa: Property, Sovereignty, And The Law Of The Territories, Joseph Blocher, Mitu Gulati
Faculty Scholarship
The United States acquired its first overseas territory—Navassa Island, near Haiti—by conceptualizing it as a kind of property to be owned, rather than a piece of sovereign territory to be governed. The story of Navassa shows how competing conceptions of property and sovereignty are an important and underappreciated part of the law of the territories—a story that continued fifty years later in the Insular Cases, which described Puerto Rico as “belonging to” but not “part of” the United States.
Contemporary scholars are drawn to the sovereignty framework and the public-law tools that come along with it: arguments about rights and …