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Full-Text Articles in Law

Downstream Inundations Caused By Federal Flood Control Dam Operations In A Changing Climate: Getting The Proper Mix Of Takings, Tort, And Compensation, Robert Haskell Abrams, Jacqueline Bertelsen Jan 2015

Downstream Inundations Caused By Federal Flood Control Dam Operations In A Changing Climate: Getting The Proper Mix Of Takings, Tort, And Compensation, Robert Haskell Abrams, Jacqueline Bertelsen

Journal Publications

The 2012 United States Supreme Court case Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States presented the Court with a claim that the property of a landowner downstream of a flood control dam was taken without compensation as a result of non-permanent inundations of low lying portions of that parcel caused by a change in the dam's pattern of releases. The Court held that, "government-induced flooding temporary in duration gains no automatic exemption from Takings Clause inspection" and must, instead, be tested according to the Court's usual precedents governing temporary physical invasions and regulatory takings. The Federal Circuit held a …


Water Law Transitions, Robert H. Abrams Jan 2015

Water Law Transitions, Robert H. Abrams

Journal Publications

The history of water law throughout the United States is dynamic. Beginning with the inherited doctrine of English common law natural flow riparianism, the changes in law can be described as instrumentalist in the sense that "judges and legislatures made this branch of water law an instrument of pro-developmental policy." When the natural flow doctrine's requirement that the stream flow down to lower owners undiminished as to quantity and quality clashed with the needs of the extensive utilization of water powered mills in the nineteenth century, the courts pioneered an American doctrine of reasonable use riparianism that would sustain water-dependent …


Selling Florida's Water Up The River, Kara Consalo Jan 2015

Selling Florida's Water Up The River, Kara Consalo

Journal Publications

While Florida has the second highest rainfall in the United States, from the northern Okefenokee Swamp to the southern Florida Everglades, these bountiful ecosystems are still dependent to a great degree on the level and flow of underground water
supplies. Yet these life sustaining water bodies are under threat
by the very government agency tasked to protect them. By selling
millions upon millions of gallons of water from the Floridan aquifer
to out-of-state bottling interests, Florida's water management
districts are causing an unnecessary, yet life threatening, depletion
of the aquifer waters. Over the last forty years of regulation by the …