Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-24-2016

Abstract

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 ÔÇ£Law of the RiverÔÇØ This 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 thirtyfive and forty million US residents rely on flows controlled by this framework and an historic drought and unprecedented water supply and demand imbalance face the Colorado River Basin It is a transformative time for the Law of the River and this Article revisits Meyers's scholarship from this vantage point It begins by considering climate change and related dynamic changes in and around the basin over the past fifty years It then considers the evolution of the Law of the River's allocation framework across this period ' particularly since the historic drought's onset in 2000 Finally focusing on the concept of ÔÇ£adaptive framingÔÇØ the Article synthesizes common patterns in the allocation framework's evolution and offers prescriptions and prognoses regarding the continuation of these patterns in the future

First Page

475

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