Cases and Materials on Water Law, steeped in water history, honors its distinguished author lineage by maintaining the book's longstanding tradition of focused instruction on property rights in water, covering appropriative and riparian principles, groundwater, interstate allocation, and federal-state relations. The Tenth Edition integrates these principles into today's regulatory framework, addressing the need for sustainable management and increased protection of the environment and public rights. The new edition is reorganized to prioritize student learning, with fewer and more focused notes and several new principal cases.


Imprint: West Academic Publishing
Series: American Casebook Series
Publication Date: 06/08/2020

Gregory S. Weber, University of Pacific School of Law

Jennifer L. Harder, University of Pacific School of Law

Bennett L. Bearden

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Like preceding editions, the Tenth Edition is a traditional casebook built around cases, statutes, regulations, and notes. The new edition updates for accuracy and adds new principal cases, carefully selected by the authors for their importance and for their efficacy as teaching tools. Chapter 1 has not undergone significant change, but other chapters are revised as follows:

  • Chapter 2, Prior Appropriation. This chapter has been substantially reorganized and headings re-labeled to improve logical flow of key principles, and a new beneficial use case has been added.
  • Chapter 3, Riparian Rights. This chapter has been revised to ensure the accuracy of citations and to update the saga of the Tri-State Water Wars between Alabama, Florida, and Georgia.
  • Chapter 4, Groundwater. This chapter has been revised to include a new discussion of groundwater doctrines as they vary across the U.S., replacing the prior case-based approach to U.S. groundwater systems with a simple, clear discussion to promote student learning.
  • Chapter 5, Interstate Water Allocation. This chapter has been updated to include several major interstate disputes, including the first interstate groundwater dispute to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, Mississippi v. Tennessee; the saga of the Tri-State Water Wars playing out in Florida v. Georgia; the dispute over the Rio Grande Compact in Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado; the dispute over conserved water in Montana v. Wyoming; and an update on Colorado River issues.
  • Chapter 6, Public Rights & Environmental Protection. This chapter has been reorganized to introduce the public trust doctrine through the key case of Illinois Central, and navigability for title as clarified by the U.S. Supreme Court in PPL Montana, to provide a foundation for understanding ongoing disputes over public access to resources. New public access cases have been added, and National Audubon Society v. Superior Court has been moved to the front of the environmental protection section to better demarcate the increasingly different doctrines of public access versus public trust concepts applied to protect instream flow and water quality.
  • Chapter 7, Federal Water Law. This chapter has been revised to update the continuing controversy over the scope of “waters of the United States” as used in section 404 of the Clean Water Act, emblematic of contemporary federal involvement in state water resources issues, and to include new authority relevant to tribes and water law.

Learn more about this series.