In June 2015, the United States Supreme Court granted the State of Mississippi leave to file a bill of complaint against the State of Tennessee, the City of Memphis, and Memphis Light, Gas & Water Division for wrongfully converting groundwater from the interstate Sparta-Memphis Aquifer. The...

Interstate environmental harms, which occur when decisions or actions in one state produce negative environmental impacts in another state, have challenged environmental law and American federalism for over a century. While even the strongest advocates of state primacy in environmental policy...

Climate change driven by greenhouse gas emissions is substantially altering water availability while increasing water demand. Shifts in domestic energy policy and production, while needed to confront the challenge of climate change, may further stress the nation’s water resources. These...

As demand for freshwater increases and surface water supplies diminish, states are increasingly tapping groundwater to meet their water needs. Like rivers and lakes, groundwater aquifers cross state lines and create legal challenges for allocation and management. For over a century, the Supreme...

Despite the complexities of climatology, certain consistent themes emerge with implications for water availability: as the world gets warmer, it will experience increased regional variability in precipitation, more frequent heavy precipitation events, becoming more susceptible to drought. This...

The Earth's climate is warming. This is the unequivocal conclusion of climate scientists. Despite the complexities of climatology, certain consistent trends emerge with implications for water availability: as the world gets warmer, it will experience increased regional variability in...

This article presents a new model for environmental policy, called cooperative horizontal federalism. The cooperative horizontal federalism approach utilizes a constitutional mechanism for states to bind themselves to common substantive and procedural environmental protection standards,...

In the wake of the Gulf oil blowout disaster, there is renewed interest in protecting the freshwater of the Great Lakes from the risks of oil drilling. The region has significant oil resources that would be economically and technologically accessible through drilling in the Great Lakes. The...

Over 95% of the available surface freshwater resources in the United States are interstate in nature and governed by interstate water compacts. These interstate compacts vary tremendously in how they allocate and manage interstate waters. Until recently, the water resources governed by...