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A compelling exploration of how Alabama’s aging water laws endanger its resources and why urgent, forward thinking reform is essential for the state’s future.

Alabama Water-Resources Law is the first truly comprehensive study examining the structure and shortcomings of Alabama’s water law. This prodigious treatise provides a necessary tool to help the state and its people understand and prepare for the wise use of its water resources. Part I provides a clear and critical statement of Alabama’s current water law in eleven chapters. Part II expands on the criticisms of existing Alabama law, recounts the history of previous efforts at addressing those criticisms, and makes recommendations for change, taking lessons from other southeastern states.

Throughout, University of Alabama law professor Heather Elliott underscores the flaws in Alabama’s current body of law, arguing that Alabama’s abundant water resources have fostered complacency that the state and its residents can no longer afford. As Alabama’s water supply is strained by population growth, economic development, and global climate change, the deficiencies in the archaic legal framework will become crippling. Investments made on the assumption of plenty will fail as water becomes less available, Alabama’s world-class aquatic biodiversity will become even more endangered, and Alabama’s courts will suffer a glut of new litigation as parties fight over rights to a finite resource. Elliott demonstrates how Alabama can avoid the worst of these consequences through the adoption of a regulated riparian statute.

Ample illustrations provide an extensive inventory of the state’s surface and groundwater resources and a technical primer on instream flow. This is a must-read for all Alabama policymakers, attorneys, and concerned citizens to answer water-law questions and to make proactive laws to bring Alabama into twenty-first-century practices.
 

Transitions: Legal Change, Legal Meanings illustrates the various intersections, crises, and shifts that continually occur within the law, and how these moments of change interact with and comment on contemporary society.