Going with the flow: a water law journey.

• Author: Neuman, Janet C.

During all the years I taught water law, I always began the first class with a quick story about how I came to be teaching water law, and I'm going to tell that story again now. I apologize for repeating myself to the many former students in the room, but I feel like it's where I need to start.

I spent most of my childhood in Minnesota--the land of 10,000 lakes, as it says on the license plates. Actually, there are thousands more than that, but the slogan just refers to the bigger ones. I swam in them, caught fish in them, rowed boats across them, got leeches and mosquito bites around them, and ice-skated on them in the winter time. There were rivers, too, most particularly the mighty Mississippi. All Minnesota kids know the chant: "M-i-ss-I-ss-I-pp-I." From way back, I remember being amazed at how the Mississippi started so small in Itasca State Park in northern Minnesota, and then became a huge river by the time it reached New Orleans. (1) The river was already plenty big by the time it flowed between the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, where I grew up. (2) It seemed like magic that it could flow all the time, year round, day and night. In fact, that's still magical to me. When it rained, my friends and I made little boats to sail down the roiling gutters along the streets, pretending that the boats would go all the way to the river and eventually the ocean, like the little canoe in the children's book Paddle-to-the-Sea. (3)

I also spent a few of nay growing-up years in South Dakota, where I swam and water-skied with friends in the Missouri, a tributary of the Mississippi. The Missouri was muddy and slow, but as adolescents we didn't think about why that was. We weren't focused on the dams and reservoirs at that age--we just knew that the big old ugly carp that lurked in the murk might nibble our legs if we stood in one place too long, because they could find us even if we couldn't see them. In high school, my family went back to Minnesota--St. Cloud this time. The Mississippi was only a couple of blocks from our house, and that's where I went to walk off the angst and worries of my teenage years. After poking along the banks--smelling the leaf mulch and maybe startling a turtle into the smooth water--I always felt better.

The point is that water played a big part in my formative years. Even my favorite books and movies had water and rivers in them: Life on the Mississippi, (4) Sometimes a Great Notion, (5) Angle of Repose, (6) and Chinatown. (7) In college in Iowa, I was fascinated by an urban history class that explored the differences between the development and character of river towns and railroad towns--and I always felt partial to the river towns, with their more organic history and rough and tumble reputations. (8) In geology field study classes, we started close to campus with the glacial features of Iowa, but then ventured much further west. Rafting the San Juan River in Utah, hiking into the Grand Canyon, camping in the Big Horns near the hot springs of Thermopolis, Wyoming, I got to know and love many other rivers, big and small. I'll never forget standing above the Goosenecks of the San Juan, contemplating the geological forces that created the oddity of a meandering stream incised into bedrock. As I drifted along my own meandering course of life, rivers and lakes were always there.

And then came law school, like a big boulder in the middle of the stream, throwing me temporarily off course. It was different than anything I'd experienced, in more ways than one. First of all, it was California. I started law school at Stanford during one of California's many cyclical droughts--the first time I had really experienced aridity. The dry brown hills, the endless sunny days, and the water use restrictions were new and strange to me, but law school was even stranger. I was not one of those who took to law school like a fish to water--I spent several months wondering what planet I had landed on and thinking that law school might have been a big mistake. But then--I remember the precise moment--during the spring of my first year, in property class, Professor Bob Ellickson drew a map on the board. I sat up and took notice--I've always been a map geek. Better yet, it was a map of the Colorado River and Professor Ellickson was talking about Arizona and California's fight over water. A light bulb went on. "Wow! There's law about this stuff? About water? Not pollution, but water itself?" It really was an epiphany, and I fell for water law, right then and there. And to some extent, the rest is history, even though the path from there to here was definitely meandering rather than straight.

Why do I love water law? Because it's about people and geography and history--and all the interrelationships among them. It's a microcosm of natural resources law generally, with all of its complexities. It's about people's relationship to one of the most important substances on earth. Most of all, water law is just a great story, full of life and death and passion and epic disputes.

Becoming a law professor was the furthest thing from my mind when I was a law student, and I'm sure none of my classmates or professors would have predicted that future. I began my legal career in litigation, but even there, a river ran through it. In my first job in a Minneapolis firm, I worked on a case involving a Mississippi River barge company whose barges got stuck up river near St. Paul when the river froze earlier than expected, stranding tons of valuable cargo for the whole winter. After moving to Oregon, I did some...