Brent Haddad, Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz will present his talk, "Rapid Evolution of Water Law in Response to Climate Change."

During his talk, Professor Haddad will explore relationships between climate change and the evolution of law, drawing on ecological and institutional economics, property theory, and evolutionary biology. Its goal is to describe how climate change can act as a driver of rapid evolution of legal doctrines. A case study of California's major shift in groundwater rights in 2014 will be presented and the role of climate change as a proximate cause for the shift will be discussed. A biological perspective on rapid evolution is applied to this case study. The paper concludes that altered climatic patterns such as repeated extended droughts can reduce barriers to changes in property rights resulting in rapid evolution of legal doctrines.