tkgrrett wrote:
Ehh.. for some reason people on TLS love to take things to extremes. Yes, it is possible to work in that stuff but most likely that is not the ONLY thing you will be working in(with the exception of specific government organizations of course.) and you will NOT be working on it the way people assume. Basically, working for a firm you are very rarely going to have a "save the wetlands" project come across your table. In water law, on the rare occasions you do have a water case, it will likely be more along the lies of Mississippi and Tennessee arguing over which state has rights to a certain body of water and how much the one state should be compensating the other for its use. In addition, you must be prepared to do much work outside of your specialty field.
Oh snap, don't tell my clinets this then, cuase I need this gig.

Also you took my bait hook line and sinker. FYI the Mississippi is a navigable waterway, its owned by the federal government not the states (based on the equal footing doctrine). Also Mississippi and Tennessee are both riparian rights states. In riparian water law states you don't "own" the water, merely the right make a "reasonable use" of it as it flows by land that abuts the waterway.
West of roughly the 100th meridian things are very different, as the land is more arid and water resources fare more scare. Out west most states use the Prior Appropriation method of water law (or a hybrid system) where one can own the right to the water (but not the water itself) so long as they continue to put it to a "beneficial use". In a PA state, one with a more senior use can put a "call' on the river and basically take all the water he/she is entitled to, even if the a city or farm downstream would go dry because of it. So there is quite a bit of water law work in western states.
In fact one of the longest running casea in the history of the United States Supreme Court is a water law case, Kansas v. Colorado (1902 to who knows when...)
People, maybe unwisely so, pay me to do this shit for a living, and yea I specialized in law school and this is what I do practice wise (as well as ESA stuff), I also only graduated in 2009. I don't work for a firm, firms lawyers and PI orgs come to me to handle this stuff for them, because well, its specialized. Its also all I do (unless its a friend who needs help, or anouther lawyer i know, I have done some criminal stuff, but just as favors moslty).
Anyway the point of all this is TLS is a great resource for finding stuff out, so long as you don't think you got it all figured out before you come here. Not anyone on TLS has all the answers, and people experiences will be different, but for most things you can usually find someone who has done what you're asking about, and those that have not but will still weight in anyway
So welcome to TLS, have a look around but watch out for the trolls.
