January 24, 2018
By Richard Frank
On Saturday, January 20th, I had the opportunity to accompany a number of King Hall water law students to the 14th Annual Water Law Symposium, held this year at UC Berkeley. The symposium is an extraordinary collaboration among six different Northern California law schools--including King Hall. Remarkably, this annual event is wholly student-organized and -produced, and recently won an American Bar Association award as the best law student-organized event in the nation. It's also become California's premier water law conference.
The theme of this year's symposium was "The Future of California's Water Infrastructure"--a most timely topic given the 2017 failure of the Oroville Dam and other water-related infrastructure challenges. King Hall's contribution to the symposium took the form of organizing and presenting a panel on "The Challenges of an Evolving Climate: A Case Study of the Impacts of Wildfire on California's Water Infrastructure."
Special kudos to King Hall water law student Ellen Simmons '19, one of the organizers of the UC Davis panel at the Symposium. When one of the panelists was forced to cancel at the last minute due to a personal emergency, Ellen stepped up, assumed the panel moderator's role and performed flawlessly in that capacity. Similarly, King Hall faculty colleague Camille Pannu, Director of the Water Justice Clinic, graciously did double duty at the symposium: in addition to speaking on the King Hall-organized panel with Ellen, Professor Pannu pinch-hit for a UCLA Law School colleague who was unable to travel to UC Berkeley due to the Montecito mudslides and subsequent closure of Highway 101.
