On October 9, 2015 Governor Jerry Brown signed into law two bills aimed at making groundwater disputes easier and faster to resolve in court. The new laws—companion bills AB 1390 (Alejo) and SB 226 (Pavley)—streamline California’s onerous groundwater adjudication process, which can drag on for decades. Such adjudications comprehensively establish groundwater right allocations for all users in a covered groundwater basin and, up to now, have been governed by common law...

Last week, the California Legislature sent two important bills on groundwater to Governor Jerry Brown for signature. The bills promise to revamp California’s complicated, lengthy, and arduous judicial process for adjudicating rights to groundwater, and to make the adjudication process comport with 2014’s pathbreaking law governing California groundwater. But as the new laws would speed the judicial process to comprehensively establish all groundwater rights in particular basins, the...