Faculty Highlight: Jason Robison

Professor Jason Robison will be one of the featured speakers at the upcoming Saturday U session in Rock Springs on April 23rd. This will be one of the concluding presentations of the Saturday U Program for the spring term. 

Professor Robison will give a 9 a.m. presentation entitled, “Montana v. Wyoming: The Yellowstone River Compact in the U.S. Supreme Court.” 

Robison will discuss how the U.S. Constitution allows states to form domestic “treaties” to reconcile competing interests in interstate rivers. These treaties are called interstate water compacts. Perhaps most significant among these is the Yellowstone River Compact. Since 2007, it has been at stake in the Supreme Court case of Montana v. Wyoming. Robison will survey the history and current status of this litigation.

Professor Jason Robison is a rising star nationally in the field of water law. His scholarship focuses mainly on intersovereign relations over water resources, particularly relations among federal, state, and tribal sovereigns in the American West. In 2014, he organized the Big Horn Adjudication Symposium, which the College of Law hosted in Riverton, Wyoming. 

He is also an expert on the Colorado River and the allocation and management of its water rights. His current projects include an article revisiting former Stanford Law School Dean Charles Meyers’s famous piece The Colorado River upon its fiftieth anniversary, a book chapter assessing climate change’s implications for the Law of the River’s allocation institutions, two articles growing out of an upcoming Indigenous Water Justice Symposium in June 2016, and a book chapter examining the Supreme Court’s seminal decision Wyoming v. Colorado, 259 U.S. 419 (1922), and its influence on the equitable apportionment doctrine.

Robison joined the College of Law Faculty in 2014 as an assistant professor, after previously serving as a visiting professor in 2013. He has a B.S. from the University of Utah (2003), his J.D. from the University of Oregon Law School (2006), an LLM from Harvard Law School (2009), and an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School (2013).