As many of you undoubtedly know, Professor Julian Juergensmeyer has had a long, distinguished career in the law. This past year, he celebrated 50 years teaching law. He’s a renowned scholar of land use and planning law not only in the United States, but around the world; during his career, he’s both conducted research and taught in Ethiopia, France, Poland, Brazil, and Denmark, for example.

In the early 1970s, Professor Juergensmeyer and his friend and colleague, the late Professor James Wadley, received a grant to research water law in eastern Africa, a subject which at that time had garnered little scholarly attention. That grant resulted in the writing of a book draft, Water Law and Water Resources in Eastern Africa. However, this book went unpublished, and the record of the important work that Professors Juergensmeyer and Wadley did in tracing the development of water law in east Africa was lost.

Until now. This past academic year the College of Law launched a new online repository, the Reading Room, and we discovered that we had the opportunity to finally make the results of the research done by Professors Juergensmeyer and Wadley over 40 years ago available to the world. We recently posted the full text of Water Law and Water Resources in Eastern Africa in the Reading Room. It’s a fascinating work, weaving together African history, culture, geography, and law, illustrating how the regulation of water resources in eastern Africa was affected by both custom and the history of colonization in the region. We’re glad that Professor Juergensmeyer held onto it until now, and we’re excited to be able to make it available to all of you.