Michael M. Brescia

Professor Brescia research examines the living legacies of Spanish water law in the U.S. Southwest in light of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and the Gadsden Purchase (1854). He is particularly interested in how Hispanic civil law and American common law defined, allocated, and adjudicated natural resources as property rights, as well as the challenges and misunderstandings that followed in the wake of the territorial cessions.