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Dr. Elizabeth McVicker on Her Water Law Course
The Colorado River near Grand Junction, Colorado.
D
r. Elizabeth McVicker’s Water Law course is one of the three that make up the Water Studies certificate program at the Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU Denver). It takes a broad view of hydrology, history, and legal doctrine and gives students a fundamental understanding of water law in the West, including the prior appropriation principle. In this interview, Dr. McVicker tells us about her background and how she came to teach this class. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background.
14 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | September 2021
municipalwaterleader.com
PHOTO COURTESY OF RENNETT STOWE.
Elizabeth McVicker: I’m a Colorado native. My mother’s family is from Texas, and that is where I went to high school and college. My father, Roy McVicker, was an attorney and was a Colorado state senator and a U.S. congressman from Colorado during the 1950s and 1960s. He was a state senator from 1954 to 1964 and served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1964 to 1966. He was a Democrat and rode Lyndon Johnson’s coattails to Washington. He represented the fourth district, which at the time was called the donut district and included all the counties around the city and county of Denver. He then came back and ended up heading up continental research for part of the administration outreach into Mexico and Central America. He was in love with the Rocky Mountains, so I spent my childhood going to the Rocky Mountains with my dad; listening to Beethoven;
and walking and going fishing on the Arkansas River, the South Platte River, and the tributaries of the Colorado River. After getting a master’s from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from New York University in Spanish, I came back to Colorado and taught language courses at the University of Denver (DU) and the University of Colorado. Because my father and my grandfather from Texas had been attorneys, my husband suggested I try law school. I decided to go to the DU College of Law, where I got a chancellor scholarship in the public interest because of my interest in environmental matters. Our water resources here at the top of the world are limited. In Colorado, every drop of water flows out of our state, and we have obligations to deliver water to other states under 19 different compacts. The Colorado River is on everyone’s mind right now because of the aridification of the Southwest. About 40 million people in this region rely on the river’s limited supplies. That really drove me to learn about the intricacies of Colorado water law. The prior appropriation doctrine is also known as the Colorado doctrine, and it derives from miners’ law and the experience of the California gold rush of 1849 and the Colorado gold rush of 1859. I also believe in collaboration. I did a lot of mediation right out of law school. It didn’t take me long to realize that repeating the water wars that happened in Colorado in the 1800s, in which people lost their lives, was not an option in the context of the burgeoning population of
