California Politics of Land and Water

In this talk, John Ferejohn will discuss parts of his forthcoming book that focus on the current groundwater crisis.  His hope is to contextualize groundwater issues in U.S. Western and California history, emphasizing 19th and early 20th century developments in land and water management. 

John Ferejohn is the Samuel Tilden Professor of Law at New York University. His primary areas of scholarly interest are political theory and the study of political institutions and behavior. His current research focuses on the American Congress, judicial institutions, law and legislation, constitutional adjudication in the United States, Europe and the developing world, separation of powers, political campaigns and elections, water politics in California, and the philosophy of social science. Before joining the NYU faculty, he was a professor of Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (1972-1983), a professor of political science at Stanford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution (1983-2009).

Ferejohn earned his PhD at Stanford University (1972) and received an honorary doctorate from Yale University (2007). He has held fellowships with the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois, and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He has written scores of scholarly articles in the fields of political science, economics and philosophy, and is the author of Pork Barrel Politics (Stanford University Press, 1974). A co-author of The Personal Vote (Harvard University Press, 1987), Forged though Fire (Liveright, 2016), and A Republic of Statutes (Yale University Press, 2010), Ferejohn also helped co-edit Information and Democratic Processes (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), Constitutional Culture and Democratic Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and The New Federalism: Can the States be Trusted (Hoover Institution Press, 1997). Currently, Ferejohn is co-leading the Anxieties of Democracy Project at the Social Sciences Research Council.