Many water law cases come to our court. Justice Madsen usually gets the majority and I end up writing a dissent.

One such recent case was DOE v. Campbell & Gwinn, 146 Wn.2d 1 (2002), also known as the "six pack well" case.

In our state the government owns title to all the water and has an elaborate scheme to license its use. But the Department of Ecology has been pretty stingy about granting licenses, so developers and homeowners often use an exemption in the law for small wells which requires no DOE license. In a 5-4 decision I concurred in the dissent and opined that the statute means what it says and the property owner was entitled to drill his wells under this exemption. The majority said I was laboring under the misapprehension that "words have fixed meanings." I felt like a drink (of water) after that one.