When Engineering Solutions Cause Legal Problems: The Developing Field of Reservoir Rights and Liabilities

For well over a decade, the pages of this Quarterly have undoubtedly been filled with discussions of cutting-edge drilling and completion technologies. This article discusses some of the problems that all these engineering solutions have caused for the law of oil and gas. It begins in Part II with a brief outline of how the law slowly develops through the common law process and illustrates how that process responds, also slowly, to rapid technological and social changes, like the unconventional hydrocarbon revolution. Part III then surveys how courts have begun to reform the legal rights and remedies in common reservoirs to respond to the revolution. And Part IV concludes with an observation about what contributions the disciplines of engineering and geology might make to aid the law in its response, and thereby help clean up the mess their innovations have created.