Frank J. Trelease Scholarship Fund

Frank J. Trelease was Western water law for almost his entire career. Only the lack of an enforceable doctrine of scholarly prior appropriation permitted many of us to enter the field with any confidence. He was often the first to address a major issue and his insight was unfailingly penetrating. Fortunately, his preemptive “calls” were only cautionary to the rest of us. Forced to leave his beloved, adopted Wyoming for health reasons after thirty-three years as professor, and twelve as Dean at the University of Wyoming College of Law, he continued his distinguished career at the McGeorge School of Law of the University of the Pacific in California for ten more years. After his retirement from teaching in 1986, Frank settled permanently in Arizona with no loss of professional vigor, despite his steadily deteriorating health. At the time of his death, he was hard at work on an article, which appears in this issue of the Land and Water Law Review, which he founded, on one of the most complex and important problems in Western water law, the relationship between state resource sovereignty and the Sporhase decision. In a letter to some of his colleagues shortly before his death, he expressed the desire to complete the article and to “die with my boots on.” And so he did. No single tribute to Frank can do justice to his scholarship, his service to the University and the State of Wyoming, let alone try to capture his decency, integrity and charm or his dry-fly fishing skills. Suffice it to say, for many years to come those of us who work in water law and related fields will be unable to complete any project without asking, “Now what would Frank have thought about this?”