Alejandra Núñez-Luna

S.J.D. Candidate

Graduate Fellow, LL.M Advisor

Status:	In Residence
Email:	anunezlu@law.harvard.edu

Dissertation

Of Private Property and Water Wars in Mexico: A Social and Legal History, 1870-2004

In modern times, the risk of water wars is often linked to geography and “bad economics”. Remedial policy solutions are focused on the privatization of water supplies, and sometimes even of public water itself. These free-market policies have brought about increasing popular protests, particularly for the poorest communities in Third World countries, where history and culture have made water a sensitive issue. Focused on Mexico, my dissertation challenges the conventional discourse, both in its assumptions and its proposals. A socio-historical examination of the public/private distinction in water rights in Mexican history shows that water wars and private property in water have existed since colonial times and have persisted throughout the modern state under forms not recognized by orthodox legal historiography. I argue that water wars have been triggered not by geographical scarcity or inefficient state planning, but by social conflicts over water uses and its relation to property law in water. By undertaking a socio-historical examination of water law, my aim is to improve our understanding of the looming water crisis and to provide a framework to better design future laws and policies. Those will require decision makers to openly confront issues of equity that are currently kept out of consideration.

Fields of Research and Supervisors

Legal Theory and Property Rights, with Professor Duncan Kennedy, Harvard Law School, Overall Faculty Supervisor
Mexican History, from 16th Century to Present, with Professor John Womack, Jr., Department of History, Harvard University
Property and Local Goverment Law, with Professor David Barron, Harvard Law School

Additional Research Interests

Suburbanization and its effect on infrastructure utilities and housing in third-world cities
Distributional analysis of legal rules for large-scale dams and power plants
The role of law in the intersection between technology, industrialization and development

Education

Harvard Law School, S.J.D. Candidate 2004-Present
Harvard Law School, LL.M. 2003
Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, LL.B. 2001

Appointments and Fellowships

Harvard Law School, 2004-2005, Graduate Program Fellow, LL.M. Advisor
Stanford University, Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, 2003-2004, Research Fellow
Harvard Law School, Summer 2003, Research Assistant to Professor Duncan Kennedy
Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, 1997-2000, Research Assistant to Dean José Ramón Cossío Díaz

Representative Publications

“Private Power Production in Mexico: A Country Study”, Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, Stanford University, Institute for International Studies (forthcoming, March 2005)
“Privatization of Infrastructure in Latin America: Openness and its Discontents”, LL.M Paper, Harvard Law School, May 2003.
“Los Archivos Públicos y el Derecho a la Información”, LL.B. Thesis, ITAM, January 2001.