2016 Articles

CRWUA Colloquium – Wednesday 12/14

Gregory Hobbs

Don’t miss Greg Hobbs’ session “Colorado River 101” at the Colorado River Water Users Association 2016 Annual Conference!

About Greg Hobbs, Jr.

Greg Hobbs, Jr., former justice of the Colorado Supreme Court who retired from the court on August 31, 2015, is the author of five books on water law, history, culture and poetry. After earning his degree in history from the University of Notre Dame in 1966, he attended Columbia University to study Latin American history before he and his wife, Bobbie, joined the Peace Corps. In 1971, he earned his law degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

In the 1970s Hobbs worked for the then newly formed Region 8 Office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and then the Natural Resources Section of the Colorado Attorney General’s Office. At both organizations, he worked on environmental law, aimed at cleaning up polluted water and air, including Denver’s “brown cloud.” Hobbs later was a partner at the law firm Davis, Graham and Stubbs in 1979 and became principal counsel to the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District. Hobbs and two others left Davis, Graham and Stubbs to establish their own firm of Hobbs, Trout and Raley in 1992 primarily to serve NCWCD.

In 1996, Hobbs was appointed to the Colorado Supreme Court, where he authored more than 250 majority opinions for the court in civil and criminal cases, including 30 water decisions. He chaired the Supreme Court’s Water Court Committee and its Judicial Advisory Council.

He currently serves as a Senior Water Judge assigned to the mediation of water cases and is Vice-President and Publications Chair of the Colorado Foundation for Water Education. He is a faculty member and Co-Director of the Environmental and Natural Resources Program at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law.