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# OTHER RELATIONS OF GEOLOGY TO LAW
It is often assumed that the economic geologist is exclusively interested in mineral resources. However, there are varied applications of geology outside of the mineral resource field,—to many kinds of engineering and construction operations, to soils, to water resources, and to transportation,—any of which may develop legal problems requiring geologic service. A few illustrative cases follow.
The classification of mineral materials in contracts presents many difficulties. A contract for a railway cut, for a canal, or for any other kind of excavation may specify different prices for removing different mineral materials. Too often these are stated in extremely crude and arbitrary terms, such as rock, hard rock, hardpan, earth, dirt, etc., without regard to the actual variety of materials to be dealt with. When, therefore, in the case of the Chicago drainage canal, the contractor encountered a soft shale and claimed compensation for rock excavation, geologists played a considerable part in the extensive litigation that followed in the attempt to define the facts of nature in terms of a contract which did not recognize them. In a railway cut through glacial drift or till, a contractor came suddenly upon a mass of till which had been so thoroughly cemented in place as to have all the resistance of rock. Litigation was then necessary to decide whether this should be classified as dirt or rock.
Rock and dirt slides of all kinds, met with in open-pit mining, canals, and other excavations, present engineering problems with a geologic basis. The kinds of rocks, their strength, porosity, and moisture content, the effects of weathering, and the structural conditions must be determined in order to ascertain the cause of the slides, and are features which figure largely in litigation arising from troubles of this sort.
Both federal and state laws give the right to lateral and vertical support. When, therefore, adjacent or underlying excavations cause earth movements in a neighbor's property, litigation is likely to ensue and the geologist is likely to be called in. The long-wall method of coal mining, extensively practiced in certain parts of the United States, is slowly withdrawing support from the ground overlying the coal seams, resulting in damages to surface structures and in some cases to overlying mineral deposits. Extensive litigation has been the result, and the future seems to promise more of it. In certain metal-mining camps, where considerable amounts of materials have been mined to great depths, caves and cracking in the surface are reaching over unexpectedly wide areas, again threatening litigation.
The laws relating to the use of surface and underground waters touch the geologic conditions in many ways. The permanent lowering or raising of a water level through mining or damming may require a careful geological analysis of the underground conditions affecting the movements of ground-water. The use of streams for placer mining, as in California, has resulted in formulation of laws and in extensive litigation, again requiring analysis of geologic conditions.
In fact geologists, perhaps more than any other group, have come to realize how many and how varied are the ways in which people get into conflict in using the earth on which they live.