08/27/2026
Every River Needs a Good Lawyer
“We’re not in the league of the real water warriors. But we’re Californians, we’re outdoor people. We always felt the loss of clear-running healthy rivers and streams would be a loss to future generations.”
For Jim Genes and his brother Dean, a love for rivers instilled in childhood has become a belief they have spent most of their adult lives acting on.
The two brothers grew up in Fresno in the late 1960s and early 1970s, fishing for bluegill and bass on the San Joaquin River with Fifi, a local farmer’s frog-chasing poodle. Their father taught them to fly-fish on the Upper Kings.
Both became whitewater kayakers and watched the West’s postwar dam-building spree take away the rivers they knew.
In 1979, the New Melones Dam was completed on the Stanislaus River, drowning one of California’s most popular whitewater runs. Jim and Dean never dreamed the Stanislaus could be lost under a dam. While others did fight the New Melones Dam, they paid no attention to it, until it was too late.
When the dam builders came for the Upper Kings, Jim and Dean got involved in the fight.
“Over the years, Dean and I have donated to many water and charitable causes that we’re interested in,” Jim says. “We’re not wealthy, and these smaller organizations are forever just trying to raise money to keep the lights on.”
So they went looking for a way to make an impact on a larger scale. The answer was a shift: from writing small checks to various organizations, to directly funding the people who might one day argue to protect rivers and watersheds.
“People only do what the law requires them to do. That’s where law and policy come in—and water lawyers can have that larger impact,” Jim says. “So we asked ourselves, if we can have maximum impact through law, how can we do that?”
What they landed on was clever and specific—the summer between a law student’s first and second year.
“Law students in between their first and second year are super enthusiastic,” Jim says. “So we wanted to create an internship between the first and second year to get students excited about water policy by exposing them to it.”
Public interest internships have long paid less than their private-sector counterparts. Students drawn to public interest work often cannot afford the summer that would launch them into it. A fund like the one provided by Jim and Dean Genes removes that calculation. It also gives students room to spend a summer inside a field they may not have heard of and perhaps find their calling.
The brothers made many cold calls, working from an environmental law directory. Eventually, Peter Drekmeier, policy director of the Tuolumne River Trust (now called Yosemite Rivers Alliance), connected Jim and Dean with Molly Melius at Stanford Law School. Melius, a lecturer in law, manages the Environmental and Natural Resources Law and Policy Program and directs Stanford's Lawyers for a Sustainable Economy initiative. Her counterpart at UC Davis, Professor Karrigan Bork, was a law school classmate. The brothers brought their idea to both Melius and Börk.
“Thanks to the support and creativity of Stanford Law School, we were able to create summer internship programs at both Stanford and UC Davis exposing first- and second-year law students to river and watershed policy,” Jim says.
The Genes Family Fund was established in 2022 and has since supported twenty-two Stanford Law students in obtaining summer funding to do this essential policy work, with up to six more fellows to be named in fall 2026. Internship hosts have included the U.S. Department of Justice, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic.
Because the internship program runs concurrently at UC Davis, that twenty-two figure counts only the Stanford side. As of fall 2026, another twenty-six law students have participated in the Davis program, which also focuses on river and watershed policy.
And while many of the recipients arrive at law school and their 1L summer knowing what field of work they want to go into, not all do. For quite a few, this summer experience is what directs them. To date, at least six of the Stanford students have gone on to work in environmental law.
One UC Davis student had hoped to work in environmental, tribal, and community-based law, and thanks to an internship the Genes Family Fund supported, she connected with the job of her dreams. In 2025, two Stanford Law students worked on an amicus brief filed on behalf of Professor Börk and other UC Davis faculty in a Ninth Circuit water case, San Luis Obispo Coastkeeper v. County of San Luis Obispo.
While these achievements are gratifying, Jim and Dean don't consider them the only measures of the program's success. All law students who participate, regardless of the direction they choose for their futures, come to understand, on some level, the importance of water policy and watershed conservation.
“We’re playing the long game,” Jim says. “We want to expose young people who may come back to water rights at a later point in their lives—be it via career, volunteering, or philanthropy. An internship between the first and second year is a very good time to plant the seed.”
Jim and Dean get to see where the students are placed each summer and where they land afterward. It is philanthropy with an immediate return. To that end, they welcome anyone who wants to contribute to the fund, or even adopt it, name and all.
Their aspiration now is to transform their philanthropic support into a permanent Stanford endowment that funds this internship for law students in perpetuity, and then to do the same at UC Davis, so that both internships outlast them.
“Rivers and their watersheds shaped us and have always been an important part of our lives. We want to ensure future generations have the same opportunities we did,” Jim says.
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