Idaho water rights legal matters
Every legal matter the Idaho Department of Water Resources lists on its active and archived matter indexes: delivery calls, mitigation plans, administrative actions, settlements, and the district court and Idaho Supreme Court cases that follow them, each with its docket, status, and dated filing trail.
Publisher
- Organization
- Idaho Department of Water Resources
- Publisher’s dataset
- IDWR Legal Matters: Delivery Calls, Mitigation Plans, and Court Cases
- File or API used
- https://idwr.idaho.gov/legal-actions/
- Retrieval script
scripts/fetch-idwr-legal-matters.py- Methodology
- https://idwr.idaho.gov/legal-matters/archived-matters/
Coverage
- Geography
- Idaho
- Time coverage
- 1940-2026 (filing dates); matter status as of 2026-09-08
- Update frequency
- Continuous; IDWR updates each matter's page as filings occur
- Published
- not stated
- Retrieved
- September 8, 2026
- License
- The compiled file on this page is CC BY 4.0. The underlying records: Idaho public record.
Measures
| Measure | What it measures | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| IDWR legal matters by type | Number of IDWR legal matters of each type, as of the retrieval date. A snapshot, not an annual series. | count |
| IDWR filings by year | Number of individual filings across all IDWR legal matters, by the calendar year of the filing date, excluding two filings whose published date is a typo (see caveats). | count |
Records
One row per IDWR legal matter, flattened from the matter's index entry and detail page. The nested list of individual filings is not carried here; filingCount and the first/last filing dates summarize it.
matter: Stable key for the matter, the last path segment of its IDWR URL. Unique across all rows; docket is not.type: IDWR's own category: Delivery Call, Mitigation Plan, Administrative, District Court, Supreme Court, or Settlements.docket: Docket number as IDWR lists it. Empty string when IDWR lists none.title: The matter's title as IDWR lists it.url: The matter's page on IDWR's site.status: 'active' or 'archived', per which IDWR index listed the matter as of the retrieved date. See the dataset caveats: this is time-scoped, not a claim about today.filingCount: Number of filings this puller parsed from the matter's detail page.firstFilingDate: ISO date of the earliest parsed filing with a plausible date (see caveats on two typo dates in the source). Empty string when no filing trail parsed.lastFilingDate: ISO date of the most recent parsed filing with a plausible date. Empty string when no filing trail parsed.
Caveats
- These are real disputes involving named parties, several of them live. This dataset reports docket status and filing dates exactly as IDWR publishes them; it does not characterize the merits of any matter, and nothing built from it should either.
- status ('active' or 'archived') is this puller's own assertion about which IDWR index a matter sat on as of the retrieved date, not a claim about the matter's posture today. IDWR decides which index a matter sits on, and a matter can stay on the active list for years, which reflects how long conjunctive administration takes rather than a backlog.
- The join key is the matter's URL slug, not the docket number: several matters carry no docket number at all, and at least one docket number is shared by two matters. `matter` in the records file is that slug and is unique across all rows; `docket` is not.
- Two of IDWR's own published filing dates are typos: an Administrative Bulletin dated December 3, 2104, and a procedural order on case CV-2015-1687 dated October 27, 2105. Both are visible verbatim in the raw HTML this puller fetched, but are excluded from each matter's firstFilingDate/lastFilingDate and from water.idwr_filings_by_year, because including them would put a 2015 case at the top of any sort by recent activity.
- firstFilingDate and lastFilingDate reflect only the filings this puller's regex parser could extract from a matter's page text; a matter's true filing history may run longer than what parsed cleanly. filingCount is the number of filings parsed, not a count IDWR itself publishes as a single figure.
- water.idwr_matters_by_type is a snapshot: a count of matters, by IDWR's own type label, as of the single retrieval date in this dataset's period. It is not a time series of when matters were opened.
- water.idwr_filings_by_year counts filings by the year of the filing date across all matters combined; it is not scoped to any one matter type.
Pages built on this dataset
Downloads
How to cite
Understand Idaho, “IDWR Legal Matters: Delivery Calls, Mitigation Plans, and Court Cases”, compiled from Idaho Department of Water Resources, IDWR Legal Matters: Delivery Calls, Mitigation Plans, and Court Cases. Retrieved September 8, 2026. https://understandidaho.com/data/idwr-legal-matters/. CC BY 4.0.
Cite Idaho Department of Water Resources directly for the figures themselves.
This page was last updated .