Climate change soon will begin to disrupt the settled expectations of humans. Rising sea levels, persistent drought where water has been abundant, longer growing seasons in some areas and invasive species elsewhere-the list of anticipated changes that will play out over the landscape for decades is long, and many inevitably will give rise to the need to formulate new policies and resolve new kinds of disputes.'Demands on the legal system will be intense and long term, but is the law up to the task? If it is, it will be at least in part because the legal system proves to be resilient and adaptive. These two properties-resilience and adaptive capacity-have become central themes for researchers studying a wide array of ecological, social-ecological, and social systems under the banner of resilience theory. 2 More broadly, they are important focal points of the science of complex adaptive systems as it has been applied in natural and social sciences. 3 Legal scholars recently have begun to consider how these properties and the research from other disciplines might inform the design of laws for discrete legal application,'but no