A standing court that decides groundwater: who may pump how much from an aquifer that ignores the border above it, and whether extraction has outrun recharge. Its artefact is a filing — white bond stock, a numbered decree in a book serif, hairline rules, no boxes where whitespace will do.

Bound into the decree is the plate: a white-ground hydrogeologic cross-section in the flat diagram language USGS has published for decades. Water table, saturated zone, confining beds, each fill keyed to a legend. The tone stays deliberately unexcited. The drama is entirely in two numbers sitting next to each other in a table.