Legal Control of Water Resources highlights the cutting edge issues of water law, while providing a comprehensive survey of the field. The book has been thoroughly updated major water marketing developments. There is extended coverage of ongoing efforts to settle Indian water rights claims. Finally, the new edition will include revised introductory materials on topics such as climate change and desalination developments. to reflect major new court decisions and legislation. The Fourth Edition deals with cutting-edge issues such as interstate water disputes on the Great Lakes, the Rio Grande, and in the Southeastern United States. New material has been added on water and urban growth management, environment/property rights conflicts, and
Cases and Materials on Water Law, steeped in water history, honors its distinguished author lineage by maintaining the book's longstanding tradition of focused instruction on property rights in water, covering appropriative and riparian principles, groundwater, interstate allocation, and federal-state relations. The Tenth Edition integrates these principles into today's regulatory framework, addressing the need for sustainable management and increased protection of the environment and public rights. The new edition is reorganized to prioritize student learning, with fewer and more focused notes and several new principal cases.
The 28-page Layperson's Guide to Water Rights Law, recognized as the most thorough explanation of California water rights law available to non-lawyers, traces the authority for water flowing in a stream or reservoir, from a faucet or into an irrigation ditch through the complex web of California water rights. It includes historical information on the development of water rights law, sections on surface water rights and groundwater rights, a description of the different agencies involve in water rights, and a section on the issues not only shaped by water rights decisions but that are also driving changes in water rights. Includes chronology of landmark cases and legislation and an extensive glossary.
Water resources were central to England's precocious economic development in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and then again in the industrial, transport, and urban revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Each of these periods saw a great deal of legal conflict over water rights, often between domestic, agricultural, and manufacturing interests competing for access to flowing water. From 1750 the common-law courts developed a large but unstable body of legal doctrine, specifying strong property rights in flowing water attached to riparian possession, and also limited rights to surface and underground waters. The new water doctrines were built from older concepts of common goods and the natural rights of ownership, deriving from Roman and Civilian law, together with the English sources of Bracton and Blackstone. Water law is one of the most Romanesque parts of English law, demonstrating the extent to which Common and Civilian law have commingled. Water law stands as a refutation of the still-common belief that English and European law parted ways irreversibly in the twelfth century. Getzler also describes the economic as well as the legal history of water use from early times, and examines the classical problem of the relationship between law and economic development. He suggests that water law was shaped both by the impact of technological innovations and by economic ideology, but above all by legalism.
Water conflicts plague every river in the West, with the thorniest dilemmas found in the many basins with Indian reservations and reserved water rightsÑrights usually senior to all others in over-appropriated rivers. Negotiations and litigation over tribal water rights shape the future of both Indian and non-Indian communities throughout the region, and intense competition for limited water supplies has increased pressure to address tribal water claims. Much has been written about Indian water rights; for the many tribal and non-Indian stakeholders who rely upon western water, this book now offers practical guidance on how to negotiate them. By providing a comprehensive synthesis of western water issues, tribal water disputes, and alternative approaches to dispute resolution, it offers a valuable sourcebook for allÑtribal councils, legislators, water professionals, attorneysÑwho need a basic understanding of the complexities of the situation. The book reviews the history, current status, and case law related to western water while revealing strategies for addressing water conflicts among tribes, cities, farms, environmentalists, and public agencies. Drawing insights from the process, structure, and implementation of water rights settlements currently under negotiation or already agreed to, it presents a detailed analysis of how these cases evolve over time. It also provides a wide range of contextual materials, from the nuts and bolts of a Freedom of Information Act request to the hydrology of irrigation. It also includes contributed essays by expert authors on special topics, as well as interviews with key individuals active in water management and tribal water cases. As stakeholders continue to battle over rights to water, this book clearly addresses the place of Native rights in the conflict. Negotiating Tribal Water Rights offers an unsurpassed introduction to the ongoing challenges these claims present to western water management while demonstrating the innovative approaches that states, tribes, and the federal government have taken to fulfill them while mitigating harm to both non-Indians and the environment.
In 2017 four rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, India, and Colombia were given the status of legal persons, and there was a recent attempt to extend these rights to the Colorado River in the USA. Understanding the implications of creating legal rights for rivers is an urgent challenge for both water resource management and environmental law. Giving rivers legal rights means the law can see rivers as legal persons, thus creating new legal rights which can then be enforced. When rivers are legally people, does that encourage collaboration and partnership between humans and rivers, or establish rivers as another competitor for scarce resources? To assess what it means to give rivers legal rights and legal personality, this book examines the form and function of environmental water managers (EWMs). These organisations have legal personality, and have been active in water resource management for over two decades. EWMs operate by acquiring water rights from irrigators in rivers where there is insufficient water to maintain ecological health. EWMs can compete with farmers for access to water, but they can also strengthen collaboration between traditionally divergent users of the aquatic environment, such as environmentalists, recreational fishers, hunters, farmers, and hydropower. This book explores how EWMs use the opportunities created by giving nature legal rights, such as the ability to participate in markets, enter contracts, hold property, and enforce those rights in court. However, examination of the EWMs unearths a crucial and unexpected paradox: giving legal rights to nature may increase its legal power, but in doing so it can weaken community support for protecting the environment in the first place. The book develops a new conceptual framework to identify the multiple constructions of the environment in law, and how these constructions can interact to generate these unexpected outcomes. It explores EWMs in the USA and Australia as examples, and assesses the implications of creating legal rights for rivers for water governance. Lessons from the EWMs, as well as early lessons from the new ‘river persons,’ show how to use the law to improve river protection and how to begin to mitigate the problems of the paradox.
Burton dissects the irreconcilable conflict of interest within the Interior Department (between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Bureau of Indian Affairs). He also examines the methods of managing disputes in contemporary cases and offers original policy recommendations that include establishing an Indian Water Rights Commission to help with the paradoxical task now facing the federal government--restoring to tribes the water resources it earlier helped give away.
