Waters And Water Rights

Originally published: Rochester: The Lawyers Cooperative Publishing Company, 1904. clxxx, 896; xvi, 897-1893; xiv, 1894-2956 pp. Reprint of the sole edition. Important treatise on water rights that examines rights based on relationships from the international to the community level as they affect water rights. This book has three parts: Part One: The Rights of States and Nations examines international rights and constitutional and statutory rights. Part Two: Rights Between Public and Individual, includes the public use of waterways, municipal water supply, drainage and rights of navigation. Part Three: Rights Between Individuals discusses the rights of riparian owners in watercourses, such as the right to dam a stream.

Much has been written about legal questions surrounding Indian water rights; this book now places them in the political framework that also includes water development. McCool analyzes the two conflicting doctrines relating to water use—one based on federal case law governing the rights of Indians on reservations, the other sanctioned by legislation and applied to non-Indians—based on the "iron triangles" of bureaucrats, legislators, and interest groups that dominate policy issues. He examines the way federal and BIA water development programs have reacted to conflict, competition, and opportunity from the turn of the century to the 1980s and updates the situation in an introduction written for this edition.

While state law almost exclusively governs the allocation of surface waters in the United States, there are also reserved rights, an important class of water rights created by federal law. Written by practitioners in private practice, government, and academia, each with extensive experience in the area, this focused book discusses the impact of federal environmental law on the use of water resources.

In the American West, water adjudication lawsuits are adversarial, expensive, and lengthy. Unsettled Waters is the first detailed study of water adjudications in New Mexico. The state envisioned adjudication as a straightforward accounting of water rights as private property. However, adjudication resurfaced tensions and created conflicts among water sovereigns at multiple scales. Based on more than ten years of fieldwork, this book tells a fascinating story of resistance involving communal water cultures, Native rights and cleaved identities, clashing experts, and unintended outcomes. Whether the state can alter adjudications to meet the water demands in the twenty-first century will have serious consequences.