Environmental dispute resolution 4,500 years ago

Fragment of the Stele of the Vultures, c. 2450 BCE

The latest Yearbook of International Environmental Law has an interesting contribution by Peter Sand, "Environmental Dispute Resolution 4,500 Years Ago: The Case of Lagash v Umma". Sand begins:

Legal historians sometimes contend—albeit tongue-in-cheek—that ‘environmental law has no history’ or that the origins of international treaty law in this field, at any rate, hardly date back more than two centuries. It is true of course that the very term ‘environmental law’ etymologically did not come into use, in any language, until the mid-twentieth century. Yet it is equally true that the earth’s natural resources have been a subject of claims for human exploitation and societal management (including law) for millennia before, as this brief note will aim to illustrate.

(The first quote is from my own chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Legal History, "Historical Analysis in Environmental Law". Let me note that I meant this contention not tongue-in-cheek but in the sense more felicitously captured by Éric Naim-Gesbert, cited by Sand: environmental law has a past without a history. See the abstract of my chapter.)

Sand continues (footnotes omitted):

The Musée du Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London hold tangible evidence of the world’s first known legal agreement on boundary water resources—that is, the Mesilim Treaty, which was concluded in approximately 2550 BC between the two Mesopotamian states of Lagash and Umma—‘the oldest international treaty of which there is a reliable record.’ The terms of the treaty have been preserved in cuneiform inscriptions on limestone cones and a ‘stele’ commemorating Lagash’s victorious battle enforcing the interstate agreement....

Mesilim (or Me-salim, born circa 2600 BC) was the ruler of Kish, a kingdom further to the north of Lagash and Umma, which held a traditional ‘hegemonial’ position in the loose alliance of small neighbouring Sumerian states in the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, south of what was to become Babylon. In that capacity, he served as arbiter in a protracted dispute between the two city states of Lagash and Umma, and it is the text of the arbitral award attributed to him, accepted under oaths by the litigants to their respective deities, that then appears as Mesilim’s rules in the cuneiform inscriptions preserved. The main subject of the award was the inter-state boundary between the two states, alongside a major irrigation canal.... The dispute concerned both water resources (with Umma upstream and Lagash downstream) and a strip of adjoining agricultural land in the fertile Guedin valley... that was cultivated by Umma under lease from Lagash for barley production.

Sand goes on to describe the breakdown of the treaty and compare it to the modern Lake Lanoux Arbitration and ensuing agreements. More on this in an earlier guest post by Sand here.

Call for applications: Masters/Doctoral/Postdoctoral fellowship -- Water Law in Mandate Palestine

This call is for a one-year or semester-long fellowship for a graduate student wishing to work on the history of water law in Israel/Palestine or a related topic (such as the history of water law in a related jurisdiction, the history of related areas of law in Israel/Palestine, legal transfers in the British Empire, etc.). The fellowship is part of my Israel Science Foundation-funded research project: "Private and Public Water Rights in Mandate Palestine and Early Israel". 

TAU Law and its Berg Institute for Law and History are vibrant and collegial centers of legal history where candidates can expect interactions with a variety of interesting scholars in the field, and access to a wide range of historical and legal databases is available.

Eligible candidates will be one of the following:

• a recent recipient of a doctoral degree in a relevant field wishing to spend a year of postdoctoral research at TAU Law;

• a candidate for a research degree in another university, or in another faculty of TAU, wishing to spend a period as a visiting researcher at TAU Law;

• a candidate for an LLM or PhD degree TAU Law's Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies;

• an applicant for an LLM or PhD at the Meitar Center (candidates must apply separately to the Meitar Center for admission, and receipt of the fellowship will be contingent on acceptance to a degree program).

• a cover letter describing a research agenda and its relevance to the topic of the history of water law in Israel/Palestine

• c.v.

• transcript of grades from last degree

• 2 letters of recommendation sent directly to berg@tauex.tau.ac.il

• writing sample

The fellow will receive a monthly stipend of between approximately ILS 4,500 (for masters students) and 11,000 a month, in accordance with university rules and subject to available matching funds, and also some funding for travel to conferences. TAU students will also receive a tuition waiver. The fellow may re-apply for funding in subsequent years, university rules permitting.

The fellow will be expected to participate in weekly workshops and seminars at TAU, and in general be in residence at TAU.

Interested individuals should send the following documents (in English or Hebrew) to berg@tauex.tau.ac.il by 15 Feb 2019:

Notification of the fellowship award will be made quickly.

Please address any inquiries to berg@tauex.tau.ac.il.

Savagery, civilization, and property V: Colonial development and Neo-Malthusian conservationism

In the last post in this series we saw how Enlightenment-era stadial thought was passed on to modern commons theory through the aboriginal property rights debate among twentieth-century ecologists. Today I'll discuss what I believe two more lines of influence. (The full article is here.)

The first was by way of the work of anthropologists and scientists associated with British colonial development efforts under the aegis of colonial administrator Malcolm Hailey. Lord Hailey, after a career in the Indian Civil Service, was tapped to run the African Survey in the 1930s and the Colonial Research Committee in the 1940s, and was an advocate of multidisciplinary social science research, particularly anthropological, in the colonies.

The staff of Hailey’s African Survey seem to have created something of a nexus for stadial thought in the context of colonial development. London School of Economics anthropologist Lucy Mair’s chapter on land made heavy use of the stadial framework for considering “the evolution of the most suitable form of land tenure”:

Lucy Mair

In some areas land custom is changing rapidly under the influence of new conditions, such as the increase of the pressure of population or the spread of a market economy. These changes will eventually involve official intervention . . . ; the need must, for example, be envisaged for the definition and recording of title . . .

There is nothing peculiar to Africa in the general direction which the evolution of land custom is taking; its adjustment in response to economic changes is a natural process which would occur independently of any action taken by the administration. 

In Mair’s analysis, traditional, communal forms of African land tenure needed to progress to more private rights in order to encourage development:

All discussions on the subject agree as to the value of giving security to the occupier of land, and the further advantage of what is generally termed the individualization of tenures. It has been urged on different occasions that the extended system of rights, vested in the family or group, has proved in Africa to be an obstacle to improved agriculture.

Strikingly, Mair also reported on Hardin’s tragedy of the commons, avant la lettre, herdsman and all:

Those who have had to deal with East African conditions have added the . . . argument that there is little incentive to natives to reduce their live-stock in order to prevent the wastage of pasture and consequent erosion, since nothing done by the individual will avail unless his neighbours take corresponding action . . . 

Moreover, in a remarkable anticipation of later legal scholarship that highlighted potential “comedies of the commons” and “tragedies” of its disappearance,  she also warned of the advantages of common property in some situations: “The question of rights over grazing commonages presents its own difficulties; the partition of grazing grounds into small units would be a bar to the adoption of that rotational use of pasture which many hold to be the best preventive of erosion in East African conditions.”

Irrigation systems: Moors v British

Erum Sattar recently posted "From the Moors to the New World: Lessons from Dynamic Water Sharing for a Colonial-Era System in the Indus". The abstract:

This project is a close study of the legal and political aspects of management of water resources in semi-arid environments. The British in India laid the foundations of the modern irrigation system in what is now India and Pakistan. In semi-arid environments, the bulk of agriculture relies on irrigation, as it did in Spain under the Moors. We can observe a stark divide in the use of laws and institutions to manage natural resources in different societies, at different times and places. Some societies have managed in a way that achieved prosperity and long-term sustainability. Others have mismanaged so as to create ecological devastation and social stagnation. The Moors of Spain created a vibrant civilization in the Middle Ages that lasted nearly eight hundred years. One of the reasons for the dynamism of their civilization was their judicious management of water resources on which foundation they created a thriving agricultural economy that produced the economic surplus for their vibrant urban culture. Of particular interest for my project is what I regard as the essence of Moorish water management: its management of scarcity by borrowing principles from the great cradles of civilization, Mesopotamia and the Nile, which built abundance in harsh environments, along with principles of use, reuse and justice as conceived of in the Quran. These sets of principles, I shall argue, yielded a society that wasted no drop of its precious waters and adopted and innovated to create new technologies, infrastructure, norms and institutions. The British in India meanwhile laid the foundations of water-sharing in a way that to this day reifies rural hierarchy and leads to social and economic stagnation while devastating the environment. In this project of comparison, I draw relevant lessons from Moorish water systems for today's management of water resources across countries.

Irrigation channel in Spain

The earliest boundary water treaty

Figure 1: 
Memorial cone of the Mesilim Treaty

Thanks to Peter Sand for contributing this post!

[Footnotes after the jump.]

The Musée du Louvre in Paris holds tangible evidence of the world’s first known legal agreement on boundary water resources: viz., the Mesilim Treaty, concluded in the 25th century B.C. between the two Mesopotamian states of Lagash and Umma. The terms of the treaty have been preserved as cuneiform inscriptions on a limestone cone (figure 1) and a stele commemorating Lagash’s victorious battle enforcing the treaty.[1] Fragments of both artifacts were excavated in 1878-1912 by French archeologists on sites at Tellō (Tall Lawh, Dhi Qar Governate in Southern Iraq), the ancient temple-city of Girsu, once the capital of Lagash.[2] The inscriptions, transcribed and translated into French, German, Italian and English,[3] turned out to match several other texts on corresponding archeological finds of the period. The key exhibit, the so-called ‘Stele of the Vultures’, depicts Lagash ruler E’anatum leading his army, and vultures devouring slain Umma warriors (figures 2 and 3).

Mesilim [or Mesalim, born ca. 2600 B.C.] was the ruler of Kish, a kingdom further to the north of Lagash and Umma, which held a traditional ‘hegemonic’ position in the loose alliance of small adjoining Sumerian city-states in the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, south of what was to become Babylon.[4] Because of the prevailing precarious rainfall conditions, the agricultural economy of the entire basin area has always been crucially dependent on irrigation, mainly from the ‘great Tigris’, through an elaborate system of canals and levees which inevitably require close inter-community cooperation. The geographic focus of the bilateral Lagash-Umma agreement, concluded under Mesilim’s authority as external arbiter, was the fertile Gu-edena valley, roughly ten by four kilometers wide and irrigated by Tigris waters from a canal named Lum-magirnunta on the border between Umma and Lagash, with boundaries marked by stone steles.

Figure 2: Stele of the Vultures

Figure 3: Stele of the Vultures

Part of the treaty was a crop-sharing arrangement for a portion of boundary land (some eleven square kilometers) downstream on Lagash territory, that was cultivated by Umma under lease, against payment of an annual rental fee (máš, calculated in silver-shekel equivalents of barley crops) to cover the costs of canal maintenance.[5] However, when Umma repeatedly refused to honor its accumulated tenancy debts, hostilities broke out, resulting in partial destruction of the canal and in unilateral diversions of water upstream. In several successive military confrontations (‘the first known war in history that was, in essence, fought about water’),[6] Umma was ultimately defeated by Lagash (first under the leadership of E’anatum, ca. 2470 B.C.; and later under his nephew Enmetena, ca. 2430 B.C.),[7] and was forced to accept the reconstruction (and extension) of the canal and the reinstatement of the boundaries as originally drawn up by Mesilim.

Alas, the treaty so renewed and ‘writ in stone’, and the peace so re-established, does not seem to have survived for long, and was eventually overtaken and mooted by external political events (the Akkadian/Sargonic invasions) in subsequent generations. Even so, the agreement has been hailed as ‘the first international arbitration’,[8] and as ‘the oldest treaty of which there is a reliable record’.[9] It remains a unique early attempt at resolving a dispute over boundary waters by formal reference to a superior spiritual order (in this case, the deities of both parties, repeatedly ‘sworn to’ in the text), and hence may indeed qualify as a precursor of international law in this field – well over 4,000 years ago.[10]

--------------------------

Property and water in Sasanian and early Islamic Iraq

Last August's Environment and History had an article by Michele Campopiano, "Cooperation and Private Enterprise in Water Management in Iraq: Continuity and Change between the Sasanian and Early Islamic Periods (Sixth to Tenth Centuries)". The article has a lot on the property system of the Sasanians and its relationship to water management. The abstract:

This article shows that the management of water resources in Late Sasanian and Early Islamic Iraq (sixth to tenth centuries ad) implied the participation of local communities and the mutual cooperation of landholders. The organisation of water management in the Late Sasanian Period (sixth to seventh centuries) depended on a highly complex system of interaction between local communities, aristocratic rulers and the imperial bureaucracy. This interaction allowed the government to gather information from different regions of the empire and to understand the needs of the different stakeholders. As such, the system provided a favourable institutional framework for the expansion of irrigated agriculture. The system changed when landholding conditions were transformed in the Early Islamic period, during the ninth century. These institutional transformations allowed the influence of a group of tax-farmers and merchant-bankers to increase. Irrigation policies were therefore bent to the interests of these new elites, which often lay in short-term gains rather than in long-term success. The article suggests that, in the long run, these socio-economic and institutional changes contributed substantially to the breakdown of the agricultural system in Ancient Iraq.

The dry bed of the Nahrawan Canal near Samarra, photographed by Gertrude Bell in 1909

Irrigation rights in medieval Islam

Barada River in Damascus

Yehoshua Frenkel, a professor at University of Haifa and member of our local environmental history forum, recently pointed me to a 2011 chapter by Boaz Shoshan on water law, "Mini-Dramas by the Water: On Irrigation Rights and Disputes in Fifteenth-Century Damsacus". The abstract:

Apart from discussions of matters of irrigation in legal works, medieval sources provide us with little information on the human dynamics and social interaction that are an integral part of irrigation systems. Some cases involving water were straightforward, whereas others were not. A laconic statement about a settlement (ṣulḥ) that was reached in Muḥarram 886/March 1481, in the presence of the viceroy of Damascus and the chief qāḍīs, between one Kamāl al-Dīn and Shihāb al-Dīn al-Muḥawjib concerning water that was coercively (zulman) diverted from the al-Manshīya river canal, provides us with only a faint echo about such conflict. Fortunately, on other occasions of water disputes Ibn Tawq paints a more detailed picture that allows some idea about their nature. This chapter discusses such disputes.

Shoshan is mostly interested in the social dynamics of the water disputes, but he also notes this information about the law "in the books":

That codifying regulations of water supply was a desideratum in the medieval Islamic world may be concluded from the Persian Kitāb-i Qāni ("The book of Qānāt"), written possibly in the eleventh century A.D., which purpose was to protect owners of subterranean aqueducts, that is, sub-surface canals that were engineered to collect ground water and direct it through a gently sloping underground conduit to surface canals.

The Israeli (and Ottoman and Islamic) public trust doctrine

Chapter heading from the Hebrew translation of the Mejelle by Frumkin

Zafrir Rinat, Haaretz's environment reporter, recently wrote about the story of Moshe Puterman's arrest for entering a municipal beach without paying the admission fee, and the court decision which might be thought of as a foundational document of an Israeli public trust doctrine:

One day in 1959, Puterman and a few friends went to the seashore in Herzliya. As was usual at that time, the municipal attendants demanded that they pay in order to enter. But Puterman was fed up with paying, and he snuck in – with the attendants hot on his heels.

“There was a scuffle and I escaped, but they caught me and I was taken into custody,” he recalled recently. “I told the attendants that this was a public area and that they were acting like thieves. It upset me to pay for something that should have come to me by right.”

Puterman was convicted in Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court for refusing to pay and for resisting the attendants with force. He was ordered to pay a fine. But he did not let the matter rest there.

“My lawyer was the late Avraham Socholovsky, who was also a personal friend,” Puterman told me. “As we left the courtroom, I asked him, ‘Do we keep going?’ ‘Of course,’ he replied.”

Socholovsky appealed, and Tel Aviv District Court Judge Jacob Gavison overturned the earlier conviction. [see excerpts of the decision below-DS]

*****

The ruling became a precedent that enshrined the public’s right to free access to the seashores. According to attorney Amit Bracha, executive director of Adam Teva V’Din: the Israel Union for Environmental Defense, the verdict led to legislation, in 1964, that prohibits charging an entry fee to beaches where only basic services – lifeguards, toilets, showers – are provided (though a fee can be charged for parking near a beach). It also led to the High Court of Justice decision in a petition filed by the IUED against the Interior Ministry more than 10 years ago. The court then instructed the ministry to order local governments to uphold the law concerning free entry to beaches. Nevertheless, there are a few beaches that still charge an entry fee.

I've translated below some excerpts from Judge Gavison's decision, which, it is worth noting, predates the well-known line of New Jersey beach access cases by a decade (see here, pp. 17-22). (I'd also like to note that Gavison taught law at the Tel Aviv extension of Hebrew University, the predecessor of the institution at which I teach.) Two points of contact with the American public trust doctrine seem interesting:

Hundley (and Pisani) vs. Worster

The special issue of Western Legal History we've been covering has an interesting survey of Norris Hundley's work by Donald Pisani. A highlight:

Hundley understood that the past should be treated on its own terms, not used as a whipping boy for concerns of the present. He was as judicious and fair-minded as he was prolific. The Great Thirst addresses Donald Worster's thesis in Rivers of Empire (1985). Worster argued that in the American West, a marriage between government and private capital created a "Leviathan" that served the rich and powerful at the expense of common citizens. Not only did the great water projects of the twentieth century transform the face of California and create an unsustainable economy that centralized people in a few great cities; those projects also subverted the region's democratic promise. Worster branded the West a "hydraulic society" and likened it to the empires of the ancient Middle East, all of which assumed that they could engineer deserts out of existence but learned otherwise.

The Great Thirst raised profound and depressing questions about the future of natural resource planning and management in the United States, not just in California. To some extent, Hundley agreed with Worster. He recognized that the arrogance, greed, and conceit of water planners played a huge role in the history of California, and that the state's great wealth had come at a very high price. He also acknowledged the power of the federal government in water development. Huge agricultural water subsidies, for example, had promoted social inequalities, including a permanent underclass of farm laborers and their families in the San Joaquin Valley. But Hundley denied that the water kings conned an unwary public into supporting water projects, or that the problem was too much government. Indeed, the public consistently welcomed such projects and voted for them as a tool of economic growth and greater wealth. He thought that a more centralized, unified power over water might serve the public interest better than the splintered authority characterized by dozens of governing boards and local districts.

Islamic law and natural resources

In an ecumenical spirit, following yesterday's post on Presbyterianism, today we note the recent publication in Environment and History of Sabrina Joseph's "Islamic Law and the Management of Natural Resources in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Ottoman Syria". The abstract:

Drawing on evidence from seventeenth and eighteenth century Islamic legal sources in Ottoman Syria, the paper examines the laws governing the use and management of natural resources, particularly for agricultural production. Islamic jurists played a key role in mediating the state's relationship with local populations and legitimising local practices and customs that governed land and water use. Often, this translated into laws which prioritised protecting the public good while not necessarily challenging existing power structures. The paper also explains how pious endowments (waqfs) were integral to the management of land and water resources in Ottoman Syria. The study sheds light on indigenous narratives regarding the environment and how Islamic law adapted to social and economic circumstances on the ground. Ultimately, the law contributed to ensuring the socio-cultural sustainability of ‘management’ strategies implemented by local populations vis à vis the environment. 

Sultan's Pool, Jerusalem, 1943 (LOC)
(a 5-min. bike ride from my house, looks a bit different today)

Water law at the UK Supreme Court

Nandini Chatterjee recently posted at Imperial & Global Forum on an exhibition opening today at the UK Supreme Court in London, "A Court at the Crossroads of Empire: Stories from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council", which she is co-curating. The exhibition website explains that it:

)

uses a range of case studies to explore how the JCPC served as an evolving hub of the British Empire - both shaping and shaped by a wide range of different cultures and communities - and how the judges serving on the JCPC applied the common law to both translate and mediate at the crossroads of Britain's colonial interests.

The exhibition includes panels created by my colleague Assaf Likhovski and me on the development of water law and constitutional law in Mandate Palestine through the 1926 Urtas Springs case (Jerusalem-Jaffa District Commissioner v Murra).

I also wrote about the case in a recent article:

Serious objections were raised... [to] the transfer of water from the village of Artas (spelled “Urtas” in the official documents of the time), south of Bethlehem, to Jerusalem. Arab opposition to the attempt of the Jerusalem Water Supply Department to ameliorate the shortage by pumping water from Artas led to a fiercely fought legal battle....

Realizing that the water plan was open to legal attack, the Palestine government enacted legislation, known as the Urtas Springs Ordinance, 1925, empowering the High Commissioner to authorize the Jerusalem municipality to take water from the Artas spring for a period of up to 12 months. Water sufficient for the Artas inhabitants’ domestic uses, animal watering, and irrigation of tree plantations was immune to taking. While water used for irrigating annual crops could be taken for the Jerusalem system, the Ordinance ordered that compensation be paid for damage to crops and for losses from inability to plant crops due to the reduction in water available to the village. Disputes between Artas residents and the Jerusalem water department over the level of compensation were to be decided by an arbitrator to be appointed by the High Commissioner, with no appeal from his decision.

Moghannam E. Moghannam, the plaintiffs' attorney

With a statute explicitly authorizing the water diversion, the only possible legal arguments available to the Artas residents were of the constitutional type, impugning the validity of the legislation itself. The Artas petitioners contended that the Urtas Ordinance violated their civil rights by taking private property—water—and providing an inadequate compensation mechanism, with no right of recourse to the regular courts of the land. Such a taking was in violation, they argued, of Article 2 of the League of Nations Mandate, which made the Mandatory responsible for “safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.” Since Palestine Order in Council (Article 17(I)(3)) provided that “no Ordinance shall be promulgated which shall be in any way repugnant to or inconsistent with the provisions of the Mandate”, they claimed, this violation of the Mandate invalidated the legislation in question.

Water law and conflict in Mandate Palestine

As missiles fly overhead, I thought I'd post on something relevant to what's happening in my corner of the world. Though I'm not a big believer in the thesis that competition over water is at the root of conflict in the Middle East (while it's a popular theme in the press, academics have repeatedly debunked it), the converse is probably true: conflict in the region almost certainly exacerbates water problems in this relatively arid environment.

I recently published "Water law in British-ruled Palestine", which outlines the basic shape of legal conflict over water in Palestine in the years in which it was under British rule (1917-1948) (an ungated version is here). The abstract:

 This article surveys the water law of Palestine under British rule, identifying the legal norms governing the use of water and explaining some of the factors shaping the development of this area of the law. It argues that despite their lack of official lawmaking power, Arabs and Jews succeeded in decisively shaping the course taken by water law in this period. After surveying the Ottoman water law in force when the British took power in 1917, the article examines influential court decisions in a case brought by the Arab residents of the village Artas against government expropriation of water, and explains the significance of this litigation for the subsequent development of Palestine’s water law. It then discusses British initiatives meant to reform water law and subject the country’s water to state control, plans frustrated by the opposition of Zionist groups fearful of increased government regulation. It closes by noting that water law was made in this colonial context neither by imposition from above nor by resistance from below, but by intervention of subject peoples at the highest levels of official lawmaking.

Jewish National Fund poster of the water tower, a Zionist icon

French environmental protection

H-Environment recently posted "Environmental Protection in a Light-Green Country", Chris Pearson's review of Une protection de l'environnement  à la française? (Charles-Francois Mathis & Jean Francois Mouhot eds., Éditions Champ Vallon, 2013), a collection of essays on the history of environmental protection in France and its empire. Pearson writes:

As well as asking what is distinctive about French nature protection and environmentalism, particularly in comparison to Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, many of the chapters engage with Michael Bess’s compelling and influential arguments in The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000 (2003). According to Bess, France has become a “light-green society” in which environmentalist ideas are widespread but shallow; “the result is a social order in which virtually every activity is touched by environmentalist concerns--but modestly, moderately, without upsetting the existing state of things too much.” It is noteworthy how the volume turns towards Bess and other Anglophone environmental historians for inspiration, rather than the approaches outlined by the Annales school or other French historians interested in the human-nature relations, such as Andrée Corvol.

Colorado and Israeli water law

If you'll be in the Denver area this week, you might be interested in the Colorado Water Congress Annual Convention, at which I'll be speaking twice.

Elwood Mead was an influential figure in the development
of Colorado water law in the 19th century,
and in Palestine and Israel in the 20th

This Wednesday afternoon I'll be speaking on "How Colorado Water Law Came to Israel", where I'll talk about how the legal rules and principles developed in nineteenth-century Colorado influenced policymakers around the world, why the British rulers of Mandate Palestine looked to the western U.S. for a model of water law, and Zionist attitudes to the importation of this model into Palestine and then Israel.

On Thursday evening I'll be giving the keynote presentation at the CSU Water Resources Archive "Water Tables" event, where I'll talk about my book, The Colorado Doctrine: Water Rights, Corporations, and Distributive Justice on the American Frontier (Yale UP, 2012).

Environment at ASLH - Report

I wasn't able to make it to all the environment-related papers at this weekend's annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History in Miami, but here's a brief report of the papers I heard:

Friday morning's exchange panel with the Israeli History and Law Association had two papers on environmental topics. Yair Sagy and Nadia Tzimerman's “‘The Responsible American Oil Men’ and the Israeli Petroleum Law of 1952” uncovered the decisive influence of an American oilman and his Israeli son-in-law on the shape of the statute governing oil and gas exploration and exploitation in Israel, a law which has emerged from its longstanding obscurity in the wake of recent major finds of natural gas off Israel's coast. (Sagy and Tzimerman's research was the subject of recent press coverage in Israel, where legal and political battles over the law are raging.) Orli Sela's “TVA on the Jordan River: American Influence on Water Resources Management and Regulation in the End of the British Mandate and the First Decade of the State of Israel” talked about the influence of American law and figures such as Walter Lowdermilk on the Israeli Water Law of 1959.

Later in the day I heard a paper by myself as part of a panel on attitudes to American law in nineteenth-century Canada. My paper, “How Smoothly Did U.S. Water Law Flow Northwards?”, examined the use that Canadian riparian-rights cases made of American sources in the first half of the nineteenth century, noting that Canadians often cited these sources not only for their statements of American law, but also for their statements of French water law.

At the same time, at the Kathryn T. Preyer Prize Panel, Matthew Axtell presented his “Customs of the River: Governing the Commons within a Nineteenth-Century Steamboat Economy”, a paper that we've noted previously.

Additional reports or comments on these papers or others are welcome!