Epidemics in late medieval law

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas recently published a review by Lorenzo Coccoli of Mario Ascheri's Rimedi contro le epidemie. I consigli di diritto europeo dei giuristi (secoli XIV-XVI) (Aracne, 2020). Coccoli writes:

In the large and ever-growing body of scholarship on the social history of medieval and early modern epidemics, a tendency exists to favor the second of these three aspects, looking at social life in time of disease outbreaks mostly through the lens of criminal justice and the repressive power deployed by authorities in order to enforce their emergency regulations. There are several good reasons justifying that choice....

Nevertheless, one might still legitimately wonder whether a different set of judicial sources could provide a somehow different picture of the challenges the plague posed at various levels of society. The sudden disappearance of people and properties confronted survivors with a whole series of legal problems that were not reducible to the grammar of crime and punishment. How to establish, for example, the correct line of inheritance when potential heirs die one right after the other, and when, because of the general confusion caused by disorganization and fear, no medical records exist to prove who died first and who died later? Should rent still be paid even though tenants had fled the rented premises to find shelter in a safer place? More generally: should contracts still be honored even though the plague had prevented their full execution? Questions of this sort may lead to a richer historical understanding of social dynamics in times of health crises, by adding to the ‘vertical’ observation of the relationship between authorities and their subjects the ‘horizontal’ auscultation of the connections and exchanges between the subjects themselves. For one thing is sufficiently clear: although narrators, from Boccaccio to Manzoni through Defoe, have conventionally depicted plague-ridden communities as unruly places where people move and act ‘beyond the usual laws’, law itself kept in fact operating throughout the epidemic storm as the fundamental infrastructure of associated life.

*****

The second and third chapters... deal with the solutions envisaged and proposed (with greater or lesser confidence) by late medieval law doctors to the problems raised by epidemic outbreaks for, respectively, the public management of cities and the regulation of private business. Sannazzari, Aldobrandini and Previdelli’s tracts in fact capitalized on a large pool of earlier consilia, quaestiones and commentaria on Roman and Canon law, gathering and organizing sparse hints on the matter that could be gleaned from them. Sixteenth-century jurists seem to agree with their predecessors on the supernatural causes of the plague, which represented the distinctive way in which God chose to wage war against humans because of their sins. The warlike metaphor—which seems to still have some currency in today’s parlance about the present predicament—was not, however, a simple rhetorical device. In the works of ius commune jurists, the notion of bellum Dei was taken literally so as to draw some effective legal consequences from it and solve, by virtue of analogical interpretation, the occasional legal conundrums. Thus, for example, the difficulty over the possibility of imposing an emergency property tax on people who were normally exempted from all sorts of contribution could be dodged by noting that, in times of war, even those who were covered by fiscal immunity were compelled to pay for the sake of the common good. 

Roman law and modern nuisance

Vanessa Casado Pérez and Carlos Gómez Ligüerre recently posted "From Nuisance to Environmental Protection in Continental Europe". The abstract:

This paper analyzes the evolution and complexity of the legal response to neighboring conflicts in European civil law countries. All of the civil codes analyzed (France, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, and Catalonia) are based on Roman Law rules that are not always clear. The fuzziness of those Roman Law rules explains, in part, why despite this common origin, the Civil Codes did not respond homogeneously to nuisances. The first subsection briefly describes the institution of nuisance in Roman Law. Then, the paper describes the original codification of nuisance and the changes in the treatment of this institution. After assessing the initial divergence and the trends towards similar rules across jurisdictions, the paper explains the potential forces of convergence at the European level: the Draft Common Frame of Reference, the European Union Environmental Liability Directive, and the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. It is important to note that this article only focuses on regulations and remedies related to non-trespassory invasions on real property, not on non-invasive, aesthetic nuisances.

Digital library IV: Bartolus's Tractatus de fluminibus seu Tyberiadis

After beginning the digital library of historical environmental law with works from the last few hundred years, we go back in time this week to the fourteenth century and the Tractatus de fluminibus seu Tyberiadis (1355, 1576 edition (source of the images in this post) here) of the great medieval Italian jurist Bartolus of Saxoferrato.

As Bartolus explained at the beginning of the work, he was inspired to write the book while on vacation near Perugia, despite his attempts to enjoy his vacation and stay away from legal scholarship:

This river [Tiber]... circles that splendid mountain on which the city of Perugia is situated and while flowing a great distance through its district, the river itself is bordered by plains, hills and similar places. These places are also well inhabited, enhanced with many beautiful buildings and luscious orchards bearing lots of fruit. Thus, when I was resting from my lecturing and in order to relax, was travelling towards a certain villa situated near Perugia above the Tiber, I began to contemplate the bends of the Tiber, its alluvion, the islands arising in the river, the changes of the river-bed as well as a host of unanswered questions which I had come across in practice. There were also other matters, which came to mind from my own observance of the river. I began to consider in various ways what the legal position was, not believing that I would take it any further, lest not to spoil my vacation, the reason why I had come. And thus while I slept that night, I had a vision near dawn that a certain man, whose countenance I found gentle, came to me and he said the following: "Write down what you have begun to think about and since there is a need for illustration, provide mathematical diagrams: Look! I have brought you a reed pen to measure and draw circles as well as a ruler to draw lines and to construct diagrams". I told him to spare me from illustrating legal matters with geometrical diagrams, since were I to do that, there would be many more scoffers than supporters. Then, looking at me with a troubled countenance, he said: "Bartolus, I know that you have something (in you) of God, but are you indeed afraid to be ridiculed for your service? 

Water rights II - Systems of property rights in water

(Continuing the series on water rights - the first installment was here.)

Property in water takes a great variety of forms. Many countries' laws state that all water is the property of the public or the state (Trelease, 1957; Cumyn, 2007; Sun, 2009; Schorr, 2013). Most civil law countries, following Roman law, distinguish between public and private waters. The "absolute dominion" rule of the common law, still in force in some American states, treats groundwater as an unowned resource, open to capture by any overlying landowner (Dellapenna, 2013). The riparian rights system of the common law views water sources as the common property of all landowners abutting the source (Getzler, 2004). The system of prior appropriation applied in the western United States recognizes private property rights to amounts of flows of water. In Australia (Davis, 1968) and western Canada the Crown owns the water and distributes it to users through a permit system (Percy, 2005). (A useful survey of most of the world's property regimes for water, including those mentioned in this paragraph, is found in Dante A. Caponera, Principles of Water Law and Administration (2nd ed., revised & updated by Marcella Nanni, 2007).)

Though most legal systems are viewed as reflecting a view of water either as private, common, or public property, most systems in practice recognize a mix of these types of rights in water sources. For instance, often quoted (e.g. Samuel C. Wiel, "Running Water", Harvard Law Review 22: 190 (1914)) is the statement from Justinian's Institutes (1913: 2.1.1): "The following things are by natural law common to all—the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the seashore"; yet the Roman law, in every period, contained a complex mix of private, communal, and public rights in water (Caponera, 2007). Of Islamic water law it is said that "true Muslim believers cannot grab water in excess to their needs since they are obliged to allow free access to any amounts of water beyond these needs" (Al-Awar et al., 2010: 32) and that the Prophet prohibited selling of water (Caponera, 1954),  but also that "Islam supports privatization of water supply… as long as it leads to a fair and free market" (Al-Awar et al., 2010: 34). The civil law's distinction between public and private waters has often ceased to exist in practice, with state approval being required for use of private waters as well as public (Caponera, 2007). China's constitution (Art. 9) and 2002 Water Law (Art. 3) state that all water is owned by the state, but in practice a system of private rights exists (Wouters et al., 2004; Shen and Speed, 2009). In the Anglo-American world much is made of the difference between the common-property rules of the riparian system in force in England and the eastern United States, and the system of private appropriative rights in the western U.S., but both systems in fact contain a mix of features typically associated with each type of property (Smith, 2008).

If the reality of formal water rights at the level of state law is a complex mix of public, private, and common, a large body of research on water management at the local level (e.g. Maass and Anderson, 1978; Meyer, 1984; Ostrom, 1990; Rivera, 1998; Boelens, 2008) reveals an almost infinite variety of property and governance systems. In various places water is sometimes allocated in proportion to field size, in accordance with the age of the field, by family, by position on the stream, or by any other of a multitude of possible principles, often anchored in long-standing custom and close social, economic, cultural, and religious ties. Integrating these locally embedded rights into systems of state law is a complex task, one often accompanied by significant redistributions of water rights (e.g. Reich, 1994; Van Koppen, 2007; Hendriks, 2010; Hicks, 2010; Boelens and Seemann, 2014).

Next: Property in water: Theory. The full article is here.

Canadian water law

The McGill Journal of Sustainable Development Law recently published an article by Jamie Benidickson, "The Evolution of Canadian Water Law and Policy: Securing Safe and Sustainable Abundance". The abstract:

Canadian water law has evolved over an extended period of time as a complex mixture of federal and provincial legislation and case law with provincial arrangements influenced by both riparian and prior appropriation doctrine as well as by the civil law tradition of Quebec. The article reviews highlights from the long-term evolution of Canadian water law, policy and institutions following a chronological path from Confederation in 1867 to the present. Three key shifts that have more recently begun to appear in background assumptions of Canadian water law are then identified. In particular, it is noted (1) that general confidence in the abundance of water is giving way to concerns over security and occasional scarcity, (2) that the primacy of human water uses is gradually being moderated by acknowledgement of the importance of environmental flows, and (3) that international considerations may be relevant to a greater degree than previously contemplated. The concluding section of the paper presents emerging policy directions in relation to the legacy of historic water law and policy decisions and the shifting assumptions previously reviewed with emphasis on sustainability, conservation initiatives and watershed frameworks.

Vermillion River, Kootenay National Park

For pre-1867 Canadian water law, see the recent series beginning here.

Inter-imperial riparian law VI: Miner as an inter-imperial legal authority and Conclusion

On Friday we discussed the place of French and American law in Privy Council water decisions, leading up to the seminal 1858 case of Miner v. Gilmour. Today we'll look at how Miner became an inter-imperial authority, as Lord Kingsdown's summary of the relative rights of riparian owners was cited widely throughout the British Empire and beyond (for examples of the case's influence, see the article on which this series is based).

Though arising in a case in which the applicable law was the old French law of Canada East, on the imperial periphery, it was taken as a faithful exposition of the common law of England, the imperial metropolis. In the 1876 case of Lyon v. Fishmongers’ Company, for instance, dealing with the right of access of riparian owners to the River Thames, the House of Lords (at the time the highest court for cases arising in Britain itself) referred to it as one of ‘the best authorities’ on riparian doctrine.

"a lord of appeal" [Colin Blackburn].
(Spy, Vanity Fair, 19 Nov. 1881)

Perhaps the most interesting reliance on Miner (for our purposes) in the water jurisprudence of the British Empire came in two decisions authored by the British judge Colin Blackburn. In the House of Lords case of Orr Ewing v. Colquhoun (1877), Blackburn rejected the rule of Scottish law applied by the Scottish court below, arguing (inter alia), "If such be the law of Scotland it is different from what Lord Kingsdown, in [Miner v. Gilmour], states to be the law of England and France". Lord Blackburn, it seems, was ready to modify the law of the metropolis (albeit of Scotland, a jurisdiction of secondary importance, and one in which the civil law, not the common law, applied), bending it to conform to the law as laid down in Miner, a case governed by the law of a foreign empire.

A few years later came Commissioners of French Hoek v. Hugo, an appeal to the Privy Council of a judgment of the supreme court of the Cape Colony, in today’s South Africa.  Governing the dispute over the waters of two small watercourses was what is known as Roman-Dutch law. This was the law in force in the Cape Colony when it was ceded by the Dutch to the British at the end of the Napoleonic wars (the metropolitan Netherlands had by this point adopted the Napoleonic Code for use in the home country), and, as the colony had been conquered from another state, not “settled”, this was the law that remained in force under British rule. Like the pre-Revolutionary French law in force in Quebec, Roman-Dutch law was based largely on the writings of learned ‘civilian’ jurists writing in the Roman law tradition. Indeed, in addition to Cape Colony cases and Roman-Dutch sources, lawyers for the appellants cited French treatises in support of their argument.

Writing for the Privy Council in French Hoek, Lord Blackburn referred approvingly to the summary of the law of riparian rights in Miner v. Gilmour, seeming to attach some importance to the similar positions of the Roman-influenced civil law in Canada East and the Cape Colony:

Inter-imperial riparian law V: Encounters of legal empires in Miner?

Yesterday I discussed why American water law may have been attractive to judges applying French law in Canada. Today we move the focus back to London and the Privy Council:

The reliance by counsel in Miner v. Gilmour on American sources for a question of French law, along with the court’s conflation of the French law and the common law (discussed in Part III of this series), would seem to be a faithful expression of the water law of Canada East, with its own heavy reliance on American sources and blending of the French law and common law, often by way of citing those same American sources.

W. Holman Hunt, The Right Hon. Stephen Lushington (1862)
(Victorian Web)

Moreover, the incorporation of the civil law into the common law of waters and the export of this mélange throughout the common-law world might be seen as the product not only of a one-time encounter with the law of Canada East in Miner v. Gilmour, but of an ongoing engagement with this odd jurisdiction, at once an integral part of the ascendant British Empire and the offspring of the old French Empire. Thus we find the Lower Canada case of St. Louis v. St. Louis, discussed earlier for Chief Justice Sewell’s use of Kent as authority for a point of French law, making its way to the Privy Council in 1841. The judge who delivered the judgment of the Judicial Committee, Stephen Lushington, a prominent and knowledgeable English civilian lawyer (he was a judge on ecclesiastical and admiralty courts, enclaves of civil law in the English legal system), was also a member of the panel that decided Miner v. Gilmour. Might the bold statement of the court in Miner, according to which riparian rights in the common law were essentially the same as in the civil law, have been influenced by Lushington’s exposure to precisely this attitude by the American-Canadian judge Sewell in St. Louis?

Sewell’s view in St. Louis may have influenced the common law of waters through yet another route, as well. Sitting alongside Lushington on the Judicial Committee to hear the appeal of Sewell’s judgment in St. Louis v. St. Louis was James Parke, the dominant judge on the English Court of Exchequer. Within the decade, his court decided two cases—Wood v. Waud and Embrey v. Owen—which were the first English cases to adopt the American law of riparian rights, relying heavily on Kent, Tyler v. Wilkinson, and French sources.  Could the Lower Canada case of St. Louis v. St. Louis have made an impression on Baron Parke, leading his court to base modern English riparian law on French and American sources?

Here we encounter a methodological difficulty—distinguishing between inter-imperial influences on the one hand, and transnational influences of the ‘ordinary’ kind, between two national jurisdictions, whether imperial metropolises or not, on the other. Put more concretely, was the intermixture of the laws of the old French Empire and the new American one in the courts of the British Empire a true inter-imperial encounter? Or might it be better conceived of as a case of British judges being influenced by the laws of France and the United States, two national jurisdictions the laws of which they were inclined to consider by factors such as geographic proximity, cultural affinity, common legal origins and the availability of law books, independently of their crossed imperial histories?

Inter-imperial riparian law IV: The attraction of American law

Yesterday I discussed the extensive use water law judicial decisions in the courts of Lower Canada, with its pre-revolutionary French property law, made of American sources. Today I discuss why they may have looked to a jurisdiction that had never belonged to the old empire from which the local law derived, and no longer belonged to the new empire of which Canada was now a part.

 Hon. Justice T.C. Aylwin (Library and Archives Canada)

In his dissent in the 1859 case of Boswell v. Denis Judge Aylwin indicated one reason why Canadians may have preferred American law over French in some cases. According to French law, a ‘navigable and floatable’ river was a public one, in which the public enjoyed rights that could not be impaired by the riparian owners. As the river in question in Boswell, the Jacques-Cartier, contained rapids and was therefore not ‘navigable’ by boat traffic, the majority of the court straightforwardly applied the French test and ruled that it could not be considered a public river. Aylwin objected to this analysis: ‘Our rivers cannot be compared with those of France or Europe; the Jacques Cartier is a good sized river and has plenty of water,—it has rapids it is true, but […] I believe the river to be both navigable and flottable.’ Following a tradition going back to Montesquieu and further, Aylwin argued that French law could not apply unmodified in North America, as it was developed for a different set of environmental circumstances. Similarly, in a 1905 case Justice Trenholme of the Quebec King’s Bench noted that American authorities on the question of navigability ‘possess more than ordinary interest for Canadian Courts, as the conditions there were and are precisely like those in our country’.

Yet it seems this was not the only reason for Canadians’ turn to American water law. Returning to Brown v. Gugy, it is significant that the American case which Judge Aylwin preferred over the lower court’s ruling was from Louisiana, the only American state which based its legal system on (French) civil law. Moreover, Kent’s discussion of water law (like his discussions of many other subjects) was replete with references to civilian sources. In the pages quoted in Aylwin’s opinion (sections 6 and 7 of Kent’s Lecture 52), the American jurist cited a large number of American and English cases, as was appropriate for a work purporting to be a commentary on American law, but his very first citations were to civilian sources: Justinian’s Digest, Pothier’s Traité du Contrat de Société and Toullier’s Droit Civil Français. Later in the section, he cited again to Pothier, quoted with approval a maxim of Roman law and stated that the Code Napoléon established the same rule as said maxim.

Later commentators have divided as to what extent Kent’s use of civilian sources was substantial or rather mere window dressing, with Alan Watson arguing that Kent’s use of the Roman and French sources in the section cited above was riddled with errors and that it provided little support to his exposition of riparian rights.  Nonetheless it seems that Judge Aylwin saw Kent as a good civilian source, prefacing his long quote from the Commentaries thus:

Inter-imperial riparian law II: The Law in Miner v. Gilmour

Continuing where yesterday's post left off:

As the judges of the Privy Council recognized, the law governing the conflict between Miner and Gilmour over the waters of the Yamaska was not English law. Quebec, before being conquered by the British in 1760, had been part of the French Empire. A royal edict of 1663 had declared the law of New France to be the law as applied in the Parlement of Paris.  This law included royal ordinances, Roman law as expounded by jurists, and the sixteenth-century official collection of the customary law of Paris known as the Coutume de Paris. The Quebec Act of 1774, passed by the British Parliament a few years after the British conquest of Canada from France, declared that the laws of property existing in the province of Quebec pre-conquest would remain in force under British rule.

The water law applicable to the case at hand was thus the law of the old French Empire, that is to say the law of ancien régime Paris, ironically no longer in force in France itself after the adoption of the Napoleonic Code in 1804, but preserved in British colonies that had been conquered from the French. Indeed, the lawyers arguing the case before the British court in Westminster cited the civilian Digest of Justinian, the great French scholar Pothier and said Custom of Paris.

Sitting of a Judicial Committee of the Privy Council
(Illustrated London News, vol. 8, no. 206, 11 April, 1846, p. 1)

The encounter between French and English law did not end with this infusion of French imperial law into a British imperial courtroom, nor with its application by British judges at the seat of imperial power. Despite the lack of formal authority for English common law in the civil-law jurisdiction of Canada East, the lawyers for Miner and Gilmour before the Privy Council cited not only the civilian sources mentioned above, but also recent English case law on the subject of riparian rights. The judges of the Judicial Committee were impressed with the ‘great learning and ingenuity’ displayed by counsel, and scheduled an unusual second round of oral arguments. Yet after all this learning and argument, they arrived at a surprising conclusion: ‘It did not appear that, for the purposes of this case, any material distinction exists between the French and the English law.’ According to both legal systems, the court opined, Miner could not demand that Gilmour keep the dam gate closed all the time, since a riparian proprietor had ‘no right to interrupt the regular flow of the stream, if he thereby interferes with the lawful use of the water by other proprietors, and inflicts upon them a sensible injury’.

The decision’s exposition of this and other principles of what Lord Kingsdown, writing for the court, termed the ‘general law applicable to running streams’—that is to say the law of riparian rights, according to him common to French and English law—went on to be cited extensively throughout the British Empire and beyond as the definitive statement of the rules of riparian rights in the common-law world, as will be discussed in a later post.

Inter-imperial riparian law I - Introduction: Inter-imperial law in an inter-imperial court

It seems I forgot to mention my own article when I posted it a while back. "Riparian Rights in Lower Canada and Canada East: Inter-Imperial Legal Influences" was published as chapter 4 of Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870-1930: Empires and Encounters (Roland Cvetkovski & Volker Barth eds., Bloomsbury, 2015). I'll do a few posts based on the article now; for the full version, please see the book.

One of the most dynamic areas of law in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American world was that of water rights, or, as it was typically denoted then, “riparian rights”. This body of law dealt with the relative rights of owners of land adjacent to water—riparian land—to use the flowing waters, whether for power, irrigation, transportation, fishing, or waste disposal. The historical development of the law in this field in the nineteenth century has been analysed from several points of view, including economic property theory and Marxian legal history.  Transnational aspects of the subject have not been neglected, as some have highlighted the transatlantic—that is, Anglo-American—framework in which this body of doctrine developed, and others have examined the use of Continental, civil law sources by some of the American jurists responsible for that development.  Yet the inter-imperial aspect of this story, in particular the meeting of the laws of the British and French Empires, has gone unremarked.

The court case of Miner v. Gilmour can be seen as the epicentre of this inter-imperial encounter. The case began as a conflict in the 1850s between two prominent citizens of the Eastern Townships village of Granby, in the part of Canada then known as Canada East (in the half century preceding 1841 called Lower Canada, the southern part of today’s Quebec). Harlow Miner’s tannery on the south bank of the Yamaska River, the town’s major industrial enterprise, was powered by water directed from a dam in the river, but Francis Gilmour, the town’s store-keeper, had been opening a sluice on the north side of the dam in order to allow the water to flow through and power his gristmill downstream. In order to put a stop to Gilmour’s interference with his business, Miner brought a lawsuit in the Superior Court of the District of Montreal.  When the court ruled in Miner’s favour, ordering Gilmour to cease and desist diverting water away from Miner’s mill, Gilmour brought an appeal to the Court of Queen’s Bench of Canada. Here the decision went in his favour, and the court dismissed the plaintiff’s suit. Unsatisfied with this result, it was Miner who appealed this time, making use of the only remaining judicial recourse available to him, an appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.

The Privy Council, an organ of the British monarchy, was for years the executive body through which British overseas possessions were governed, also hearing appeals from the courts of these colonies. In 1833, in an effort to give these appeals a more judicial character, Parliament created the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, composed primarily of judges from other British high courts. Though formally not a court of law—the members of the committee did not wear judicial garb, they sat around a table with the parties’ counsel and their decisions were, strictly speaking, merely recommendations to the monarch, who would then issue an order giving force to the recommendation—in practice it functioned like a court, and was treated as such by all. This new judicial body was tasked with hearing appeals from overseas possessions (as well as from the British court of Admiralty and ecclesiastical courts).

The Judicial Committee, hearing cases from far-flung possessions around the globe, was an imperial institution par excellence. The nature of litigation in the common law, adversarial, system—in which the parties, not the state, generally determined if and when court proceedings would be conducted, and on what legal grounds—meant that the court’s agenda was largely shaped by the decisions of litigants in the courts below. Nonetheless the Judicial Committee’s worldwide jurisdiction, along with its judges’ parallel tenures on other British high courts, gave it a potentially harmonizing and homogenizing role; ‘The assumption was that there could be cohesion and certainty in the legal system of the Empire only if appeals could be referred up to a judicial body in London.’ (Cornish, Lobban, Smith, "Empire’s Law", p. 245)

At the same time the Judicial Committee was in effect an inter-imperial institution.

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:

Water and the civil-common law divide

The next article from the special issue of Western Legal History on Southern California water is Peter Reich's own "The All-American Canal and the Civil-Common Law Divide". Reich writes:

The wide divergence in legal doctrine between civil law in Mexico and common law in the United States illustrates why resolution of water disputes... has been so difficult. Mexican water rights, descended from Roman and medieval Spanish concepts and applied in the northern territories that became the U.S. Southwest after 1848, have traditionally been shared among various users, especially during times of drought....
U.S. water law... differs significantly from Mexican law, particularly in the western states, which developed the doctrine of prior appropriation granting an absolute, exclusive legal right in surface waters and underground streams to the first beneficial user....

These conflicting water doctrines have affected not only internal jurisprudence in Mexico and the United States, but their relations with each other as well. In 1928, the two countries' representatives to the International Water Commission were negotiating the status of existing diversions from the Colorado and Rio Grande, and the American section proposed that, as a matter of comity, such uses be recognized and confirmed as prior appropriations. The Mexican section rejected the proposal, stating that it could not agree to any restriction on its sovereignty over river tributaries within its own territory, and so could not recognize even established uses of this water on the other side of the border....

Due to these doctrinal disparities, Mexico-U.S. water disputes have been addressed largely through diplomacy rather than the courts....

Notwithstanding divergent legal regimes and diplomatic limits, a few examples of Mexico-U.S. legal integration suggest opportunities for water law harmonization. The traditional Roman distinction between gradual accretion and rapid avulsion of watercourses became the basis for the International Boundary Commission's settling ownership of the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande bancos (sandbar islands). Bancos were allocated in the Colorado River on the same basis.... [T]he commission used a legal historical source, in this instance an ancestor of Mexican civil law, to fill a gap and reconcile two divergent regimes.

Colorado River Dry Delta, terminus of the Colorado River
 in the Sonoran Desert of Baja California and Sonora, Mexico

Morag-Levine on the history of precaution

Noga Morag-Levine, who participated in the roundtable at the recent ASEH conference on what environmental history and legal history can learn from each other, also recently posted her American Journal of Comparative Law review essay on the history of precaution (following on a condensed, blog, version in 2013.) The abstract:

The distinctiveness of European from American regulatory cultures or traditions is a matter of longstanding controversy. Two recent books — The Politics of Precaution by David Vogel — and The Reality of Precaution, edited by Jonathan Wiener with several others — have made notable contributions to this debate. Both books argue that regulatory cultures or traditions are incapable of explaining current differences between American and European approaches to precaution, which they define as regulatory stringency. For Wiener, this conclusion derives from the inconsistency of patterns of stringency between the United States and Europe. Vogel argues that while the stringency of current European environmental regulation indeed exceeds that of its U.S. counterpart, the split is unstable and opened relatively recently. In combination, the books aspire to put to rest an entire family of historical-institutional explanations for cross-national regulatory differences in the transatlantic context and beyond.

Edwin Chadwick, who brought the Continental
precautionary approach to Victorian England

This essay draws from legal history to argue for an alternative position: legal traditions and their associated administrative-law principles are highly relevant to current transatlantic conflicts over precaution. The paper’s starting point is the distinction between two separate meanings of the precautionary principle, the first prescriptive, and the second permissive. In its prescriptive sense the precautionary principle urges regulators to take stringent mitigation measures in the face of scientifically uncertain risks. In its permissive sense, the principle authorizes the state to regulate when the relevant harms are scientifically uncertain. Conflicts over permissive precaution thus inherently reflect divergent views of the scope of the state’s autonomy in the regulation of risk. These disparate views correspond closely, in turn, with relevant differences between the administrative law traditions respectively associated with Anglo-American common law and Continental civil law.

More on early modern water law treatises

In response to my desire to hear more about the water law treatises described in Mark Weiner's video, "Water, Paper, Law", Yale Law's Rare Book Librarian Mike Widener (featured in the video) has posted information on the books featured in the video. These include a treatise by the great medieval jurist Bartolus and other works on Italian, German, and Dutch water law.

The page below is taken from a 4-volume Italian treatise on Roman water law, published originally 1670-86. Stay tuned for more on Mike's work on these interesting books.

from Francesco Maria Pecchio, Tractatus de aquaeductu (2nd ed., Ticini Regii, [1700?]-1713)
Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School

Roman-Dutch law and subsurface resources

Hanri Mostert and Hugo Meyer Van den Berg have posted "Roman-Dutch Law, Custodianship, and the African Subsurface: The South African and Namibian Experiences", a chapter from a forthcoming edited volume on the law of energy underground. From the abstract:

The legal heritage of Southern Africa provides interesting perspectives on the... history and present status of laws governing energy resources in different legal families. Common Law and Civil Law approaches to subsurface resource regulation will be sketched in the [other] contributions [in the book]. The "mixed" legal family to which South Africa, Namibia and Botswana belongs, crosses over the common law/civil law divide; to provide for the regulation of subsurface resources in peculiar and often anomalous ways. The reason for this mix is found in the bipartite colonial history of the region.

Our contribution is limited to a study of one particular African perspective on subsurface resource regulation: that of Southern Africa. Here the development of a mixed legal tradition has been most pronounced, because of the region’s particular colonial history. In this chapter, we examine the proprietary principles on which the law relating to subsurface regulation is based, referring particularly to differences in the reception of Roman-Dutch law due to different colonial histories. Our main focus is South Africa and Namibia, although we include superficial references to Botswana. In undertaking this analysis, we are particularly interested in the role that legislative regulation and policy changes have played to amend or substitute Roman-Dutch law rules. This line of inquiry may assist in determining whether the peculiar roots of the mixed legal family investigated here remain influential in current law and practice regulating the subsurface.

We contrast the legacy of Roman-Dutch law in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, discussing basic tenets of subsurface ownership from the Roman-Dutch law perspective, and tracing the influence that colonialism and constitutionalism had on the development of the legal system as it pertains to the subsurface.

The history of precaution

A little while back Noga Morag-Levine posted on "The History of Precaution" over at RegBlog. Her work on the topic is a good example of how historical research can help make sense of current legal and policy issues, in this case the proper understanding of the much hyped and much maligned "precautionary principle".  As Morag-Levine explains,

comparative environmental scholars have recently focused their attention on whether, when, and why Europe has become more precautionary than the United States. This inquiry has entailed a debate on the capacity of distinct American and European regulatory traditions to account for transatlantic divisions. The Reality of Precaution, by Jonathan Wiener with several co-editors, and The Politics of Precaution, by David Vogel, are among the most notable contributions to this discussion.  The two books concur that any such legal-institutional traditions are irrelevant to the question at hand.

Morag-Levine thinks otherwise:

These disparate views of regulatory autonomy correspond closely to the divergent administrative law traditions of continental and Anglo-American law.   Debate over health and safety regulation in both Britain and the US during the 19th Century revolved around competing models of administration—the first termed “nuisance,” the second “police.”

"Corporate Social Responsibility" and "Legal Origins"

"The Legal Origins of Corporate Social Responsibility", by Leonardo Becchetti, Rocco Ciciretti, and Pierluigi Conzo, relates the voluminous literature on the "Legal Origins Theory", which mostly focuses on the connections between finance law and economic development, and "corporate social responsibility" (CSR), a prominent buzzword in current environmental law and policy. The abstract:

from economyage.com

The legal origin literature documents that civil and common law traditions have different impact on rules and economic outcomes. We contribute to this literature by investigating the relationship between corporate social responsibility and legal origins. Consistently with the main differences in historical and legal backgrounds and net of industry specific effects, the common law origin has a significant and positive impact on the Corporate Governance and Community Involvement domains, while the French legal tradition of civil law on the Human Resources domain. We also document that the lack of observable differences in the environmental domain can be explained by firms' progressive convergence to industry sustainability standards.

Bridging water law traditions

Peter Reich recently posted his Environmental Law Reporter article, "The Historical, Comparative, and Convergence Trifecta in International Water Law: A Mexico-U.S. Example". The abstract:

Charles O'Rear, All-American Canal
Carries Colorado River Water
Through Sand-Swept Area of the Imperial Valley

Doctrinal disconnects complicate adjudication of international water rights controversies. However, legal history and comparative law sources can fill gaps and build analogies to bridge differences in substantive law. Between Mexico and the United States in particular, the civil-common law divide at times appears vast, but has been occasionally narrowed by reference to shared Roman principles of usufruct or by incorporation of Mexican law into the U.S. system. This article argues that these commonalities can help solve the dispute over the All-American Canal in Southern California, which prior to being lined with concrete by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation recharged groundwater supplying Mexican farmers and the endangered Colorado Delta ecosystem. Such meeting places for doctrine suggest that, even in domestic courts, nations need not attempt to resolve international problems through domestic law alone.

Morag-Levine on the historical roots of the precautionary principle

I had the privilege of commenting earlier this week on a paper by Noga Morag-Levine on the historical roots of the differing approaches taken to the precautionary principle. Focusing on the “permissive” version of the principle, according to which regulators should be allowed to regulate suspected risks even in the absence of proof of harm, she argues that the transatlantic debate of the last few years regarding the propriety (or legality) of the principle has deep roots in debates going back hundreds of years.