Nature versus the common law III: Canadian and Indian rivers

Bhanutpt, Krishna River

In the previous post in this series, we looked at how nineteenth-century American courts debated whether the common law rules of riparian rights applied to the grand American rivers, seemingly so different from those of England. But the question of whether the common law applied to environments unlike England's soon arose in territories around the British Empire as well. Robert Travers has argued that while judges in England had used ideas of natural law to modify the common law, in India natural law arguments were used in some contexts to support the replacement of local law by English norms. Here, however, we see the reverse, with nature invoked to reject English rules of water law in favor of new norms, felt to be more appropriate to the local environment.

In an 1842 case (Esson v M’Master, 3 NBR 501 (1842)) the New Brunswick Supreme Court noted the "great difference in the character of the small rivers of England and those of this Province", but thought that this consideration "may be thought more fit for the Legislature than the Court ". Yet the same court in 1849 (Rowe v Titus, 6 NBR 326 (1849)) adopted the ruling of an American court, following the argument of counsel that:

The principles of the law of England, in respect to rivers, cannot be applied to this country : there the rivers are not subject to such sudden freshets, nor are they used for the same purposes as in this country ; the cases therefore on this subject in the United States, where the rivers are used for the same purposes as in this country, will be very important.

The idea that Canadian courts should follow American courts rather than English ones when dealing with rivers was not limited to New Brunswick. In an 1852 case (R v Meyers, 3 UCCP 305 (1852)), Chief Justice James Macaulay of the Upper Canada (Ontario) Court of Common Pleas, after examining the English precedents which normally would be thought binding in the British colony, demonstrated the legal power of geography over the common law by contrasting English precedents with decisions from "this side of the Atlantic", lumping together American and Canadian cases without distinguishing between them. Macaulay's judgment was also significant in ruling that the test for navigability of a river was its "natural capacity", not its use in practice, once again demonstrating the normative power of nature. The influence of American jurisprudence was evident as well in an 1882 opinion of Justice Samuel Strong of the Supreme Court of Canada :

I do not hesitate to say that the rule which appears to have been adopted as a principle of the common law as administered in England, that no rivers are to be considered in law as public and navigable above the ebb and flow of the tide, is not applicable to the great rivers of this continent, as has been determined by the Supreme Court of the United States and by the courts of most of the States […]

More on nature versus the common law: American judges on American rivers

As I mentioned in a post last week, the first topic covered in my article "Nature Versus the Common Law: Nature as a Norm in the Water Law of the British World" is the question of whether the water, bed, or other resources of a non-tidal river belonged to the riparian landowners or to the state or public. 

While the civil law (for example Article 538 of the Code Napoleon) distinguished between private and public rivers based on tests of navigability and floatability, the English common law adopted a slightly different distinction : Tidal rivers were held to be the property of the Crown, while rivers and lakes above the reach of the tide were the property of the adjoining landowners, with each riparian owner owning the river from the edge of his dry land up to the median of the water body ("usque filum aquæ" or "ad medium filum"). Non-tidal but navigable bodies of water typically were subject to a public right or servitude of navigation, while the water, the submerged land, and other resources (such as fish) belonged to the riparian owners.

These rules were relatively uncontroversial in England, but in British colonies and the new United States they were often felt to be inappropriate to the environmental reality of other continents, in which rivers might be kilometers wide in some portions and navigable for thousands of kilometers above the reach of the tides, while freshwater lakes might bear a closer resemblance to seas than to the small lakes of England. In this context, a rule under which all non-tidal waters were private seemed problematic to many.

The first reported case in which the tension between the received law of England and the local environment arose was the 1807 Pennsylvania case of Carson v Blazer, in which a landowner along the Susquehanna River, near Harrisburg, demanded compensation from some fishermen who had fished shad from the river alongside his land4. As the Susquehanna at this point was navigable but not a tidal river, the common law rule seemed to be clear – the river, and the right to fish, belonged to the riparian owners. But Chief Justice William Tilghman, presiding over the trial, thought otherwise, distinguishing between the geographies of England and Pennsylvania :

Voluntarism and deregulation

Rachel S. Gross recently reviewed Jeffrey K. Stine's Green Persuasion: Advertising, Voluntarism, and America's Public Lands (Smithsonian 2021) for H-Environment. Gross writes:

In the 1980s, Hollywood tough guy Charles Bronson took his vigilante reputation to the world of public service. Bronson was a perfect poster boy for the Ronald Reagan-era PR effort, Take Pride in America. In TV ads, Bronson, along with fellow actors Clint Eastwood and Louis Gossert Jr., decried “bad guys who beat up on trees” and encouraged listeners to take voluntary action to help solve the problem (p. 62). The Take Pride ads were a curious take on the pressing environmental issues of the day. To be sure, vandalism did occur but to name that as a central environmental issue and to use Bronson’s image to convey pride in land as a masculine and patriotic concern were deflections. Just what these ads were a distraction from is the question that Jeffrey K. Stine addresses in Green Persuasion: Advertising, Voluntarism, and America’s Public Lands. Stine argues that the Take Pride in America campaign, which pushed voluntarism as a solution for the issues plaguing public lands, was a reflection of the conservative ideology that government was a problem rather than part of a solution. The Take Pride in America program suggested “that the enlightened self-interest of the private sector offered the ideal approach to public lands stewardship” (p. 53).

*****

Stine faces a challenge in that his book is an analysis of a government program that in the author’s own assessment was ultimately ineffectual and unimportant. In addition to showing the program’s lack of effectiveness, Stine also makes the case for why such an analysis is necessary. For Stine, the office was a failure but a revealing one, in that its longevity reveals a political history of conservative approach to environmental (lack of) action. Namely, Take Pride in America and the agenda of voluntarism it pushed via a succession of Republican administrations reflect a partisan divide on environmental policy, where conservatives aimed to deflect attention away from how they underfunded federal land agencies.

The environment in Dan Ernst's legal history exam

Dan Ernst (Georgetown Law) regularly posts a long exam question from his legal history course at Legal History Blog. This year's question was on federal grazing policy in the US. Some excerpts:

One of the Forest Service’s first projects was to subject stockmen used to roaming the mountains at will to the principles of forestry.  To develop and defend the new regulations, Pinchot hired, as chief legal officer of the Forest Service, an able and imaginative lawyer, who was personally indebted to him for, among other things, lending him money in the past.  The chief legal officer, who reported directly to Pinchot rather that the more politically connected Solicitor of USDA, soon worked out an ingenious constitutional justification for criminal enforcement of the grazing regulation, turning in part on the claim that the use of the public domain was not a private right but merely a privilege.  In 1908, Pinchot’s lawyer convinced the Department of Justice to bring a test case against a sheepherder named Pierre Grimaud.  A federal district judge ruled that the prosecution violated the nondelegation doctrine.  On direct appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices at first deadlocked, 4-4.  Pinchot was unfazed.  “I hold it to be the first duty of the public officer to obey the law,” he explained, “but I hold it to be his second duty, and a close second, to do everything the law will let him do for the public good.”  After Charles Evans Hughes and another justice joined the Court, Grimaud was reargued, and, in 1911, the Court upheld the prosecution.  The Forestry Service immediately brought scores of criminal prosecutions, and, by 1912, USDA could report that overgrazing in the forest reserves had ended.

*****

In 1934, the Colorado Cattleman’s Association sent [Farrington] Carpenter to Washington, DC, to lobby Congress to add beef cattle to the Agricultural Adjustment Act’s list of “basic agricultural commodities” and permit them to enter into marketing agreements controlling cattle prices.  Having succeeded, Carpenter stopped by his Congressman Taylor’s office to say his goodbyes, just as the grazing act was having a hearing.  Realizing that Carpenter would be an effective witness and learning that he did not think the public domain should be turned over to the states, Taylor asked him to testify.  (Carpenter was no fan of national power, but he believed that once the land was devolved to the states, different grazing interests would capture different state legislatures and produce an unworkable patchwork of regulation.)  Before the House committee, Carpenter spoke for small-scale cattle stockmen such as himself, plagued by nomadic sheep herds and pushed off public domain by larger cattle outfits.  Federal control was the small stockman’s only chance to avoid being “completely wiped out of existence,” he testified.

When, a few months later, [Secretary of the Interior] Ickes’s undersecretary offered Carpenter the directorship of the new Grazing Division created within the department to enforce the Taylor Grazing Act, Carpenter warned that sheep herders would object to his appointment because he was known as a champion of cattlemen in his corner of Colorado.  He claimed also to have said that he did not intend to create “a great centralized bureau” like the Forest Service, “run by Eastern people who know little about the public domain.”  After consulting a government official who once represented sheep herders, Ickes decided Carpenter would treat them fairly.  Whether Carpenter’s other warning registered with the Interior Secretary Ickes is not known. 

The Roman public trust doctrine

I've often expressed impatience with the throwaway references to Justinian (often misconstrued as an adjective!) that are so ubiquitous in discussions of the public trust doctrine. Now comes Bruce Frier's review of Domenico Dursi's Res Communes Omnium. Dalle necessità economiche alla disciplina giuridica (Jovene, 2017) to make some order for those of us for whom Roman law is something of an enigma. Frier writes, explaining his own view (I'm omitting most citations and footnotes):

By the Late [Roman] Republic, the general idea of res communes was already well known in Roman culture. Plautus’ comic play Rudens, thought to date from c.190 B.C., features a fisherman (his occupation is important!) proclaiming that “the sea is unquestionably common to all persons” (mare quidem commune certost omnibus) in a longer speech that emphasizes fish as belonging to their captor.... [T]he concept becomes much more familiar in Latin sources from the Late Republic and Early Empire. Forms of common property are most often the air and the sea, but Cicero adds in the seashore (litus) as well. Although the familiar idea of common property was further elaborated in Early Imperial poetic or Stoic theories on the origin and development of human culture, there is no sign that these theories had any pronounced influence on the law; certainly they lead to no demonstrable legal conclusions.

By the Late Republic, a second cultural element had emerged: a widespread and often expressed disquiet about the startling proliferation of villas along the coast of central Italy and the Bay of Naples.... The architects of these villas, capitalizing on recently-discovered hydraulic concrete, often put down substructures extending beyond the shore and out into the sea — a phenomenon quite commonly referred to in legal texts, and one of particular concern to poets such as Horace who perceived the structures as morally hubristic. More exciting, however, is the discovery that not a few of the maritime villas incorporate fishponds so large that they were plainly intended to produce fresh fish not just for the villa, but for local markets.... [T]hese fishponds may well have brought the villa-owners into direct confrontation with more humble local fishers. 

Public property and the rise of the individual

Historical articles on the commons keep coming. Victorian Studies recently published an article by Daniel Stout, "Uncommon Lands: Public Property and the Rise of the Individual". (I'm happy to say that the article cites extensively from my "How Blackstone Became a Blackstonian".) The abstract:

This article examines the theoretical hurdles that the English legal system faced in trying to come up with a coherent conception of public land in the Victorian period. Rapid urbanization and industrialization meant that the pressure to preserve open space was intense, but a conception of public land—land that belongs to everyone—was strikingly absent from English law. “The commons,” this article stresses, is importantly different from “the public.” The absence of the public from the English theory of property helps us see the ways in which the regime of liberal private property continued to carry traces of older customary forms of tenure, and to be governed by ideas (use, access, etc.) that complicate—and, often, contradict—liberal assumptions about the nature of property.

And an excerpt:

William Hartley, Justice Scrutton

[W]e have inherited from the nineteenth century a certain story about property as an institution whose rise inevitably entails the cancellation of some prior collective. And of the available names for that prior collective (family, status, clan, custom, etc.), none attaches us to it quite like “the commons.” Compared with “commons,” terms like “family,” “status,” “clan,” and “custom” seem both too privative—“the commons” has an openness and flexibility that the unnervingly tribal “clan” or aristocratic “family” clearly lack—and somehow not personal enough—the “commons” grounds an affective warmth that the cold institutionalism of “status” and the archaic proceduralism of “custom” can’t match. The appeal of the commons is that it allows us to lament the privacy of property without, at the same time, having to sacrifice an individualism—the capacity for meaningful, personal attachment—that we have come to cherish. The commons is, in this sense, liberalism’s name for what it doesn’t like about liberalism. Hence, the perfect fluency of Thomas Edward Scrutton (a highly successful commercial lawyer) complaining in 1881 that “the speculative builder and the wealthy landowner alike prey upon roadside wastes, and neighbouring Commons”: “the poor, who are deprived of any interest in the land, and the public, more and more restricted to the hard high road, are affected by the Policy of Enclosure and Individualism”. Reading closely, one can see that Scrutton elides what are actually three nonidentical constituencies—the “commons,” “the poor,” and “the public.” But to the degree that the elision works it’s because commonness could already, in 1881, serve as a kind of penumbral keyword for the opposite of “Enclosure and Individualism.” To see that the “commons” continues to function in this generic way, one need look no further than Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s recent call for a “democracy of the multitude” in which “we all share and participate in the common... —the air, the water, the fruits of the soil” and focus on “the practices of interaction, care, and cohabitation in a common world”.

Running water for the officials, rainwater for the poor

Venetian aqueduct in Crete

The latest issue of Water History has an article by Yannis Spyropoulos, "Running water for the officials, rainwater for the poor: symbolic use and control of water in early modern Ottoman Crete". The abstract:

This paper deals with the issue of water management on the island of Crete from the beginning of the Ottoman–Venetian war in 1645 to the beginning of its Egyptian administration in 1830. Based primarily on information given by Kandiye’s (mod. Herakleion) Shariah court records, but also on a variety of published and unpublished archival material from Turkey, Greece, and France, it explores the socioeconomic aspects of water-resource exploitation in the island’s urban centers, analyzes the involvement of various local and imperial actors in water management, and locates the struggles created in the above-mentioned processes. Through a detailed analysis of the challenges faced by the administration and the population of an insular area with limited water resources, such as Crete, the article tries to take a fresh look at water management on the Ottoman periphery: It redirects the researchers’ focus from heavily-populated cities and large cultivated plains to the examination of smaller regions with no major hydraulic and irrigation networks and puts emphasis on the symbolic use of water in the socioeconomic context of the Ottoman Empire.

And from the conclusion:

I would like to underline the importance of running water in early modern Ottoman Crete as a symbol of financial and administrative power. In Islamic Law, water was considered to be a public good reserved for everyone, regardless of class and officialdom. Yet, in an insular space with limited water resources, such as Crete, Islamic canonical treatment of water was often overruled in favor of those with access to wealth and power. In this context, the ownership of running water became a status indicator for the island’s elites and a field of competition and negotiation between various officials. In early Ottoman Crete, it was mainly the sancakbeyis and other non-Cretan officials who undertook the task of finding and channeling running water to the island’s three cities, yet, through time, as local elites started rising to power, mainly through their connection with the military, the management of water resources gradually passed into the hands of both imperial and local actors. Their origins notwithstanding, the tactic used by all these elites was similar: They claimed the water of all the springs discovered in the vicinities of their cities by creating infrastructure connecting the former to the latter. After ensuring the appropriation of a large amount of water resources for their own establishments, they provided the rest of the water for public use –mainly through private endowments—thus presenting themselves as benefactors in the eyes of the local populace. The latter’s restricted access to running water, on the other hand, not only made them turn to rainwater in order to quench their thirst, but it also seems to have been one of the most probable causes of the frequent sabotage of the water-supply networks of Crete, a reasonable reaction if seen in the light of the following Koranic verse: “And We send the fecundating winds, then cause the rain to descend from the sky, therewith provide you with water (in abundance), though ye are not the guardians of its stores”.

Digital Library V: A History of the Foreshore and the Law Relating Thereto (1888)

In the common-law world, historical and legal argument are frequently intertwined, a phenomenon reflected in the title of this week's addition to the digital library of historical environmental law, Stuart A. Moore's A History of the Foreshore and the Law Relating Thereto, published in London by Stevens & Haynes in 1888 (available on the Internet Archive and in Gale's The Making of Modern Law).

Moore's work was part of a wave of antiquarian interest in early writings on property rights in the seashore (today this topic would be labeled "public trust doctrine") that seems to have been motivated largely by legal and economic issues at stake during Britain's industrial revolution. So in addition to his treatment of a legal manuscript by the Elizabethan-era mathematician Thomas Digges and other early sources, Moore reproduced in his work "A New Treatise by Sir Matthew Hale, from a MS. in his Handwriting", which Moore believed to be an early version of the influential De Jure Maris and other works by Hale published by Francis Hargrave in the late eighteenth century. And, as Moore explained in his introduction, the whole work was born out of a project to issue a new edition of Robert Gream Hall's Essay on the Rights of the Crown and the Privileges of the Subject in the Sea Shores of the Realm, first published in 1830:

Water services - the Scandinavian model

I recently came across Tapio Katko's Finnish Water Services: Experiences in Global Perspectives (Finnish Assn. of Water Utilities, 2016). It's been reviewed in several journals; here are some excerpts from Glen O'Hara's review in Scandanavian Economic History Review (references to page numbers omitted):

Particularly impressive sections include those on the post-Second World War growth of transnational water governance systems through the auspices of the United Nations, including the International Hydrological Decade of 1965–1974, the subsequent International Hydrological Programme and the regional Baltic agreements that followed the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm and then, in a further burst of maritime co-operation, after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.

Perhaps because of Finland’s small population, and her traditional Nordic role within the international aid and development network, the international situation plays a key role in this book. The spread of integrated Water Management Systems via observation of other countries’ examples, and the role of international bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development in defining good governance, are usually to the fore – or at least mentioned – in a compelling narrative of how policy actually works in practice....

Finland, of course, is a country where water systems have for the main part remained in the public, and usually in the municipal, sector: though as Katko acutely points out, that still means that Finland’s water concerns spend a great deal of money in the private sector through the services, equipment and goods that they necessarily consume. As in other countries, charges have mainly paid for Finnish water supply, with direct government support remaining rather low, and in recent years declining further. Capital investment, including in Finland’s far north, was the main intervention mounted by the government: all interesting sidelights on a Nordic economic and social system that depended much more on concert and co-ordination than on massive continued budgetary support, whatever the ubiquity of these states’ image as a type of social democratic utopia outside their borders. 

Water rights V: Public rights

(Continuing the series on water rights:)

Whatever property regime applies to water, the public often retains certain rights in the resource. Thus, for instance, in American law, though a river's water may be owned by riparian landowners or appropriators, the federal government retains a "navigation servitude" in the water with which private owners (and states) cannot interfere (Trelease, 1965).

Joseph Sax

Recent decades have seen much discussion of the "public trust doctrine", rules that allow public interests, especially environmental ones, to trump the normal property rules in water. Though the doctrine has its roots in the traditional civil and common law, particularly with regard to tidelands (Selvin, 1980), its modern form was first articulated by Joseph Sax in a highly influential article (1970), in which he argued that the historical doctrine should be developed to encourage courts to subject actions that harm the environment to strict scrutiny. In the field of water rights the doctrine has been applied by American state courts in recent decades to push states to protect environmental values, even when this protection is in tension with private property rights (Craig, 2010). The best-known expression of this trend is the decision of the California Supreme Court in the Mono Lake case, in which the court ruled that longstanding water diversions from the lake by the city of Los Angeles might need to be limited by the state in order to protect ecological values being harmed by the lowering of the lake level. In recent years the doctrine has been adopted in additional countries around the world (Cullet, 2009; Blumm and Guthrie, 2012).

The public trust doctrine continues to receive support from many commentators, but it has also been criticized. On the one hand, it has been argued that the doctrine places undue reliance on an inflexible, property rule as applied by the judiciary, while environmental protection should be sought from progressive legislation (Lazarus, 1986). On the other, the doctrine has been criticizes as historically without basis, undemocratic, and invasive of private property rights (Huffman, 1989, 2007).

Next: A human right to water. The full article is here.

Water rights IV: Property in water: Empirical and historical evidence

(Continuing the series on water rights:)

The empirical work of Ostrom (1990; Ostrom and Gardner, 1993) and others on institutions for governing commons resources has shown that, in practice, common property can be highly successful in managing water resources, depending on the structure and functioning of the institutions involved. She and her collaborators summed up their conclusions (Ostrom et al., 2010):

Elinor Ostrom

Researchers usually distinguish four basic types of governance systems, defined in terms of who controls access to resources: private property, government property, common property, and open access (i.e., no one's property). Research has consistently shown the inefficient outcomes of open access since open access almost always leads to destruction of any resource that is in great demand. This is the problem identified in Hardin's famous essay, although he called open access "commons," which led to substantial subsequent confusion. The other three systems, however, have mixed records in terms of sustaining water resources, including both great successes and massive failures. Thus, the ability of a type of ownership to enhance sustainable resource management depends on a number of other factors…

Many legal and environmental historians have focused on historical transitions between property regimes in water, particularly two major developments in the Anglo-American legal world: the development of the "reasonable use" riparian regime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the rejection of riparian rights in favor of the system known as "prior appropriation" in the western United States in the second half of the same century.

Some historians' accounts, beginning with Walter Prescott Webb's "Great Plains Thesis" (Webb, 1931), have supported the economic view associating with aridity with private rights in water (Robert G. Dunbar (1985) 'The Adaptability of Water Law to the Aridity of the West', Journal of the West 24: 57; Percy, 2005). Yet aridity has also been associated with strict state control, as in Karl Wittfogel's (1957) hypothesis associating "hydraulic civilizations" with "oriental despotism", applied to the western American context by Donald Worster (1985).

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.

Water law in medieval Lombardy

"Diploma" of Frederick Barbarossa granting navigation rights to the monastery of
San Carpoforo di Como (1159)

I recently came across Acque della Lombardia Medievale, apparently the catalog for an exhibition held by the Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano in 2015. (If you're ever in Milan, don't miss the associated Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.) The editors, Federico Gallo and Rita Pezzola, write:

According to Roman law, one defines every permanent water-course as "publicum" whether it was navigable or not, and only rivulets and streams were considered private. During the Middle Ages and in particular in the 10th and 11th centuries, we find more and more imperial and royal diplomas giving grants and donations related to stretches of rovers: they refer to the construction of ports and mills and to fishing and navigating rights. Thus the principle, or better the custom, of considering some parts of a river as capitalized (today we would say "privatized") was established, and more and more we find that the water-course was at the disposition - more or less in their possession - of the people who owned the adjacent land. During the Dieta di Roncaglia (Piacenza) in 1158, Federico I, called Barbarossa - assisted by lawyers from the school of Bologna - redefined the legal status of rivers. Referring to Roman law, the Emperor inserted the "flumina navigabilia" in the regalie (royal prerogatives), so that the "flumen publicum" no longer referred to permanent water-courses, but only to the navigable ones.

For a similar development in 19th-century Canadian water law, see here.

Charles Wilkinson

Robert Fischman recently posted "Wringing Wonder from the Arid Landscape of Law". The abstract:

Charles Wilkinson

Charles Wilkinson’s estimable contribution to public land law scholarship is widely cited but only partly understood. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s he upended the field by elevating the diffuse public interest, displacing creation and adjudication of private property interests as the field’s focus. However, his subsequent scholarship grappled with an even more important challenge that has been far less noted. Beginning in the late 1980s, Wilkinson explored how legal institutions should determine the pluralistic, public interest. In trailblazing articles and books, he rose to the challenge with site-specific details, compelling narratives, and aspirational themes. This work undermined the dominance of exogenous preference accounting as a means of identifying the public interest. Instead, often employing methods from the humanities, Wilkinson promoted planning as a deliberative, value-shaping process for crafting resource management objectives. His scholarship of the past thirty years redefined the relevant inquiries for public land law scholarship. In particular, he established bioregionalism, time, culture, and wonder as place-building concepts essential for translating justice and equity into public natural resources decisions.

Multiple use

The latest Environmental History has a review by David Rich Lewis of The Size of the Risk: Histories of Multiple Use in the Great Basin by Leisl Carr Childers (U. Oklahoma Press, 2015). Lewis writes:

Leisl Carr Childers’s book appeared at an opportune moment, just as debates over federal management of western lands roiled the national news. The takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, the armed standoff over grazing rights at Cliven Bundy’s Ranch in Nevada, and the ensuing federal criminal prosecutions highlight the larger critique of federal authority in the West. Two-thirds owned by the federal government and perceived as an unpopulated wasteland that defied Congress’s raft of land disposal acts, the Great Basin is, in Carr Childers’s estimation, the “bellwether for federal land management policy” (p. 7). She explores how “multiple use” emerged in the twentieth century as a way to give the nation’s unclaimed public domain a human purpose, utility, and identity separate from its ecology. This book is not just a primer on land management policies—although it certainly provides outstanding coverage of that—but one deeply rooted in cultural and environmental history, using the tools of oral and public history to trace the intersecting activities of people and their different land uses as these federal policies evolved over time.

Multiple-use management begins with the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act that allowed western ranchers to continue their “accustomed use” of the range without purchase. Having already developed their own water sources and rights, the creation of grazing districts legitimized ranchers’ activities and made the surrounding public range their liminal property. Ranchers reluctantly acceded to the political organization and fees, assuming their accustomed use rights would endure as the activity best suited to these arid lands. At the same time, progressive land managers saw grazing as just one of many possibilities, a stop gap until higher uses (or disposal) of the land occurred. Ranchers, then, assumed an unseen risk in a policy world dictated by different visions of their land and a belief in use for the greater good. 

More on the Antiquities Act

Bears Ears National Monument designated by President Obama

Following up Sunday's post on the Antiquities Act, I'd like to note an interesting post on the topic by Nick Bryner at Legal Planet. There's a lot of straght legal analysis, but a large dose of legal history as well. Bryner takes on an AEI "white paper" written by John Yoo and Todd Gaziano:

First, Yoo and Gaziano seek to re-frame the history and past judicial decisions on the Antiquities Act in order to make an argument about the purpose of the Act. The authors raise the argument that the Act has been “abused” for the purpose of effectively creating new, large national parks, and that the large size of some monuments designated throughout the Act’s history runs counter to the statute. Their claim purports to be rooted in textual analysis of the Act, but relies on an assumption due to the context of “earlier and contemporaneous bills” that would have “limited monument designation to 320 or 640 acres (page 3). The Act instead provides that monuments “shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” Yoo and Gaziano posit that the lack of a size limit “provide[s] flexibility for special situations and not to allow a million-acre designation” (page 3). Contemporaneous history, however, also points to officials in the Interior Department who favored broad empowerment of the President to set aside public lands, and suggests that these officials had a hand in adding the Act’s more expansive language of “other objects of historic or scientific interest” to meet this goal. No court has ever invalidated a presidential designation of a national monument — from the Grand Canyon under Teddy Roosevelt (its status as a national monument, prior to conversion to a national park, was upheld by the Supreme Court against mining claims in Cameron v. United States), to the Giant Sequoia NM under Clinton (upheld by the DC Circuit in Tulare County v. Bush).

*****

The purpose and context of the Antiquities Act, including congressional action and inaction over the past century, suggest that a one-way ratchet — presidential designation, with significant reduction or revocation only by Congress — is exactly what was intended. Congress was concerned that historical, archaeological, and natural or scenic resources could be damaged or lost, and devised a delegation to the President to act quickly when needed to preserve those resources, leaving Congress the opportunity to deliberate on a longer-term solution for the area in question, if it so decided. On 10 occasions, Congress has reversed those presidential decisions; far more often, it has concurred or built upon the President’s actions by expanding monuments or re-defining them as national parks. This is how the process is supposed to work. Antiquities Act designations do not, as critics say, cut off debate or circumvent the democratic process. They simply alter the status quo in favor of conservation — a precautionary approach. If Congress studies the matter and decides to change or abolish the monument to allow for different uses of the land, it has the power to do so through the usual legislative process; until that action is taken, objects of historic or scientific interest are protected.

Race and public lands

A recent issue of Environment and History has an article connecting issues of conservation and race, Harald Witt's "Indigenous Trees and Forests: Contradictions, Conflict and Conservation in Natal and Zululand (1900–1960)". The abstract:

At the turn of the nineteenth century, it was estimated that nine-tenths of the identified forests in Natal had been permanently alienated from the Crown through their incorporation into private lands and Native Trust Lands. The entrenchment of the political power of white land-owners in the twentieth century ensured that official attempts at restraining private land-owners from destroying indigenous forests on their lands were doomed to fail. Trust forests, as quasi state forests, were however, more accessible to Forestry officials, who remained convinced that the management and ultimately preservation of these forests could best be controlled and managed by themselves. This article examines the manner in which the conservation and administrative control of the various forests on Trust lands became the subject of dispute between various organs of the state in the first half of the twentieth century. This contestation was characterised, on one level, by a general shift from a conservationist and utilitarian approach in regard to the management of indigenous forests to one that was far more preservationist in definition while, at the same time, illustrating fierce administrative tensions between a relatively compassionate Department of Native Affairs and a Department of Forestry that subscribed to a more racialised agenda.

 Coastal Forest Dunes at Sodwana, Zululand (Carlos de Resende)

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:

Public ownership of water

Yesterday's "This Day in Water History" had the following historical editorial, including not only the record of enforcement action for exceeding a water allocation but also some historical justification for public control and ownership of water resources:

June 14, 1919: Municpal Journal and Public Works editorial. Public Control of Water. “Water companies and departments have appealed to consumers from time to time to restrict consumption in order to avert a water famine in the city, and meters are used largely to prevent waste; but we believe it is something new to impose a penalty for excessive consumption. As told last week, Jersey City, N. J., has been fined by the state $22,285 for using from the Rockaway river more than the 100 gallons per day per capita which had been allotted to it.

The right of state or federal government to guard the quality of river waters has been recognized and become familiar, and western states have long controlled the amount that could be withdrawn for irrigation; but limiting the amount that cities can use for their public supplies is a novelty. There is every reason, however, why power to limit the amount that can be used should rest in a central authority and be exercised on occasion. No one city has a right to monopolize a water supply because it “saw it first.” The water flowing in the rivers of a country comprises the run-off from every square foot of land in that country; and as the entire area yielded it, the entire area has a right in it. Moreover, to permit one or a few cities to monopolize all the water available in a state would be fatal to the growth in population and industrial development of the state outside of such cities.

The New Jersey plan seems to be a rational one and one that all states must adopt in some form, sooner or later; and the sooner, the less will be the confusion and individual hardship and the greater the benefit resulting therefrom.”

Rockaway River (Capture the Moment)

Battle for Paradise

Legal History Blog noted yesterday the New York Times review by Louis Bayard of David Randall's The King and Queen of Malibu: The True Story of the Battle for Paradise (Norton, 2016). The publisher's website describes the book:

Frederick and May Rindge, the unlikely couple whose love story propelled Malibu’s transformation from an untamed ranch in the middle of nowhere to a paradise seeded with movie stars, are at the heart of this story of American grit and determinism....

The newly married couple reached Los Angeles in 1887 when it was still a frontier, and within a few years Frederick, the only heir to an immense Boston fortune, became one of the wealthiest men in the state. After his sudden death in 1905, May spent the next thirty years fighting off some of the most powerful men in the country—as well as fissures within her own family—to preserve Malibu as her private kingdom. Her struggle, one of the longest over land in California history, would culminate in a landmark Supreme Court decision and lead to the creation of the Pacific Coast Highway.

Bayard writes:

Stubborn, isolated and innately distrustful, May couldn’t grasp that her prerogatives as property owner were being challenged by a new birthright, coaxed into being by the rise of the automobile: the right to beauty. Or, to quote the 1923 Supreme Court decision [Rindge Co. v. Los Angeles] that killed off May Rindge’s last hopes (and fortune): “Public uses are not limited, in the modern view, to matters of mere business necessity and ordinary convenience, but may extend to matters of public health, recreation and enjoyment.”

In other words, the government had a right to Malibu because the place was too wonderful to sit on. It took only six years for an actual road to materialize, and with it came the movie stars and the surfers and the billionaires and all the other fauna we associate with this pristine stretch of sand where, thanks to a south-facing shoreline, you need never squint into the sun.

But May Rindge’s legacy of cussedness and exclusion lives on. Her unfinished mansion has been reborn as a gated community, and in an atavistic echo of old battles, Malibu’s newest homeowners are once again working to seal off public access to their coastline.