The Colorado Doctrine: Water Rights, Corporations, and Distributive Justice on the American Frontier

摘要

For decades, historical and legal understandings of western U.S. water law-most notably its premise of prior appropriation-have oscillated between interpretations of market efficiency and those of corporate greed. In many respects, such interpretations aptly fit the capitalist frontier of the West, a field where corporate monopolies and free marketeers have proved as lasting in the scholarly imagination as gun smoke and cowboy hats. In his book on what became known as the Colorado Doctrine, a system of private rights in water that favored the rule of prior appropriation, David Schorr seeks to reorient the predominant views of western water law by spotlighting the principle of distributive justice that underpinned it. Adroitly tracing the development of water law in Colorado from gold rush mining camps to the early years of the twentieth century, Schorr reveals how this radical Lockean perspective, which aimed at the broadest distribution of vital resources, consistently proved the region's judicial thrust regarding public and private property. According to Schorr, this principle has not only been overlooked in scholarly discussions on western water, but continues to be ignored within current paradigms of natural resource and property law.