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

Abstract

Almost all economic and legal histories of the American West discuss the evolution of water rights from the common law riparian doctrine to the prior appropriation doctrine, a new form of property rights in water. Riparian rights give landowners the right to the “reasonable use” of water that flows through their land. The system worked well in the high rainfall areas of the United States east of the Mississippi River, but in the arid West there quickly developed an alternative legal system: prior appropriation. This water doctrine allowed usufructuary rights in diverted water and used the date of the original appropriation to allocate water among competing claims. The doctrine also required that water be put to beneficial use. The emergence of this novel form of legal governance of water is usually treated as the result of miners and farmers wanting to capture substantial efficiency gains by diverting water from streams for sluicing in mining and raising crops in agriculture.