When is a River not a River? Reclaiming Nature's Disorder in Lux v. Haggin

Abstract

Few legal cases in nineteenth-century California sparked such bitter controversy as the preeminent water rights ruling, Lux v. Haggin. From the time litigation began in 1879, Lux v. Haggin served as a public forum for a wide range of ongoing conflicts in California's arid San Joaquin Valley: San Francisco's control of hinterland resources, the struggle between land monopolists and small farmers, and, perhaps most notably, landowners versus water appropriators., While these highly politicized issues made Lux v. Haggin a case with different meanings for different audiences, the court had a basic question to decide: What is a watercourse? For Charles Lux and his fellow plaintiffs legally to establish their water rights as riparian landowners, they had to prove that the Buena Vista Slough that crossed their Kern County swampland was a watercourse. If it was a watercourse, then they were riparian landowners; but if Buena Vista Slough was indistinguishable from Buena Vista swamplands -that is, if no watercourse existed, as Haggin and the other defendants contended-then the plaintiffs had no riparian rights. Defining what constituted a river therefore stood at the center of Lux v. Haggin. Over the course of the lengthy trial, however, this attempt to codify a river's existence developed into a broader discussion about the character of nature in California. The text of Lux v. Haggin provides a unique view of Californians' representations of nature and how these representations functioned within the discourse of nineteenth-century law. These representations largely portrayed nature as orderly, consistent, and definable -a socially constructed nature both adaptable to the permanency of human law and amenable to the preservation of private property rights. In this way, Lux v. Haggin presents a compelling example of how law transforms nature into prop-