The Colorado Doctrine: Water Rights, Corporations, and Distributive Justice on the American Frontier (Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference) - Hardcover

Schorr, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300134479 ISBN 13: 9780300134476

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Making extensive use of archival and other primary sources, David Schorr demonstrates that the development of the “appropriation doctrine,” a system of private rights in water, was part of a radical attack on monopoly and corporate power in the arid West. Schorr describes how Colorado miners, irrigators, lawmakers, and judges forged a system of private property in water based on a desire to spread property and its benefits as widely as possible among independent citizens.  He demonstrates that ownership was not dictated by concerns for economic efficiency, but by a regard for social justice.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"In this brilliant book, David Schorr demonstrates that prior appropriation water law broke radically from riparian water law in order to prevent moneyed land interests from monopolizing and speculating in the scarce waters of the arid west." - Justice Greg Hobbs, Colorado Supreme Court
"This is an extremely important contribution not only to American legal history but to economic history and legal theory generally. Schorr's idea that the prior appropriation doctrine created an anti-commons for purposes of distributive justice is completely original and highly important." - Gregory S. Alexander, Cornell Law School
"This important book provides a highly original and well-documented agrarian perspective on a pivotal episode in water law and the history of the nineteenth-century American West." - Henry Smith, Harvard Law School

About the Author:

David Schorr is senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University, where he chairs the Law and Environment Program at the Faculty of Law.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0300134479
• ISBN 13: 9780300134476
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256