General Stream Adjudications: A Good Public Investment?

The drive for perfection and certainty lie deep in American culture, but the law of prior appropriation has long made the realization of these goals incomplete for water users in the western United States. To resolve both simple and complex water use disputes, the West — with the exception of California — has primarily followed the law of prior appropriation for over a century and a half. The doctrine has evolved from a customary rule to resolve disputes between rival mining claimants, to a complex system of judicial and administrative irrigation rights,2 and in the last four decades as a vehicle to change the West from a colonial commodity production economy to a modern urban service and agribusiness one. Today, the doctrine that supported the Reclamation Era is once again adapting to the start of the reallocation and “smart” (smaller) project era, the consequent shrinkage of the irrigation economy and the recognition of “quasi-riparian” Indian and federal reserved water rights to support non-consumptive environmental water use.