Law Commons^™

Séances, Ciénegas, And Slop: Can Collaboration Revive The Colorado Delta?, Bret C. Birdsong

Scholarly Works

Issues of transboundary allocation of water resources and its environmental effects are, virtually by their very nature, ones that require collaborative solutions. In the absence of international law norms and institutions to resolve sovereign claims to the waters of international rivers, much of the decisionmaking is left to the collaborative, or negotiated, arrangements between the countries involved and their respective domestic stakeholders. This Article examines collaborative efforts to allocate waters in the Colorado River basin as they relate to the lowest reaches of that great river, the ecologically important but very fragile Colorado River Delta in Mexico. Collaboration is sometimes …

Road Rage And R.S. 2477: Judicial And Administrative Responsibility For Resolving Road Claims On Public Land, Bret C. Birdsong

Scholarly Works

The past decade has seen the D-4 Caterpillar bulldozer become a significant tool for those seeking to challenge federal land management agencies' authority to protect resources federal lands by reducing access. The power of the bulldozer is both symbolic and pragmatic. It cuts an iconographic image of local officials standing up against federal control over vast areas of land in the rural west. But it also, in many cases, provokes litigation, allowing claims to property rights to receive judicial attention that might otherwise evade them.

Underlying each of these protagonist's legal positions, if not their motivations, is a right-of-way grant …