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Natural Resources And Natural Law Part I: Prior Appropriation, Robert W. Adler
Natural Resources And Natural Law Part I: Prior Appropriation, Robert W. Adler
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
In recent years there has been a resurgence of civil disobedience over public land policy in the West, sometimes characterized by armed confrontations between ranchers and federal officials. This trend reflects renewed assertions that applicable positive law violates the natural rights (sometimes of purportedly divine origin) of ranchers and other land users, particularly under the prior appropriation doctrine and grounded in Lockean theories of property. At the same time, Native Americans and environmental activists on the opposite side of the political-environmental spectrum have also relied on civil disobedience to assert natural rights to a healthy environment, based on public trust …
Whose Lands? Which Public?: The Shape Of Public-Lands Law And Trump's National Monument Proclamations, Jedediah Britton-Purdy
Whose Lands? Which Public?: The Shape Of Public-Lands Law And Trump's National Monument Proclamations, Jedediah Britton-Purdy
Faculty Scholarship
President Trump issued a proclamation in December 2017 purporting to remove two million acres in southern Utah from national monument status, radically shrinking the Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument and splitting the Bears Ears National Monument into two residual protected areas. Whether the President has the power to revise or revoke existing monuments under the Antiquities Act, which creates the national monument system, is a new question of law for a 112-year-old statute that has been used by Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama to protect roughly fifteen million acres of federal land and hundreds of millions of marine acres. …