Law Commons^™

A Short History Of The Public Trust Doctrine And Its Intersection With Private Water Law, Erin Ryan

Scholarly Publications

This article explores the development of public trust principles from early Roman and British law through modern U.S. law as a public commons approach to natural resource management, especially with regard to waterways. It then analyzes the tension between the common pool approach underlying the public trust regulation of waterways and the contrasting theoretical premises of American laws that regulate private use of the water within them—especially the privatization model embedded in the doctrine of prior appropriations, which assigns perpetual rights to withdraw from the watercourse on a first-in-time basis. The public trust doctrine, the protagonist of much modern environmental …