Top 100 environmental blog

I'm happy to report that Feedspot has named Environment, Law, and History one of the top 100 environmental blogs. Thanks to all of you - the readers, writers, commenters, mentioners, and so on - who made it happen!

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Trends and approaches to the commons in historiography

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Next to last in our series on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50"  (the previous post, on Carol Rose's article, is here ) is Giacomo Bonan's piece, "Confronting Hardin: Trends and Approaches to the Commons in Historiography" . The abstract: This Article analyses both the role of historiography in Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons (1968) and his paper’s impact on historiographical debates of the last five decades. Concerning the role of historiography in Hardin’s argument, the ‘tragedy of the commons’ itself derived from a pamphlet written by a nineteenth century supporter of English enclosures, who proposed a variant of Malthus’ theory. If Hardin inevitably dealt with previous historical interpretations of the commons, the reverberations aroused by his paper have strongly influenced subsequent historical research on this subject. It is possible to group the historiographical production of the last decades concerning the commons into three main lines of rese...
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Water rights II - Systems of property rights in water

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(Continuing the series on water rights - the first installment was here .) Property in water takes a great variety of forms. Many countries' laws state that all water is the property of the public or the state ( Trelease, 1957 ; Cumyn, 2007 ; Sun, 2009 ; Schorr, 2013 ). Most civil law countries, following Roman law, distinguish between public and private waters. The "absolute dominion" rule of the common law, still in force in some American states, treats groundwater as an unowned resource, open to capture by any overlying landowner ( Dellapenna, 201 3). The riparian rights system of the common law views water sources as the common property of all landowners abutting the source ( Getzler, 2004 ). The system of prior appropriation applied in the western United States recognizes private property rights to amounts of flows of water. In Australia ( Davis, 1968 ) and western Canada the Crown owns the water and distributes it to users through a permit system ( Percy, 2005 ). ...
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Water rights V: Public rights

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(Continuing the series on water rights :) Whatever property regime applies to water, the public often retains certain rights in the resource. Thus, for instance, in American law, though a river's water may be owned by riparian landowners or appropriators, the federal government retains a "navigation servitude" in the water with which private owners (and states) cannot interfere ( Trelease, 1965 ). Joseph Sax Recent decades have seen much discussion of the "public trust doctrine", rules that allow public interests, especially environmental ones, to trump the normal property rules in water. Though the doctrine has its roots in the traditional civil and common law, particularly with regard to tidelands ( Selvin, 1980 ), its modern form was first articulated by Joseph Sax in a highly influential article (1970) , in which he argued that the historical doctrine should be developed to encourage courts to subject actions that harm the environment to strict scrutiny. In ...
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