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Erum Sattar recently posted "From the Moors to the New World: Lessons from Dynamic Water Sharing for a Colonial-Era System in the Indus" . The abstract: This project is a close study of the legal and political aspects of management of water resources in semi-arid environments. The British in India laid the foundations of the modern irrigation system in what is now India and Pakistan. In semi-arid environments, the bulk of agriculture relies on irrigation, as it did in Spain under the Moors. We can observe a stark divide in the use of laws and institutions to manage natural resources in different societies, at different times and places. Some societies have managed in a way that achieved prosperity and long-term sustainability. Others have mismanaged so as to create ecological devastation and social stagnation. The Moors of Spain created a vibrant civilization in the Middle Ages that lasted nearly eight hundred years. One of the reasons for the dynamism of their civilization w...

An issue of Theoretical Inquiries in Law on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50" that I am co-editing should be out in a couple of months, at which time I'll post about it. In the meantime I received this call for papers for a conference on a similar theme. Please contact the organizers if you have any questions. Georgetown University, Washington D.C. October 5-6, 2018 This year marks the 50th anniversary of Garrett Hardin's  The Tragedy of the Commons . In one of the most cited articles of the 20th Century, Hardin provided a stylized and memorable cautionary tale of how self-interested actions can destroy common resources. However, even as Hardin's work gained traction with a broad array of scholars in many fields of study, it also garnered its fair share of criticism. Indeed, while Hardin popularized the notion of the commons, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her rigorous research refuting the core tenets of Hardin's cautionary tale-- namely that open acce...

Thomas Aquinas (detail from Valle Romita Polyptych  by Gentile da Fabriano (c. 1400)) William Boyd recently posted  "Just Price, Public Utility, and the Long History of Economic Regulation in America ". The abstract: This Essay investigates the history of “just price” and its influence on the concept and practice of public utility regulation in the United States. It begins with a discussion of the Scholastic understanding of just price and its relationship to commutative justice, with particular attention to the problem of coercion in economic exchange. The Essay then discusses the centrality of just price to broader ideas of moral economy and to economic thought and regulation in colonial America and the early United States. The heart of the Essay shows how the idea of just price influenced public utility regulation as it took shape during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the Essay demonstrates, received understandings of just price were fundamental to ...

Figure 1:  Memorial cone of the Mesilim Treaty Thanks to Peter Sand for contributing this post! [Footnotes after the jump.] The Musée du Louvre in Paris holds tangible evidence of the world’s first known legal agreement on boundary water resources: viz., the Mesilim Treaty , concluded in the 25th century B.C. between the two Mesopotamian states of Lagash and Umma . The terms of the treaty have been preserved as cuneiform inscriptions on a limestone cone (figure 1) and a stele commemorating Lagash’s victorious battle enforcing the treaty.[1] Fragments of both artifacts were excavated in 1878-1912 by French archeologists on sites at Tellō ( Tall Lawh, Dhi Qar Governate in Southern Iraq), the ancient temple-city of Girsu, once the capital of Lagash.[2] The inscriptions, transcribed and translated into French, German, Italian and English,[3] turned out to match several other texts on corresponding archeological finds of the period. The key exhibit, the so-called ‘Stele of the Vultures’, d...