12,459 research outputs found
Montana v. Wyoming: Sprinklers, Irrigation Water Use Efficiency and the Doctrine of Recapture
In 2007, Montana filed an original action with the United States Supreme Court asserting that certain water uses in Wyoming violated the Yellowstone River Compact (“Compact”). The litigation was triggered by severe drought in the basin between 2000 and 2006, during which period there was inadequate water available for Montana appropriators in the Tongue River and Powder River sub-basins. Montana raised four primary issues: irrigation of new acreage in Wyoming; new and expanded storage facilities; new groundwater pumping, especially associated with coalbed methane development; and increased consumption of water due to improved irrigation efficiency on existing irrigated acreage. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the first substantive issue in this litigation: “Is a switch to more efficient irrigation with less return flow within the extent of Wyoming’s pre-1950 users’ existing appropriative rights, or is it an improper enlargement of that right to the detriment of Montana’s pre-1950 water users?” The Court held that such improvements are permitted under the Compact.
This Article takes a careful look at this decision. It begins with an introduction to the physical setting, focusing on the Tongue and Powder sub-basins within the Yellowstone basin. It discusses Montana’s arguments why the Compact precludes improved irrigation efficiency that increases consumption and the Special Master’s rejection of those arguments. Next, the Article looks at the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion. Finally, it offers some observations triggered by this litigation, critiques the doctrine of recapture in western water law, and supports the Court’s embrace of water use efficiency over protection of the status quo. We begin with a look at the Yellowstone River basin
The Use and Abuse of Special-Purpose Entities in Public Finance
States increasingly are raising financing indirectly through special-purpose entities (SPEs), variously referred to as authorities, special authorities, or public authorities. Notwithstanding their long history and increasingly widespread use, relatively little is known or has been written about these entities. This article examines state SPEs and their functions, comparing them to SPEs used in corporate finance. States, even more than corporations, use these entities to reduce financial transparency and avoid public scrutiny, seriously threatening the integrity of public finance. The article analyzes how regulation could be designed in order to control that threat while maintaining the legitimate financing benefits provided by these state entities
Constitutional Analogies in the International Legal System
This Article explores issues at the frontier of international law and constitutional law. It considers five key structural and systemic challenges that the international legal system now faces: (1) decentralization and disaggregation; (2) normative and institutional hierarchies; (3) compliance and enforcement; (4) exit and escape; and (5) democracy and legitimacy. Each of these issues raises questions of governance, institutional design, and allocation of authority paralleling the questions that domestic legal systems have answered in constitutional terms. For each of these issues, I survey the international legal landscape and consider the salience of potential analogies to domestic constitutions, drawing upon and extending the writings of international legal scholars and international relations theorists. I also offer some preliminary thoughts about why some treaties and institutions, but not others, more readily lend themselves to analysis in constitutional terms. And I distinguish those legal and political issues that may generate useful insights for scholars studying the growing intersections of international and constitutional law from other areas that may be more resistant to constitutional analogies
Parity realization in Vector-like theories from Fermion Bilinears
We reconsider in this paper the old aim of trying to understand if the
observed realization of discrete symmetries as Parity or CP in the QCD vacuum
can be satisfied from first principles. We show how under the appropriate
assumptions implicitely done by Vafa and Witten in their old paper on parity
realization in vector-like theories, all parity and CP odd operators
constructed from fermion bilinears of the form should
take a vanishing vacuum expectation value in a vector-like theory with N
degenerate flavours (N>1). In our analysis the Vafa-Witten theorem on the
impossibility to break spontaneously the flavour symmetry in a vector-like
theory plays a fundamental role.Comment: 12 pages, no figures To be published in JHE
A Study of Activated Processes in Soft Sphere Glass
On the basis of long simulations of a binary mixture of soft spheres just
below the glass transition, we make an exploratory study of the activated
processes that contribute to the dynamics. We concentrate on statistical
measures of the size of the activated processes.Comment: 17 pages, 9 postscript figures with epsf, uses harvmac.te
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