Hydrology and Texas Water Law: ...A Logician’s Nightmare

Scientists generally consider all water as merely passing through, but in different phases of, the endless hydrologic cycle. In contrast, the law divides water in the hydrologic cycle into several different classes based on real or supposed physical differences between classes. Legal classes of water are treated separately, usually without consideration of the many interconnections existing between phases of the cycle, and different rules of law have developed concerning the ownership and use of each legal class. Texas courts, like those of other Great Plains jurisdictions, have applied this fragmented classification system, recognizing diverse public and private rights to each class of water. Under such a system, it is obvious that human interference with water in one phase of the cycle can have significant impacts on existing water rights in other phases, a situation especially evident in water-short West Texas, a part of the semi-arid southern Great Plains. Application of this legal system to hydrologic realities has, as one scholar aptly noted, resulted in a lawyer’s paradise and a logician\u27s nightmare.

Review of \u3ci\u3e Indian Water in the New West\u3c/i\u3e by Thomas R. McGuire, William B. Lord, and Mary G. Wallace

This collection of essays on Indian water rights results from a symposium, Indian Water Rights and Water Resources Management, sponsored by the American Water Resources Association and the Northern Lights Research and Education Institute. Held at Missoula, Montana in June, 1989, the symposium was co-sponsored by a number of federal and state agencies and universities. Included among participants were lawyers, engineers, economists, ecologists, anthropologists, mediators, federal officials, and Native Americans who collectively represented a broad range of scholarly and applied expertise and viewpoints. This book is not a collection of papers by academics on the history and development of Indian water rights law. Instead, its primary focus is on negotiated settlements, a new, more expeditious method being used with increasing frequency to resolve disputes involving Indian water claims, as opposed to protracted, complex and costly litigation in the courts