Water Rights and the Colorado River Basin
The shift towards new forms of energy can have a significant impact on employment. There will be people gaining and losing from these changes and there will be disputes, some leading to legal issues. I would like to investigate these issues.
Secondary Sources
CHRISTIAN S. HARRISON, ALL THE WATER THE LAW ALLOWS: LAS VEGAS AND COLORADO RIVER POLITICS
(2021). Harrison’s book All the Water the Law Allows directly looks into my topic of the state’s legal rights to the Colorado River water. Harrison’s goal is to criticisze the argument that urban centers, such as Las Vegas, operate as ‘monolithic water-grabbing empires.’ Instead, Harrison details the water policy and legal agreements that affect the water distribution of the Colorado River, showing that the economy of the American West’s reliance on agriculture has a much greater affect that any urban center. Harrison tells us the story of the “Law of the River” or the Colorado River Compact. He goes through the history of the river and urban centers to set the scene for more recent issues, such as the ‘legally imposed shortage’ that forced competing water agencies to get together and form teh Southern Nevada Water Authority in the late 1920s. His book gives different political and legal models for for distribution of the River’s water as twenty-first century trends render “the Law of the River” obsolete.
MATTHEW MILLER, ENVIRONMENTAL PERSONHOOD AND STANDING FOR NATURE: EXAMINING THE
COLORADO RIVER CASE, 17 U.N.H. L. REV. 355 (2019). This law review article looks at the 2017 Colorado River case in which the Colorado River Ecosystem brought a lawsuit against the State of Colorado for violating its constitutional rights. seeking to establish in federal court two doctrines that have made strides in other countries as part of the international Rights of Nature movement: environmental personhood and standing for nature. Environmental personhood would recognize natural entities as legal persons, endowing them with rights and duties under the law. The article goes through the benefits of establishing ecological features as legal persons and how that would allow for increased protection under the law. Miller also goes through the case and critiques how the Colorado River Ecosystem could have improved its case to increase its chances of winning.