Water Coda, with No End in Sight

2018 ◽  
pp. 177-186
Author(s):  
Eric P. Perramond
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Data Sharing ◽  
Water Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Water Sharing ◽  
Water Users ◽  
Positive Results

Adjudication created an adversarial relationship between the state and New Mexicans, as well as between different water users in New Mexico. This chapter considers whether altering the purpose and process of adjudication might yet produce some positive results if the assumption of water sharing, not hard and fast prior-appropriation property rights, becomes the normative assumption by the state. The state could improve its data sharing and transparency to enable greater flexibility in using adjudication to a different end. Yet understanding New Mexico’s struggles over defining water rights offers lessons. The implications of resolving these issues speak directly to the ongoing water struggles in many other western states in the United States and in other countries where water allocations are already a concern.

scholarly journals Prison Gangs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danilo Freire
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
The State ◽  
Correctional Facilities ◽  
Street Level ◽  
Illicit Markets ◽  
Prison Gangs ◽  
The Impact

Although widely seen as unruly and predatory, prison gangs operate as quasi-governments in many American correctional facilities. Inmate groups enforce property rights, regulate illicit markets, and promote cooperation when the state is unable or unwilling to act. Prison gangs are relatively new to the United States, and are best understood as unintended consequences of recent shifts in inmate demographics and the gradual erosion of the convict code. The impact of prison gangs on street-level criminal activities and directions for further research are also discussed.

scholarly journals Challenges and Opportunities for Water of the Rio Grande

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Edward Rister ◽  
Allen W. Sturdivant ◽  
Ronald D. Lacewell ◽  
Ari M. Michelsen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
Financial Incentives ◽  
Water Rights ◽  
Rio Grande ◽  
The United States ◽  
Irrigated Agriculture ◽  
International Treaties ◽  
Agriculture Sector ◽  
Interstate Compacts

The Rio Grande has headwaters in Colorado, flows through New Mexico, and serves as the United States-Mexico border in Texas, emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. Snow melt in Colorado and northern New Mexico constitutes the water river supply for New Mexico and the El Paso region, whereas summer monsoonal flow from the Rio Conchos in Mexico and tributaries, including the Pecos River, provides the Rio Grande flow for southern Texas. The region is mostly semiarid with frequent long-term drought periods but is also characterized by a substantial irrigated agriculture sector and a rapidly growing population. International treaties and interstate compacts provide the rules for allocation of Rio Grande waters between the United States and Mexico and among Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. Water rights in Texas have been adjudicated, but the adjudication process was based on a wet period; hence, contemporary Rio Grande water rights are overallocated. Issues related to the waters of the Rio Grande include frequent drought, increased municipal demand caused by a rapidly increasing population, supply variability, underdeliveries from Mexico, increasing salinity, inefficient delivery systems, health issues of the population, no economic/financial incentives for farmers to conserve, and water is not typically priced for efficiency. Stakeholders are interested in identifying solutions to limited water supplies while there is increasing demand. There are several activities in place addressing Rio Grande-related water needs, including enhancing delivery distribution efficiency of raw water, conversion of rights from agriculture to urban, improving both agricultural irrigation field distribution and urban use efficiency, developments in desalination, and litigation. None of the solutions are easy or inexpensive, but there are encouraging cooperative attitudes between stakeholders.

Unsettled Waters

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric P. Perramond
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
Water Rights ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Western United States ◽  
Water Law ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Indian Water ◽  
Water Users ◽  
Court Process

Water rights adjudications happen quietly every day across the western United States, sorting Indian water rights, claims by cities, and use by agriculture. This book argues that these state-driven court procedures change what they purport to merely measure and understand about water within state boundaries. Adjudications have unwittingly brought back to the surface old disputes over the meaning of water and access to it. Because of their adversarial court process and identity cleaving between Indian and non-Indian water rights, the state simultaneously faces resistance and friction over water use. Unsettled Waters uses insights from ethnography, geography, and critical legal perspectives to demonstrate the power of local negotiation in water settlements and to examine the side effects of these legal agreements and lawsuits in New Mexico, a state struggling with water scarcity. As the process unfolded in the twentieth century, new expert measures and cultures of expertise developed into an adjudication-industrial complex. These added layers of bureaucracy and technology complicated the state’s view of water. Water users have also pushed back against the state and have used the glacial pace of adjudication to adapt to changes in water law while making new demands. The process will also now have to account for climate-related water supply shifts and unquantified Indian water rights, as well as the demands endangered species and rivers themselves. Adjudication in the twenty-first century may serve a completely different purpose than what it was designed for over a century ago.

How Local Waters Become State Water

2018 ◽  
pp. 11-31
Author(s):  
Eric P. Perramond
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Water Rights ◽  
The State ◽  
Private Property Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
Water Users ◽  
State Water ◽  
Access Rights ◽  
Local Water

New Mexico, like most western U.S. states, relies on the legal assumptions of prior appropriation to sort out historical water rights in space and in time. Early in the twentieth century, the state redefined water as owned by the public, but access rights to water were assigned as private property rights. Water rights adjudications are designed to identify water users throughout the state and quantify their water allocation. This process fundamentally rescaled water as an object and a property and was at odds with existing local water cultures and definitions of water. Local and indigenous water sovereigns contested the state’s reading of water as property, and adjudication dragged on for decades in valleys where local interests wanted water to remain with their lands.

Reparations, History, and Nietzsche

2019 ◽  
pp. 220-238
Author(s):  
Dan Moller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Classical Liberal ◽  
Over Time

Classical liberals stress property rights. An important objection to classical liberal views of the state is that significant portions of land and wealth were acquired unjustly and are owed to others through reparations. There is in fact a case for limited reparations in countries like the United States, especially to the still-living victims of state injustice. But this chapter also establishes important limitations to reparation claims. In particular, it seeks to identify the reasons why reparation claims tend to fade over time. It also discusses the selective nature of reparation claims and what this tells us about their underlying logic.

Changing Measures

2018 ◽  
pp. 89-105
Author(s):  
Eric P. Perramond
Keyword(s):  
Water Management ◽  
United States ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
Local Level ◽  
State Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
State Agency ◽  
New Science ◽  
Property Owners

To implement adjudication, the state devised and imposed new metrics and measures. Particular places in New Mexico were fundamental to the state and federal efforts to create a new science of water and a parallel legal treatment to water rights, by creating new ways to measure water for property owners. By moving away from local units to standardized acre-feet of water per year, the use of water at the local level became readable to the state agency responsible for water management. This chapter argues that water metrics were vital to creating a new state level of expertise, creating water experts along the way, as well as a basis for pricing water. These new units for water were critical for the coproduction of water expertise in the state of New Mexico and across the western states of the United States.

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