| This dissertation examines the prior-appropriation water right, and, in particular, the implications of this property right: for water marketing. The first chapter develops a model of the prior-appropriation right, then proves that this right can inhibit water transfers under certain conditions. A simulation of a water market between on-stream diverters is used to quantify this impairment in terms of lost-output. The second chapter studies the initial development of the property right in the case law of California, Colorado and Utah. Analysis reveals that nineteenth-century courts did not reject the eastern water right, the riparian right, in response to scarcity. Instead, the reason was the legal problem of settling the public domain prior to survey, and the resulting property right was neither dramatically difference from the right it supplanted nor crafted to allow for transfer. The third chapter examines the development of mutual irrigation companies after 1860 in the states mentioned above. The hypothesis is that these institutions served to define and defend a transferable property right in water where courts and legislatures had failed to do so. Evidence is assembled to support this hypothesis from then-contemporary government documents and case law. |
