faulker079

Murray Clamen and Daniel Macfarlane recently posted "The International Joint Commission, Water Levels, and Transboundary Governance in the Great Lakes" . The abstract: This article provides a historical background of the evolution of transboundary water governance and environmental diplomacy in the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence basin, with a focus on the International Joint Commission (IJC), during the twentieth century. This study focuses on water quantity issues, such as diversions, canals, hydroelectric developments, control works, and water levels, revealing the range of  artificial and natural impacts on water levels in the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence basin. Doing so provides for a revealing examination of the IJC, which has traditionally been the main forum in which Canada and the United States manage their environmental relations and border water issues, which allows for an engagement with a range of North American transboundary governance theories. While the IJC is often laude...

Continuing where yesterday's post left off: As the judges of the Privy Council recognized, the law governing the conflict between Miner and Gilmour over the waters of the Yamaska was not English law. Quebec, before being conquered by the British in 1760, had been part of the French Empire. A royal edict of 1663 had declared the law of New France to be the law as applied in the Parlement of Paris.  This law included royal ordinances, Roman law as expounded by jurists, and the sixteenth-century official collection of the customary law of Paris known as the Coutume de Paris. The Quebec Act of 1774, passed by the British Parliament a few years after the British conquest of Canada from France, declared that the laws of property existing in the province of Quebec pre-conquest would remain in force under British rule. The water law applicable to the case at hand was thus the law of the old French Empire, that is to say the law of ancien régime Paris, ironically no longer in force in Franc...

It seems I forgot to mention my own article when I posted it a while back.  "Riparian Rights in Lower Canada and Canada East: Inter-Imperial Legal Influences"  was published as chapter 4 of  Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870-1930: Empires and Encounters   (Roland Cvetkovski & Volker Barth eds., Bloomsbury, 2015). I'll do a few posts based on the article now; for the full version, please see the book. One of the most dynamic areas of law in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American world was that of water rights, or, as it was typically denoted then, “riparian rights”. This body of law dealt with the relative rights of owners of land adjacent to water—riparian land—to use the flowing waters, whether for power, irrigation, transportation, fishing, or waste disposal. The historical development of the law in this field in the nineteenth century has been analysed from several points of view, including economic property theory and Marxian legal history.  Transnational as...