Madera Mercury, Volume XXXVI, Number 133, 31 August 1922 — Chief Justice Tells Of Rights to Water [ARTICLE]

Chief Justice Tells Of Rights to Water

The growth of water laws In California has already settled the main issues involved in the various uses of water so that the newest development in use, storage in mountain reservoirs for irrigation purposes, presents no very novel legal problems, Chief Justice Lucien Shaw of the California supreme court said in an address before the American Bar association at San Francisco recently. After questions involved in using stream water for placer mining had been settled, he said, a long controversy arose over riparian rights, which ended when the legislature and the courts fixed their status as vested rights. Riparian rights have not prevented the beneficial use of water for irrigation, he said, as the rights of innumerable riparian owners have been acquired by others for irrigation purposes, so that practically all the irrigated land in the state is now non riparian. Owners of land situated above an underground water supply have a mutual interest in the water similar to the mutual rights of riparian owners to the waters of a stream, the judge said.