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Item Common Property's Role in Water Resource Management(Second International Conference on Property Rights, Economics and Environment, 1998) Blomquist, WilliamSince I was invited to speak about common-property arrangements in the management of water resources, I shall begin with a description of common-property arrangements. I will then turn to the relationship between the common property and regulatory-agency approaches to water resource management, addressing both its empirical manifestations and some theoretical bases for understanding them. Then I will consider the relationship between common-property and private-property or market arrangements, again analyzing that relationship from empirical and theoretical perspectives. When I use examples or illustrations in this brief presentation, they will have to do with groundwater basins in the United States since those are the empirical cases with which I am familiar. And throughout my remarks, I will be applying the analytical approach of institutional rational-choice analysis, and restating the work of many scholars who have worked in the field of common-property resources.Item A Flexible Framework or Rigid Doctrine? Assessing the Legacy of the 2000 Mojave Decision for Resolving Disputes Over Groundwater in California(2018) Szeptycki, Leon; Conrad, Esther; Blomquist, William; Martinez, JanetThe string of California Supreme Court cases establishing and elucidating groundwater pumping rights and rules for adjudicating them, culminating in the court's 2000 decision in City of Barstow v. Mojave Water Agency, has produced a framework that is frustratingly rigid and unclear at the same time. Fully litigating the relevant issues under that framework is a potentially time consuming and expensive slog. The rigidity drives up the cost of proving rights and the appropriate formula for allocating water, while the uncertainty creates room for litigious mischief. However, a close look at seven adjudications that have gone to judgment since Mojave shows a more complex and interesting story. In five of those cases, the parties and the courts effectively finessed the property rights rules to reach relatively quick settlements that included creative groundwater management solutions. In two of the seven, however, the Mojave framework produced over a decade of litigation. Both lines of cases hold important lessons for groundwater management generally, and for California as it moves forward in implementing the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014.