The Historical Origins of the Modern Public Trust Doctrine

The California Supreme Court’s decision to protect Mono Lake provides a paragon example of how the public trust doctrine can serve as an environmental guardian – as well as a story full of intrigue, suspense, and high stakes. One unusual aspect of the story is that two of the most important characters are neither people nor cities, nor even geological formations on the land – they are laws. In the Mono Lake case, advocates invoked the public trust doctrine to protect public law interests in the environmental values of the waterway, defending them against private law claims to the water within it. To understand how these public and private interests came into conflict at Mono Lake – and why they continue to harbor conflict across all arid lands – it is important to understand the legal doctrines that govern different aspects of water governance. For this reason, the book begins with the law – tracing the history of the public trust doctrine from its ancient Roman and English roots to its reception in the United States, and the conflict posed by independently developing doctrines of private water allocation law, especially the prior appropriations doctrine of the American West.