OCR Text |
Show PUEBLO WATER RIGHTS IN CALIFORNIA 147 which decisions of the State courts are final. This is discussed below under "Question of Local Law." Early Judicial Inquiries Lux v. Haggin Statements by the California Supreme Court in the leading riparian rights case of Lux v. Haggin played a significant part in laying the foundation of the California pueblo rights doctrine, despite the fact that the statements were dicta. The court went into the question of pueblo water rights, although it took notice that no pueblo existed on Kern River, the waters of which were the subject of the controversey.8 Although not necessary to the decision in this case, the subject matter became judicial law as the result of actual adjudications in later cases. Under the Mexican law, said the supreme court in Lux v. Haggin, each pueblo was a quasi public corporation having a right, by reason of its title to the four leagues of land set apart for its use, to the use of the waters of the stream on which it was situated, and vested with power to provide for a distribution of the waters to those for whose benefit the right and powers were conferred. The court's thesis was based on a decision that it had rendered in 1860 in a case involving lands of the pueblo at San Francisco, in which water rights were not involved.9 By analogy to this earlier decision, the court purported to "hold" that the pueblos had "a species of right or title in the waters and their use" within the pueblo limits, "subject to the public trust of continuously distributing the use in just proportion" to the common lands and settlers. Apparently, according to this thesis, the pueblo had a preference or prior right to the use of the water as against other proprietors of land contiguous to the same stream. Early Los Angeles Cases The first California decision in point was rendered in 1881, prior to the decision in Lux v. Haggin, with respect to the pueblo of Los Angeles, but without invoking or examining the ancient pueblo water laws. The basis of the decision was that as the pueblo and City of Los Angeles, for a full century from the founding of the pueblo in 1781, had claimed a right to all the waters of Los Angeles River, and as plaintiffs and their predecessors had recognized 'Lux v. Haggin, 69 Cal. 255, 328-332, 4 Pac. 919 (1884), 10 Pac. 674 (1886). 9Hartv. Burnett, 15 Cal. 530, 542, 573 (1860). |