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Show PUEBLO WATER RIGHTS IN NEW MEXICO 163 and 19 of the Plan of Pitic (or Pictic) and said that from this language it was his view that the California decisions on the pueblo rights doctrine "stretched the meaning and context of the plan out of proportion and beyond its original intended meaning and colonization." He also referred to a published statement that Los Angeles, "being thwarted by the courts in her attempts to expropriate all the waters of the Los Angeles river, then went to the legislature and after legislation was adopted favorable to the municipality the statutes were upheld although the courts prior to such legislation had refused to uphold the claims of Los Angeles to the water." This he mentioned "to point up the proposition that this California Pueblo Water Rights Doctrine is a hybrid mixture of the application of (1) Spanish and Mexican law as far as it could be applied and stretched, plus (2) California cases and decisions originally dealing only with land titles and not water rights plus (3) legislative enactment."82 The New Mexico Supreme Court thus applied to the decision in the Cartwright case American law-the law of an American sister State-rather than Spanish-American law. The decisions of the California Supreme Court on pueblo water rights, although stare decisis in California, were obviously not conclusive on the New Mexico court. The latter was free to accept them as precedents or to reject them; as the United States Supreme Court said in refusing to review the early California decisions on pueblo water rights, these were matters of general law or State law, not Federal law. See the earlier discussions "Pueblo Water Rights in California-Question of Local Law." With the new, larger, and more readily available sources of information, there was an opportunity in the Cartwright case to explore the basic Spanish and Mexican laws, and to reach an independent conclusion as to their applicability to the local situation, before engrafting upon the jurisprudence of New Mexico a concept the authenticity of which has been the subject of so much criticism, both interested and disinterested. There is no hint in the court's opinion that such an objective study was authorized or even considered by the majority. Judge Federici made a determined effort to gather together and to present in a persuasive manner all pertinent materials that were available, but on each presentation he was outvoted. Municipal Pueblo Right vis-a-vis Appropriative Right The majority opinion in the Cartwright case included the statement that "We see nothing in the theory of Pueblo Rights inconsistent with the doctrine of prior appropriation and beneficial use."83 In his second dissent, Judge Federici criticized the fallacy of this statement-particularly with respect to the diversion of water from a source of supply in accordance with law, with the intent to apply the water to a specific beneficial use, and consummated with 8i66N. Mex. at 93-99. 8366N. Mex. at 80. |