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Show ORGANIZATION 17 disputes arose between riparians, the courts defined the respective water rights and awarded appropriate relief between the parties. (2) EMERGING STATE REGULATION The most significant recent change in the water law of the Eastern States is the recognition that there is a vital public interest in the use of the water resource. This recognition has lead many States to enact statutes providing for very comprehensive water use regulation. To be sure, no Eastern State has regulatory machinery to match the sophisticated allocation, adjudication, and distribution procedures of some of the appropriation States, but it is misleading to assume that Eastern States are not devising effective means of regulating water use. First of all, it must be emphasized that water use administration in the riparian States cannot be cast in a proper perspective, nor can the effectiveness of administration be evaluated, without an apprecia- tion of the basic nature of riparian rights. To one degree or another, all riparian States define the riparian water right as the right to make a reasonable use of the water. The reasonableness of a par- ticular use is susceptible to no precise measure, but must be deter- mined in light of all of the facts and circumstances as they exist between the parties to a particular dispute. The critical observation is that riparian rights, by their very nature, cannot be defined and quantified for a stream system. The various potential uses of the riparian owners defy any application of the reasonable use standard to determine how, where, when, under what circumstances, and how much water each riparian shall be entitled to use. If riparian rights cannot be quantified for stream systems, it is not surprising that Eastern States have not adopted statutory ad- judication procedures to quantify such rights. And if riparian rights cannot be quantified, it is apparent that they cannot be "admin- istered" by a public agency; nor can there be a supervised distribu- tion of water in accordance with rights unless and until it is known exactly what those rights are. Accordingly, one cannot expect to find, and does not find, ad- ministrative provisions for adjudication and distribution of water under the riparian rights system in the East. What one does find is an attempt either to impose regulatory controls within the frame- work of the riparian system, or an effort to move from riparian doctrines toward permit systems which incorporate certain appro- priation principles. (3) REFORMS WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF THE RIPARIAN SYSTEM Several Eastern States have enacted rather comprehensive legisla- tion to control much water use and many water related uses, without directly regulating traditional riparian water rights. New York is perhaps the best example of this kind of legislative reform, and brief reference to administrative control of water in that State will illustrate the kinds of controls that many States exercise without abolishing the riparian system. There, water use by riparians con- |
