OPINION/COMMENTARY

PLF Fights For Water Rights In The West

In the last few years, Pacific Legal Foundation’s Western Water Law Project has been sending federal, state, and local regulators and environmentalists a powerful message that PLF will enforce through legal precedent: Where the government takes water rights away from ranchers, farmers, and even from entire water districts for a public benefit, it has to pay for it. Indeed, in 2001, the Court of Federal Claims embraced the arguments filed by PLF and recognized that government diversion of water away from the Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District in central California to benefit the winter-run chinook salmon constituted a regulatory “taking” no different in kind than the government taking of private land by eminent domain to build a highway bypass across a cornfield....