UCLA School of Law

This book chapter applies Agustín Parise’s “ownership paradigm” of Latin American civil law typologies to water law development in seven countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. Parise’s historical model characterizes property regimes as “allocation” (royal use grants) in the colonial period, “liberal” (absolute individual rights) in the nineteenth century, and “social function” (government management for public benefit) in the twentieth. After briefly surveying Roman and US water law, the work examines legislation and caselaw to illuminate the water ownership trajectories in each of these seven nations, analyzing how different countries swung from the colonial allocation category to the others at different rates, depending on domestic and international political contexts. In some cases the author identifies a further category—the “neoliberal” (market-oriented or privatization) system. A final section investigates to what extent Hispanic and US water regimes have converged in the American Southwest. The study sheds light on how legal rights to water evolved as part of broader historical processes, and on the particular relevance of national constructs such as agrarian reform and federalism.