Riparian water rights (or simply riparian rights) is a system for allocating water among those who possess land about its source. It has its origins in English common law. Riparian water rights exist in many jurisdictions with a common law heritage, such as Canada, Australia, and states in the eastern U.S.
Common land ownership can be organized into a partition unit, a corporation consisting of the landowners on the shore that formally owns the water area and determines its use.
Read more about Riparian Water Rights: General Principle, Canada, Riparian Rights and Duties in England and Wales, United States
Famous quotes containing the words water and/or rights:
“By polluting clear water with slime you will never find good drinking water.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)
“Rights! There are no rights whatever without corresponding duties. Look at the history of the growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights of Man.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)