Jill Robbie, Private Water Rights
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| Author | |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| Pages | 408-409 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2016.0377 |
Against a background of unacceptably high carbon emissions and rising seas, the search for alternative energy sources includes the development of hydropower and tidal-power. This means an inevitably increasing interest in legal questions relating to water in the near future. Enter Dr Jill Robbie's excellent new monograph, which helps to clarify a number of interesting questions in the law of water, an area which until now has been much under-researched (the only other monograph having been published in 1907).
Dr Robbie's work, a revised version of her 2012 PhD thesis, is divided into three main sections: the first discusses the division of things in Scots Law, the second the rights of ownership of land beneath bodies of water, and the third – and substantially largest – details the history and nature of common interest as it applies to running water in Scotland.
In the first section, Robbie remarks that it is odd that Scots legal literature has hitherto shown little interest in the division of things. This seems a fair point; with our system of property law heavily influenced by Roman law and the civil codes of our European neighbours, it seems surprising that there has been so little discussion of this issue beyond the simple division of corporeal, incorporeal, moveable, and heritable property. Indeed, it may be this lack of focus on key definitions which has led many scholars over the centuries to confuse and intertwine the issues of common
Robbie concludes in this section that, since rivers are constantly moving bodies of water, they are incapable of private ownership, due to their continuously changing nature. This classification as
The second section provides detailed discussion on the...
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