For decades, historical and legal understandings of western U.S. water law—most notably its premise of prior appropriation—have oscillated between interpretations of market efficiency and those of corporate greed. In many respects, such interpretations aptly fit the capitalist frontier of the West, a field where corporate monopolies and free marketeers have proved as lasting in the scholarly imagination as gun smoke and cowboy hats. In his book on what became known as the Colorado Doctrine, a system of private rights in water that favored the rule of prior appropriation, David Schorr seeks to reorient the predominant views of western water law by spotlighting the principle of distributive justice that underpinned it. Adroitly tracing the development of water law in Colorado from gold rush mining camps to the early years of the twentieth century, Schorr reveals how this radical Lockean perspective, which aimed at the broadest distribution of vital resources, consistently proved the region's judicial thrust regarding public and private property. According to Schorr, this principle has not only been overlooked in scholarly discussions on western water, but continues to be ignored within current paradigms of natural resource and property law.

The book begins with an in-depth investigation of the mining laws that emerged in the Colorado territory following the 1859 discovery of gold. Here Schorr sets an impressive tone for the following chapters, as he seamlessly interweaves his legal and historical training in research and analysis. Drawing on ninety-one mining codes from seventy-eight districts, Schorr demonstrates how the principle of equality, modified by the rule of sufficiency, limited mining claims in both size and ownership. And as he shows, this Lockean principle of equal access soon spread from land to water. From Colorado's territorial laws and constitution to the 1882 Coffin decision that etched the young state into legal history, the water monopoly bestowed in common law to riparian lands was consistently undercut and, ultimately, abolished in favor of the broader distribution achieved through the system of prior appropriation (first in time, first in right). In the final two chapters, Schorr charts how the principle of distributive justice continued to influence Colorado's water laws in the decades that followed; in the process, he squarely challenges the varying interpretations of corporate greed and market efficiency often ascribed to the law of appropriation. Contrary to Gilded Age stereotypes of corporations running amok in the West, Colorado courts consistently ruled in favor of small farmers and placed heavy restrictions on the size, access, and contracts of irrigation companies. Such efforts of fair distribution, however, did not make for efficient markets—a fact that Schorr details in his chapter on the beneficial use clause and the diminishing productivity inherent in its restriction on water right transfers.

On the whole, Schorr's book is an impressive achievement. The research and analysis the author advances is certainly one of the work's primary strengths. Schorr not only draws on primary documents heretofore missed by other historians of western water law, but also interrogates them with both a historical and a judicial eye, providing analysis that is clear, well-written, and accessible. That said, water historians will most likely not find anything significantly new in Schorr's account of the Colorado Doctrine's Lockean aims and roots. Indeed, this was intended, as the book is aimed more at property and legal theorists than at historians. This focus is clearly seen in the book's conclusion, in which the author discusses the implications of his study at length regarding property theory and natural resource law. Here, Schorr asserts that the distributive justice underpinning the Colorado Doctrine not only offers a more egalitarian rethinking of law and resources in the West, but a possible “paradigm shift” for current policy debates in which “property regimes will be classified not along the governance axis . . . but first and foremost along the distributive one” (p. 164). While historians may raise issue with the book's scope and theoretical discussions, scholars of all stripes will find Schorr's work filled with noteworthy contributions and deem it a valuable addition to historical and legal discourses on property, resources, and business.