Oil and Water: Easements and the Environment

(Excerpt) While critical in the country's infancy, encouraging land use and development through legal constructs is less important and arguably detrimental now. Our need to develop wide swaths of wild land has changed; our common law has not. Part I explores the vast wilderness and open spaces of America's infancy and how state and federal government articulated a clear objective to settle and develop "wild lands." Part II tracks the continuing influence of this objective in implied easements, prescriptive easements, and express easements. Part III recognizes the lack of a conservation counterbalance and details several approaches that might curb pro-development bias in easement law.