Public Trust Case Study

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The United States government and all of its lesser conglomerates have a tough job to do when it comes to protecting its citizen’s rights. The fact of the matter is that the government doesn’t always get it right and citizen’s rights are often infringed upon, the court system aims to resolve these issues. One such instance comes to us from the Supreme Court case Bennett v. Spear in 1997. Here’s a brief summary of the case; in the area of question, the Klamath River in Oregon, it was discovered that two types of sucker fish were in peril due to falling lake levels caused by the Klamath Reservoir project. Irrigation regions and farmers downriver benefitted financially from the abundant water from the river. Their irrigation systems and therefore …show more content…

In America public trust is a huge deal, it’s what gives us all our public parks, national to county level. Public trust is defined as, a governments duty as a trustee to protect publicly owned resources. Matters of public trust are decided in state courts so resulting action can vary from state to state. For a government to violate the public trust the land or resource in question must make a shift from public to private without proper compensation for what the public will now be missing out on. This is exactly what is going on in this case. The water and the subsequent water level is the resource in peril. The reservoir physically holding that water is what changes it from public water to private water since no farmers can use what is all kept up upriver. With the ESA suit provision the public (farmers) has legal standing to sue based on a violation of the public trust, which lead to unfavorable economic conditions for them. With this provision and the ruling on the case the ESA was recognized as a tool for environmentalist and competing users of natural resources alike to challenge government

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