Opinion ID: 1170215
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 24

Heading: Basis of Prior Decisions Upholding Existence of Pueblo Right Under Spanish and Mexican Law

Text: (5) The adequacy of the data and the reasoning on which a prior decision purports to be based are relevant factors in determining whether the decision should be followed under the doctrine of stare decisis. (See. e.g., DeBurgh v. DeBurgh (1952) 39 Cal.2d 858, 863-867 [250 P.2d 598]; 6 Witkin, Cal. Procedure (2d ed. 1971) Appeal, § 698. p. 4615.) In accordance with this principle, defendants contend that we should overrule our prior decisions upholding the existence of the pueblo water right because those rulings were allegedly based directly or indirectly on incomplete and distorted presentations of historical data about the water rights of pueblos under Spanish and Mexican law. In only two decisions, Lux v. Haggin (1886) supra, 69 Cal. 255, 313-334, and Vernon Irrigation Co. v. City of Los Angeles (1895) supra, 106 Cal. 237, 244-251, has this court examined Spanish-Mexican history and law pertaining to the existence of the pueblo water right claimed by plaintiff. Prior cases in which the issue was raised were disposed of on other grounds. Two such cases resulted in reported opinions. In City of Los Angeles v. Baldwin (1879) 53 Cal. 469, the city's action to quiet title to Los Angeles River waters against the owners of certain land in Los Feliz Rancho bordering the west bank of the river in the Narrows was held barred by a prior judgment denying the city an injunction against the same defendants' use of the river. The city had not appealed the prior judgment; hence it was only res judicata, not stare decisis, before this court. In Feliz v. City of Los Angeles (1881) supra, 58 Cal. 73, owners of other tracts also located in Los Feliz Rancho were denied the right to have the city enjoined from cutting off the flow from the river into the owners' irrigation ditches insofar as the city was taking such action to maintain the volume of river water necessary to supply the city's needs. As previously stated, the decision was based on the long-standing recognition and acknowledgment of the city's pueblo water right by the owners, their predecessors, and other upstream riparian owners, in view of which the court found it unnecessary to examine the Spanish and Mexican laws applicable to pueblos. In cases raising the pueblo water right issue after the Lux and Vernon decisions, this court has treated the existence of the pueblo water right as a rule of law based on the precedent of those two decisions and of decisions relying on them. (See City of L.A. v. City of Glendale, supra, 23 Cal.2d 68, 73; City of San Diego v. Cuyamaca Water Co., supra, 209 Cal. 105, 122; City of Los Angeles v. Hunter, supra, 156 Cal. 603, 608; City of Los Angeles v. Los Angeles Farming & Milling Co., supra, 152 Cal. 645, 652; City of Los Angeles v. Pomeroy, supra, 124 Cal. 597, 641.) Therefore, Lux and Vernon are the key decisions on the issue. Lux v. Haggin, supra, 69 Cal. 255, is a landmark case establishing for California the doctrine that riparian water rights generally have priority over appropriative rights based on appropriations made after the riparian land became private property. The part of the court's exhaustive opinion relevant here is that dealing with and rejecting a contention that riparian rights were precluded by Mexican law which dedicated running waters to the common use of all inhabitants. (69 Cal. at pp. 313-334.) Although the opinion does not mention Law 5 or Law 7 of Title 17, Book IV, of the Laws of the Indies, on which defendants rely here as establishing the principle of commonality of water use under Spanish and Mexican law in California, the court does recognize the principle and analyzes its relationship to riparian rights and to the pueblo water right. Generally, the court views Mexican law as (1) permitting common use of the waters of unnavigable streams while flowing in their natural channels but (2) treating such water as capable of appropriation as private property, independent of any common use, where the quantity of water is so small as to be incapable of being fully enjoyed without exclusive possession. (69 Cal. at p. 320.) The court states that Mexican law gave pueblos a property right in the waters of an unnavigable river on which the pueblo was situated in trust for the purpose of equitably distributing the water for the benefit of its inhabitants. The trust is within the supervision and control of the state. Thus the legislature has provided for the mode and manner in which shall be exercised the trust of distributing the waters by the city, the successor of the pueblo of Los Angeles.  [19] (69 Cal. at p. 329.) Turning to the relationship between pueblo rights and the riparian rights of private landowners, the court quotes a passage from the Spanish legal writer, Escriche, including the following key sentence about rivers: `If not navigable, the owners of the lands through which they pass may use the waters thereof for the utility of their farms or industry, without prejudice to the common use or destiny which the pueblos on their course shall have given them. ...' (69 Cal. at p. 330.) The court then states that it appears that a pueblo had a prior right to use the waters of a stream passing through it for the benefit of its inhabitants even as against an upper riparian proprietor. The court adds, however, that [i]t is not necessary here to decide that the pueblos had the preference above suggested, or to speak of the relative rights of two or more municipalities on the same stream because no pueblo existed on the watercourse under litigation. (69 Cal. at pp. 331-332.) Defendants' principal response to the merits of the Lux court's views favoring the pueblo water right is to attack the credibility of the quotation from Escriche. In this regard, defendants adopt the view of the trial judge's memorandum of decision which in turn is based on statements of the Texas Court of Civil Appeals in State v. Valmont Plantations (1961) 346 S.W.2d 853, 867-869, affd. 163 Tex. 381 [355 S.W.2d 502]. In Valmont the court ruled that owners holding land along the lower Rio Grande River under Spanish and Mexican grants did not have riparian rights to use the river water for irrigation. In so holding, the court rejected the riparian owners' contention that Escriche's statement, quoted above, showed the existence of riparian rights under Spanish or Mexican law. [20] This rejection was based on (1) an asserted absence of Spanish legal authority to support the existence of riparian rights and (2) a theory that Escriche borrowed his ideas from the Code Napoleon of France (a country in which he lived from 1823 to 1833 which was prior to the publication of his treatise in 1847) and that his work imitated the organization of a treatise, published in 1834, of a French legal writer named Duranton. The Texas court's criticism, however, was directed solely to Escriche's views on riparian rights (346 S.W.2d at p. 868, fn. 31) and not to the part of his statement indicating that a private landowner's use of river water must be without prejudice to the common use or destiny given to such water by pueblos along the river's course. It is clear from French legal material submitted by plaintiff and not disputed by defendants that neither Duranton nor the French laws of his time recognized any municipal water right equivalent to or resembling the pueblo right referred to by Escriche. Thus the Valmont discussion sheds little light on the soundness of Escriche's indicated view of the existence of pueblo water rights. The other case in which this court examined the question of the existence of the pueblo water right under Spanish and Mexican law is Vernon Irrigation Co. v. City of Los Angeles, supra, 106 Cal. 237. In Vernon, an owner of land downstream from the city claimed riparian and appropriative rights in water of the Los Angeles River and sought an injunction and decree quieting title against the city. The city asserted the pueblo water right and was sustained by the trial court. The Supreme Court upheld the pueblo right not only by relying on the above described discussion in Lux v. Haggin, supra, 69 Cal. at pages 326-332, but also by making an independent review of Spanish and Mexican law and of the pueblo's early history. The court did not point to any specific governmental act or rule of law expressly creating the pueblo right but concluded that the existence of the right was implied by the role which the Spanish and Mexican governments assigned to the pueblo as an instrumentality for settling vacant territory. The needs of the pueblo settlers for wood, pastures, and water were supplied by the pueblo from public or common lands administered for the benefit of the inhabitants. Spanish laws directed that pueblos be located with a view to ample water supply and this was done in the case of Los Angeles. Since the water belonged to the nation, and could not be acquired from it by condemnation, it would seem to follow, as a matter of necessity, that, when the pueblo was organized under the [Spanish] laws, a sufficiency of this water for the pueblo was appropriated to it. (106 Cal. at p. 248.) The court concluded (1) that pueblos had a right to the water which had been appropriated to the use of the inhabitants, similar to that which it had in the pueblo lands, (2) that the right of its successor, the city, to the water, for its inhabitants and for municipal purposes, is superior to the rights of plaintiff as a riparian owner, and (3) that such right could be asserted only to the amount needed to supply the wants of the inhabitants. (106 Cal. at pp. 250, 251.) The opinion states these conclusions were supported (1) by the history of the Pueblo of Los Angeles, including the instructions for its founding in 1781 and the pueblo's complaint in 1810 of the San Fernando Mission's diversion of river water at Cahuenga, upstream from the pueblo, followed by the mission's acknowledgment of the pueblo's superior right, (2) by the translations of numerous ordinances, laws, rules, and regulations of Spain and Mexico relating to this subject (106 Cal. at p. 250), (3) by Lux v. Haggin, supra, 69 Cal. 255, and (4) by Feliz v. City of Los Angeles, supra, 58 Cal. 73. [21] Defendants make a broad attack on the Vernon case, based primarily on the present trial court's lengthy finding 55, which states the following as its basic proposition: A review of the Vernon case reveals many instances of erroneous translations of Spanish documents, incomplete references to source materials and omissions of important sentences. The effect thereof was to create confusion and to present incorrect and distorted statements about the water rights of pueblos under Spanish and Mexican law. Both this finding and defendants' brief offer numerous examples to support this proposition, but after comparing them with the present record we conclude that some are inaccurately stated and after correction for such errors, in total, they are not of sufficient seriousness to have misled the Vernon court. [22] After reviewing the showing in the present record of the briefs and record before the court in Vernon, we are satisfied that the court had before it the same major contentions and considerations which are now being advanced for and against the historical existence of the pueblo water right claimed by plaintiff. That court based its conclusion in favor of the existence of such a right on the very same historical circumstances on which plaintiffs rely here, including (1) the primary role played by the river's availability for irrigation in the Spanish government's selection of the pueblo's location and instructions for its establishment and development and (2) the subsequent recognition of the pueblo right manifested by such incidents as the resolution in the pueblo's favor of the 1810 dispute with the mission over the dam at Cahuenga. The portions of the Vernon appeal transcript which defendants introduced into evidence in the present case include summaries of the testimony of four witnesses whose personal familiarity with the use of the Los Angeles River for irrigation dated back to periods beginning between 1837 and 1854. All of them testified that during these periods it was common knowledge that the pueblo or the City of Los Angeles controlled the use of the river for irrigation and that such use by private owners was only with the city's permission. Despite defendants' strenuous contentions to the contrary, the Vernon court did have before it the essentials of their objections to the existence of the pueblo right. The court was told of the provisions of Law 5 and Law 7 of Title 17, Book IV of the Laws of the Indies to the effect that the use of water should be in common, of the rights of landowners in water from springs and wells, and of other principles on which defendants rely. It is true that the present record includes extensive testimony by experts on early California history and on Spanish and Mexican law and apparently includes far more voluminous documentation on the pueblo water right issue than was considered by the Vernon court. On the other hand, the Vernon court was in a position to consider documents that have since disappeared and testimony of witnesses with personal recollection of the Mexican era. We are not convinced that the justices who heard and decided either Lux or Vernon were misled in any material aspect of their consideration of the existence of the pueblo right or that their conclusions on the issue would have been substantially different if they had had the benefit of the contents of the present record prepared three quarters of a century after those decisions.