Court Opinion

ID: 9540504
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:16:52.392097+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:59:54.817199
License: Public Domain

WOLFE, Justice
(concurring).
The doctrine that a party could gain title to water by adverse user for a period of seven years was, at best, dubious. Because water for certain purposes and especially when appurtenant and used on a particular piece of real estate was governed by legal principles pertaining to real estate, there grew up in this jurisdiction and some others, the doctrine that water could be adversed as could land. But water is, of course, quite different from land. The latter is stationary; any use of it ordinarily is easily ascertained by inspection. Moreover, as an additional act of notoriety, a claimant to gain title to land by adverse possession must pay all the taxes levied against the property for the seven year period.
Water, as distinguished from land, is fugitive; its constituent particles are only temporarily possessed even when taken from the source of the waters. It is the right to use, and in order to use, to reduce to possession, which is invested in the owner by appropriation. And no taxes are assessed against the water itself albeit if the water is appurtenant to particular land and used thereon, it may share in inducing a greater tax because the land with the water may be more valuable. In fact, the water right may be far more valuable than the land on which or in connection with which it is used.
*31In Wellsville East Field Irrigation Company et al. v. Lindsay Land & Livestock Company, 104 Utah 448, 137 P. 2d 634, this court recognized that the doctrine that title to water may be acquired by adverse possession had been part of the law of this state for a number of years. In that case, a predecessor of the Lindsay Land & Livestock Company had appeared in court in response to a summons in a suit to adjudicate rights on a stream, announced his presence verbally, but never answered as defendant. After a decree which excluded him as owning any water right, he continued to use that water which he had been using for more than seven years. There was no question about the use nor that those who were entitled to the water had notice of his use and had even interrupted it from time to time. The question was as to whether the interruptions were sufficient to break the continuity of the adverse claimant’s use.
Since 1939, a water right cannot be initiated nor acquired by adverse possession and user in this state. Probably the number of water rights gained by seven years’ adverse user in this state are comparatively few. But once having been acquired, such a right gives the acquirer as good a title as a decree, and if acquired against a decreed right, a better title to that water, although it may require a new decree as to the particular adversed water to gain a good record of the title. The fact that where a user takes water from a source from which others take and that all the water looks the same and may be commingled with water taken under decreed or unquestioned rights, and that unless the excess over his vested right is so great as to make it apparent to other legitimate users that he is exceeding his right, he may continue to wrongly take water for many years and may have done so for seven years or more before 1939. Finally, a time comes when other users either thitherto unaware of his trespass *32or perhaps, suspecting it, but being too timorous as neighbors to challenge it, do challenge it.
I think adversing water in a state largely dependent on water for its economy should have been declared as contrary to public poliey and never by judicial pronouncement been allowed. Since it was permitted, it should not receive judicial sanction unless the evidence is clear and convincing. ' I believe the evidence in this case is of such a nature as to be clear and convincing to a reasonable mind.
I therefore concur.