Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1983

Arizona v. California

460 U.S. 605 | 103 S. Ct. 1382 | 75 L. Ed. 2d 318 | 1983 U.S. LEXIS 137 | 36 Fed. R. Serv. 2d 11 | 51 U.S.L.W. 4325

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Takeaway

In short, the Court allowed the Tribes into the case but enforced finality: previously litigated acreage claims could not be reopened, while only boundary additions established by judicial decree or Congress justified immediate additional water rights.

Background

This original action concerns the allocation of Colorado River mainstream water among the Lower Basin States—principally Arizona, California, and Nevada—and the federal reserved water rights of five Indian reservations. In the Court’s 1963 decision and 1964 decree, the Court held that the Boulder Canyon Project Act supplied the governing allocation scheme. It also held that the United States had reserved water for the Indian reservations under the Winters doctrine and quantified those rights by the amount needed to irrigate each reservation’s practicably irrigable acreage.

The 1964 decree awarded specified water quantities to the Colorado River, Fort Mojave, Chemehuevi, Cocopah, and Fort Yuma (Quechan) Reservations. It retained jurisdiction to amend the decree and provided that certain reservation-water allocations could be adjusted if reservation boundaries were later “finally determined.” A 1979 supplemental decree established other present perfected rights but left the Tribes’ later claims unresolved.

In 1977 and 1978, the Tribes sought intervention and, joined by the United States, sought additional water rights. They claimed rights for “omitted lands”—irrigable acreage within boundaries recognized in 1964 but not included in the earlier calculations—and for lands allegedly added to reservations through later administrative orders, judicial decrees, accretion, and congressional action. Special Master Elbert Tuttle permitted intervention and generally recommended additional water rights. The States and California water agencies filed exceptions to those recommendations.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the five Indian Tribes could intervene in this original action to participate in the adjudication of their water rights.

Holding

Yes. The Tribes could intervene in the later proceedings concerning their reserved water rights.

Reasoning

The States’ sovereign-immunity objection failed because the United States had already brought the Tribes’ water-right claims in this original action. The Tribes did not seek to assert new claims against the States; they sought to participate in the continuing adjudication of claims that the United States had asserted on their behalf. Their participation therefore did not enlarge the Court’s judicial power or compromise state immunity.

The Court’s original-action rules use the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure only as a guide, but the Tribes at least met the standard for permissive intervention. Their water rights would be determined in this litigation, and the United States’ representation would bind them to the judgment. Given the direct importance of the litigation to the Tribes’ welfare, their participation should not be discouraged.

Intervention did not authorize the Tribes to relitigate matters already decided. It allowed them to participate only in issues that remained properly open for decision, and the States had not shown that intervention would cause prejudice or undue delay.

Issue #2

Whether Article IX of the 1964 decree permitted the Court to reopen the prior determination of practicably irrigable acreage to award water rights for omitted lands.

Holding

No. The 1964 determination of practicably irrigable acreage could not be reopened merely because additional acreage could have been claimed and litigated before the decree.

Reasoning

Article IX retained the Court’s power to correct errors, resolve reserved questions, and modify the decree when appropriate. But it did not make every issue resolved in the 1964 proceeding perpetually open to reconsideration. The provision must be read in light of the general principles of finality and repose.

The prior determination was the product of full adversary proceedings. The United States had presented the Tribes’ claims, the Court adopted practicably irrigable acreage as the measure of reserved rights, and the 1964 decree fixed the resulting quantities. The omitted-land claims concerned acreage that could have been included in the original litigation, not an unforeseen issue or a material change in circumstances.

Finality is especially important for western water rights. Colorado River water is scarce, and increasing senior Indian rights would reduce water available to junior state and private appropriators. States, water agencies, and large projects planned around the fixed quantities established in the decree; reopening a fully litigated acreage calculation would undermine the certainty the decree was designed to provide.

The Court rejected the view that the absence of the Tribes as named parties justified reopening the issue. The United States had authority as trustee to litigate and bind their reserved-water claims, and the record did not establish an actual conflict of interest or legally inadequate representation. The United States’ failure to claim every possible irrigable acre did not itself defeat the finality of the prior decree.

Allowing relitigation of omitted acreage would risk reopening other settled components of the decree, including the standard used to quantify Indian water rights. The Court declined to open that “Pandora’s Box” and sustained the States’ exceptions.

Issue #3

Whether post-1964 reservation-boundary developments constituted final determinations that justified additional water rights under the 1964 and 1979 decrees.

Holding

Administrative boundary determinations by the Secretary of the Interior were not final determinations for this purpose, but boundaries established by judicial decrees were sufficiently final. Land added to the Cocopah Reservation by Congress also supported a new water right with a 1974 priority date.

Reasoning

The Court held that ex parte secretarial orders enlarging reservation boundaries could not count as final determinations under the decree. The States, their agencies, and affected water users had not received an opportunity to litigate the boundary issues, and the administrative orders remained subject to judicial review. Nothing in the stipulated 1964 decree suggested that unilateral executive action by the United States could conclusively reduce state and private water supplies.

The Court did not decide the merits or legality of the Secretary’s boundary determinations. Instead, it directed that the pending federal district-court litigation challenging those determinations proceed promptly. If that litigation resolved the boundary issues, the Court could later determine the effect of the resulting judgment on the water-right decree.

The Court accepted boundary additions established by judicial decree where the States did not challenge the conclusion that the particular parcels were reservation land. Those judgments supplied sufficient practical finality, leaving only the question of how much practicably irrigable acreage lay within the adjudicated parcels. The Court accepted the Special Master’s acreage findings for those parcels and ordered corresponding adjustments to the reservations’ water rights.

Congress’s 1974 addition of land to the Cocopah Reservation was undisputed. The associated water right arose on the date of the congressional enactment, rather than receiving the earlier priority accorded to reserved rights established with the original reservation. It therefore would not disturb preexisting rights of the States and other parties.

Dissents

Justice Brennan

Reasoning

Justice Brennan, joined by Justices Blackmun and Stevens, agreed that the Tribes should be permitted to intervene and agreed that Article IX gave the Court power to reconsider the 1964 quantification of tribal water rights. He disagreed, however, with the Court’s refusal to exercise that power over the omitted lands and its treatment of the boundary lands.

In his view, the Court overstated finality. Res judicata did not technically apply because the Tribes raised their claims in the same continuing original action, before the overall allocation system had become final. The 1979 decree resolving other present perfected rights had not yet been entered when the Tribes first raised the omitted-land issue, and the Central Arizona Project—the practical impetus for the litigation—was still not ready to use most of Arizona’s allocation.

Justice Brennan considered the failure to include undisputedly irrigable omitted lands a manifest injustice to the Tribes. The United States, acting as trustee, had failed to present evidence about those lands, but the Tribes had not themselves participated in the 1964 proceedings. In his view, the United States’ authority to represent the Tribes did not require the Court to make the Tribes permanently bear the consequences of the Government’s omission, particularly where the omitted claims had never actually been litigated.

He also concluded that correcting the decree would cause little procedural prejudice to the States. The States would be no worse off than if all irrigable acreage had been identified in 1964; the Tribes could not immediately use all of their existing water rights; and projected water availability and construction schedules meant that additional tribal rights would have little immediate practical effect on other users.

On the boundary issue, Justice Brennan would have adopted the Special Master’s conditional approach. The decree would quantify water rights for lands treated as reservation land under the Secretary’s determinations, while automatically reducing those rights if later litigation established that a parcel was not Indian land. He believed this approach would give all parties a fixed upper limit on tribal rights, preserve the States’ ability to challenge boundaries elsewhere, and avoid repeated future proceedings before the Supreme Court.