Prior Appropriation: a Suitable Doctrine for the Changing West?

The essay seems to me to make prior appropriation doctrine seems more static and less flexible than it is in practice. Cities have been modifying their surrounding water rights environments for a long time, so that as the West became the most urbanized part of the United States (as it presently is), prior appropriation comes to look more like a system for resolving user disputes—for which it has always worked well—while the large-scale allocation decisions occur in different form. But slowness and close attention to immediate purposes is even more characteristic of water managers than of lawyers. You might want to take a look at this paper on the future of prior appropriation by A. Dan Tarlock, of Chicago-Kent, which although it's getting old is still quite relevant.