Water rights, river compacts, and legal-policy stationarity in the American West*

This article examines static-data assumptions trapped in water rights and, separately, in larger interstate river compacts in the American West. These reflect assumptions of scalar stationarity embedded in water codes in western states. State water adjudications sort how much water is being used, but the resulting data are often publicly unavailable and unchanged. Interstate river compacts often divide fixed, erroneous river flow data. River...