 We're going to go ahead and get started. My name is James School, and I have the privilege and first welcome to the 2022 Montana State University Library of Trucks, a long time. It's been a couple of years since we've done one of these for probably all these reasons, everybody, so we're glad to be back and saying a thing for having another lecture, and certainly I'm going to make just an annual bet going forward. It is my privilege to be able to introduce our speaker this evening, Jim Yes. I've got a little surprise for Jim that I had talked about earlier from our hard lives, and as far as wanting me to know if there's a photo is old enough to be in black and white. Jim is, of course, an MSU alum graduating with a degree in history in 1965, and from Yale Law School in 1969. He founded his law firm here at Joe's in 1972, has been practicing law in the area I was sent. Jim's been working about his involvement in the Montana String of Access cases tonight. In addition, Jim is a longtime aimler. He told me his father was a really good and well-involved politician. Jim sat with me several years ago for an interview for our old industry project, and that morning he told me his dad had even gotten a big deposit one time. I don't know if I'm correct, so that's what he had to say. I am sure that he is a better aimler than I ever will be, but one of his longtime friends and cohorts, Tony Schoen, once said that he's glad Jim is a better lawyer than he ever was, and I don't think he's ever been in trouble. But I think I stole that line from him, actually. But, so Jim and his firm have donated his papers on String Access in the case of Stuart's, so we have to get all of his various DC legal files on String Access's law collection. He has won multiple awards, legal awards for the remainder of the environment in Montana, supported the arts, and it's on the monitor, and just a genuinely nice DC legal meeting. So much to the point where he's brewed all of his good lawyer jokes for me, then I know who's who, but anyway, we'll offer their view, Jim gets. How is this? This is Rachel Utener, our legal and our firm. I'd like to introduce my wife, Joe, would you raise your hand? Joe Devonport, who's a great oil painter, but more important, she likes to fish, and more important, she likes to row the boat. I want to start by talking about an early case that had in the early 70s. You all probably know where the Karst Ranch is down in Gallup Canyon. Back in the early 70s, a couple of developers decided to put a subdivision on that karst across the river. And so my plan for Montana Willowless Association challenged that, and one of the things the developers did, at that time you had had one ninth of your property dedicated to public park purposes. So what did they do with these developers, these public-spirited developers? They donated the one ninth park land under the West Gallup River, arguing that they owned the land after the threat that is the middle of the stream. So we challenged that, and we prevailed. Judge Gordon Bennett, that's the line we'd help with the screen. He held at the West Gallup River, we had evidence of log-folding saw logs down the West Gallup to the Walter Cooper sawmill at Gallup and Gateway, and you can see in the top paragraph, the West Gallup River has been used for commerce and is therefore navigable. And if you look down in the second paragraph, you'll see that the judge enjoyed the subdivision because they were trying to dedicate land that was already owned by the public. I mentioned this because it was my first story into the law of habitability. So years later, probably in the late 70s, I was approached by a group of youth sportsmen, the ringleaders or others, but the ringleaders were Tom Beuny, the late Tommy Shulman, the late Jerry Maddler. And I'd like to introduce the heirs, Chris Beuny, when you stand, the son of Tommy, and yet, you're the son of Tommy, they're great guys. I have to say that when you're fishing with them, it's not exactly stress-free. I sort of like to look every once in a while on off of the scenery and the wildlife and the bird life on the river. And if you miss hooking one of those strikes, you just jam them horizontally. Yeah, there's a, there's a strike. So, but we do catch a lot of fish, I'm very reluctant. And with their fathers and Jerry Maddler, we formed the corporation called the Coalition for Scream Access. James Thule is right, Tony talked, I talked with him, session at the UN law school a number of years ago, and Tony, Josh and me by saying, Jim is a much better lawyer than he is officially. I think that is true, but I want to tell you all, that's a very high bar. So, he was a photo of Tommy Schumann, Tommy Schumann, and I'm a big old, I think Jeff was guiding Maddler, and he had a very nice fish, but for the guy who said I'm a better lawyer than a fisherman, I'm not the next one. No. Any red way, despite the hefty competition when they were interviewing me to, I was a pretty young lawyer at the time. They interviewed another high power, or a high intelligence lawyer from Butte, and chose me, I think maybe in part because of this car sub-division avatability issue, in part because of my background, I grew up in Hennis, my father was an avid fisherman, and so we would fish up in the North Meadow Creek, lakes of it, and the Tobacco Ritz and McKelvie lakes, my brother and I, and the friends, and catch grasshoppers on the way up, we had great times, and then my dad had this old, yellow army surplus raft, and my dad was just a fisherman, he was not a boatman, so he had these poles, my brother and I would pole with that in the river, and my dad would fish, and so my father was famous for taking that crappy raft down, and all things, the Bear Trap Canyon, and once, when I was a junior in high school, I was assigned the task of driving over the warm front take-out to pick him and his two buddies up after they floated the Bear Trap. They were standing on the side, and I said, where's the boat? And they all started laughing. They apparently knocked the crap out of the boat and left it down. Somebody in the bar in Hennis, heard the story and went and sell us the boat one. And the other thing interesting about the Bear Trap and my father is the celebrated Herbs Rock, many of you have heard of the major rock in the Bear Trap Canyon. It is named after my father Herb. Anyway, I was hired maybe because the Senate's background made me the Navigability of the West Gallatin, but probably because I gave them a reduced speed rate of $40 an hour, and it was kind of a hampasser group that really did their best to raise money. And I'll bring up the next slide, please. This is a photo of my father. In the very nice niche, I happen to have my camera there. That day, let's add an undisclosed location, except for us in Montana. My father was not really big on trophy fishing. I like to catch big fish, in a way. So one time, my good brother, Buddy Jess Frisbee, from the Calister, was there, and then when he was alive, he said, oh, you've got to see this fish. And he went down to the freezer in the basement and pulled up this fish that was obviously too long to be certain that it was in a sea shape, totally frozen. And he said, look at this, and that was his trophy fish. And Jess just showed me his head. But I have the next slide. This is my dad's idea of a trophy fish. I was given to him by his buddy from B.C.P. Lee. Had a place in the long grass, known in Annasford courts of time. That's the closest dad ever came to a trophy fishing. Well, anyway, when I was hired by the Coalition for Stream Access, I set about researching the law and developing a strategy. I learned some very interesting history with the next slide. There's a case called Martin V. Waddell from 1842. And what it says is when each of the original 13 colonies declared their independence, they became themselves sovereign. And in that character, hold the absolute right to all their natural waters and still have soils under them for their own common use. What that is, when the 13 colonies broke away from mother England, at that time, the Tidelands were owned by the sovereign, the king of England. The colonies there, where there was no federal government in Annasford, took over that ownership. And it became ownership not only of the Tidelands, but also of the natural streams. So that's the 13 colonies. Now the next step is what happens to Montana, Nebraska, and these other states, which were not originally 13. And the answer was found in 1845 in the case of Paul R. B. Hogan. And that says these states, those states entering the Union after 1789 did so on a quote equal footing with the original 13 possession, possessing the same ownership over southern Iraq. So when Montana came into the Union in 1889 to the extent that rivers were navigable, the bed and the waters became the property of the state of Montana, which is true of all the later states. Now, one interesting aspect that's interesting to Montana's is that back in the early 70s, there was a major case of the Big Horn River, which flows out of my homing at me through the Crow Reservation. And the Crow tribes tried to prohibit or regulate non-members from use of the Big Horn River. Eventually, the Crow tribe joined by the United States sued the state of Montana over the ownership of the Big Horn River streambed. And there the court applied the same formula that we see here, that the court held that although the Court of the Army Treaty of 1851, the later Court of the Army Treaty of 1868, that created the Crow Reservation and set aside those lands for exclusive use of the Crow tribe. But did that mean the rivers? And the court, the U.S. Supreme Courts said, no, the rivers are not my circuit. And the U.S. Supreme Courts said, no, there's not enough there in that treaty language to defeat this presumption that all of the waters are held by the federal government in trust for when the states come into the union. So the U.S. Supreme Court, in that case, decided to stay in Montana, which is why the Big Horn River is now not recruited from non-Indian fishing. Now, that's a side excursion to what we did, but it's an important mission because of the Big Horn River. Now, the next slide is something called the Daniel Ball case that's the name of it. I think it quote, and it basically said that those rivers must be regarded as probably navigable rivers in law, which are navigable in fact. And that became known as the navigability of fact, in fact, tests. That is, if the stream is usable from allegation, then it's navigable in fact. Now, there are other cases of branched off on the Daniel Ball, and curiously, there are two types of, at least two types of navigability, one is for tidal, which I've been talking about, who owns this stream as. And the other is federal jurisdiction navigation for regulatory purposes, like the old federal power act, all kinds of core of engineers regulations that follow the U.S. commerce laws. And they all use this navigability in fact and test, but there are differences. One major difference is that for tidal, there has to be navigability, in fact, at the time of statehood, whereas for federal jurisdiction, commerce laws jurisdiction, it can be anytime the streams that are developed to be navigable, it didn't have to be in the natural forms. Here in this research strategy, now what I said will bring up the other side. The first paragraph, the goal of this group is to establish in the state an expanded legal right on the part of the public to access. And then I discuss various theories. And you can see there that I was leery about the tidal test that I've been talking about. And one of the problems is that when Montana was admitted to the Union shortly after, it seeded all the land to the low water mark to the repair area on it. So tidal was a problem for us. It was making 95 case hips in the gillie, which talked about the ownership only to the low water mark. So we were a little worried about tidal and that theory slightly developed some other theories like public use, public easement type theories. And eventually we developed the public trust theory. But then at the bottom, this is more technical. You see, I say, care should be taken in selecting the right defendant, find one rich enough and erasable enough to take the case all the way. Find one who will not have the sympathy of the judge and Donald Trump wasn't available to talk about it. So we did find, by the way, that I like that word of askable, probably a better word is askable. Find a good, rich, askable, has a better word. And we managed to do that. Next page, I shall have a performance down there at the end of our previous talk about it. We selected two screens. First, the Dearborn River, which comes out of the scapegoat wilderness, flows south-easily down the Missouri River. And we had some evidence of saltwater floating, which was evidence of commercial use. So we selected that, plus current, D. Michael Kern, the asshole, was an oil and gas developer in Mark, Texas. And he owned a lot of land on the Dearborn River. And he was fighting access. So he was asshole number one. The next one was a gold hillbilly, not nearly as rich, but he had land on the Beaver Head, just downstream from the Clark Canyon Dam. And he was fighting public access. But with the Beaver Head, we didn't have any evidence of commercial use, other than hot feathers. Lewis and Clark, I think, went up the Beaver Head. But we just didn't have the kind of solid log evidence that we had on the Dearborn River. So that gave us a nice two different types of occasions to develop. And so what happened, it's showing that when we chose the right asshole on Dearborn, was that it's currently sued the coalition for a stream access with 10 million dollars in a counterclaim. And we, I called my clients and I said, I had bad news and good news. And they said, well, what's the bad news? And I said, the bad news is you've been sued for 10 million dollars counterclaim. They said, well, what's the good news? And I said, well, I think I can settle it for less than that. Now, picture this, the coalition from Stream Access didn't have any money. They were strafing to pay me. And of course, currently I have no evidence that would support this counterclaim. Maybe in this day and age, you can kind of read his mind, that's what I see in the paper. So anyway, we commissioned a historian named Al Newell from the Historic Research Associates in Mizzoua. He'd already done some work on the other side. You can see from his report, he starts during the years 88 and 89, there were log drives down in the gridiron, this is from the Great Falls for Neumann at the time. And you can see in the block of holding that some detail on the drive. But the problem with the other side parking is, well, you don't tell us exactly where these logs were floated. Now, Common Sense tells us they floated from where the area that's forged had mostly way up-streamed. But we didn't have the precise evidence of current's property through it being in the second business. So Al Newell went back to the drawing board and he came up with some more research. And this is what he found from somebody in the 30s who we called growing up in the area. And he said it was in April or early May of 87 that he was at the Dearborn Crossing and saw all these logs coming down. You know, all this historic evidence is providently the question. And that was the scenario that we needed because Dearborn Crossing, right on the left-hand side, you see Highway 287 going up the Morrie Cross the Blue River with the Yellow Arrow. That's where Highway, that's the old Dearborn Crossing. The old helmet to Fort Metley Road cross right there. And if you look at the white squares, those are sections then owned by the Dearborn Ranch which was D. Michael Curran. So that was very trove of the evidence for us on the commercial use. Now, I took the deposition of asshole number one in Helena and I didn't expect much because he suddenly went up that channel and they don't want to know. The truth is a little foreign to most of those people. So his main argument, I asked him, what's your third of the counterplay? His main argument was, well, it takes two days to float from Highway 287 to Missouri. And so somebody's got to camp out. It's on my property, usually, and they banalize the property and so on. Well, I've floated that section and it's easily done in a day, but I wanted to pin him down the two days so I asked this Supreme Minister. The first set of questions up there, you others, if you're still floated in that stretch of the river, answer yes. I wasn't much interested in the two days. What I was interested in is the man for the man. The fact that the river goes through his property and then look at all the other property goes through and down to the Missouri. Well, how can you claim that people don't have the right to float through his property, but then he has the right to float through others? And so bring up that slide. So if you look into the three afters, I pinned him down, the section is isolated now in this match, and then I said, let's look at the ownership of these places down the stream. And he said, I really can't tell you who owns them. So here's the guy who says, I've floated from Highway 287 of the Missouri, but somehow nobody else gets to float through the stretch of his property even though he doesn't know even who owns the property that I'm floated. So we had a little fun with Mr. Kern on that. The other interesting thing of referring to the trial, they brought in, the other side brought in a late witness called, his name was Gus Carey, Gus Carey Boxes. Gus was from the Corps of Engineers in Omaha, and supposedly an avidability accident. And so I took his deposition, flew over the river for one day, looked at some stream flow records, and came up and said, by golly, that river is not avidable. So we had a little fun with him and his deposition, and I went to it. But later when I argued the case in the Montana Supreme Court, I, somebody asked one of the justices, asked me about Carey Boxes, and I said, oh, he was a prostitute too. And so, Justice Frank Morrison who was a pretty good friend of mine at least, and Frank was originally from Nebraska, and his father had actually been governor of Nebraska. He said, well, he can't be all that bad, he's from Nebraska. Well, that happened to me two or three weeks, 1984 after Miami had upset Nebraska corn huskers and they weren't full for the national title. So I shot back to Justice Morrison and said, he'd have more credibility if he was from Miami. He could have court enjoyed that one. So after the argument, the feisty lawyer on the other side came up and said, you'll be hearing from us on that, which I took to mean the prostitute comment. So I didn't say anything, but I really thought about it on the side. Well, probably it was a bad choice of words, and we probably should have called him a mind whore. Well, ultimately, we won the first three-max case, the current case, the airborne river case. This is language, and it's very, very broad language for us. First of all, we were little worried that the recreational use test, that's why we developed the Weber head case. There was some precedent for recreational use from Minnesota and other states, but the court adopted the recreational use case and adopted it in very broad terms. They basically helped the capability of use of the waters for recreational purposes determines their availability for recreational use by the public. Streambed ownership, and by the way, the court did agree with us on streambed ownership. It did agree with us of the Solwog floating test. But then until that's basically developed, it's the question of use of the waters and to the extent that waters are usable for recreational purposes. That's the extent of very broad, comforting, and ruling by the court. And it held that a private party can't interfere with the public's use of the waters. So, then shortly after that, we tried the Weber head river case, and Judge Joe Gary here in Bosnia was the initial judge. He granted temporary opening day of fishing because there was threat of chaining across the river. And then the other side that substituted Gary out, and he called in and judged Jack Shansham from Livingston. Well, Jack Shansham was a well-known avid fisherman, particularly in the Yellowstone River, so later Judge Gary chuckled at me and he said, well, for the fire, frag that into the fodder. So anyway, Judge Shansham ruled on our favor, too. And on the Weber head, I've got some language. They talk about the only possible limitation to be the characters of the water itself. And then the last sentence on the top quote, the public has the right to use the waters to the bed and banks up to the ordinary high water mark. So notwithstanding that ownership in Montana and the state was only to the low water mark, this ruling established the high water mark test. And then the last paragraph on the screen talks about barriers and navigation. If there are any, you have the right to report it to around them. And then the court in current and health of the Weber River case also embracing what is called a public trust doctrine, which I want to get to in a minute. But if we look at the slide, the next one's 16. Montana Constitution talks about the surface waters and the high water is a property of the state subject to beneficial use. And I've thrown in a use-a-frug, would you go to page? Use-a-frug, which is probably not a term that most people are familiar with, it's a legal term. But it basically, as you can see in the deposition at the screen, is a legal right according to the person or party that confers the temporary right to use. Uses and fructus, Latin terms. But that's what water is, really. You don't own the water, you have, if you have a water right, you own a water right. And the standard Montana or Western water was, you have to put it to beneficial use if you don't, you lose it. And if you abandon it, you can abandon it. So it's not like land ownership. So that's kind of the trust issue in the Montana Constitution, the water is owned by the state for the beneficial use of people. So I want to spend just a minute or two on the public trust club, it's become very, very important. And the next slide, because the Hillgrith and Curran cases largely centered on what's called the public trust. Well, what is the origin of the public trust? It's kind of a doctrine going back to Justinian law in ancient Rome in Latin English common law. And its provenance is a little controversial. But anyway, Montana really embraced the public trust doctrine. And one of the cases that established the public trust is Illinois Central Railroad. I've got the language there, I won't read it, but basically what happened is through some kind of corruption add-ons by the legislature, a bunch of Chicago late footage on Lake Michigan was donated to by the state that they were given to the city of Chicago, which in turn ended up with the Illinois Central Railroad. And the court and then a subsequent legislature tried to overturn that. And the court then upheld the subsequent legislature based on what's now known as the public trust doctrine. That the waters and the harbors are so important to the public that they can't be, the interests can't be advocated by the state. And so that became a very central theme in our stream access cases. And if you go to slide 20, recently many of you have probably seen this New York Times article just for a week and a half ago. And it's about the state of Colorado. But the first sentence that here is an advocate, a lawyer for the Colorado water, you're gonna say. The main concern is that Colorado does not open the door to the public trust doctrine in Montana down there. And then at the end, it's one that the water community views as a threat. So the public trust doctrine important in Montana, important nationally, is controversial in Colorado and elsewhere. And I started wondering about it. Well, how solid are we on the public trust doctrine? So I went back and re-read Curran. And if you go back to that slide on that, if you look at the language from the Curran case, the Daredevil River case, you have full lines from the Constitution and the public trust. So, my question is, is Montana dependent, is the public trust doctrine dependent on the Montana Constitution? Is that its legal origin? And the reason I ask that is because there's been a lot of talk lately that the Republicans are trying to get a super majority so they can modify the Montana Constitution. Mostly it's because of the privacy division and the abortion of the Armstrong family. But the Constitution on the waters might be also vulnerable. But what I like about this is the word and, which means to me, discounted. So the public trust, the ruling Daredevil River case is based on the Constitution, the Montana Constitution, and the public trust doctrine. You'll say the public trust doctrine has, based on the Montana Constitution, is disjunctive. So even if the legislature takes a stab either legislatively or in the constitutional amendment to change it, I think we have this very good language and I think the public trust doctrine does, does, it is incredibly helpful to us on that score. Now, I wanna just talk briefly after we won current and held it in the 1985 legislature, met at a very fadcious session and some of the ag interest came out in force they were arguing about people would float in their hayfields in their irrigation district and ditches. It's a particularly group in Sweetgrass County. The mainstream agricultural interests, back when they were the same republicans actually agreed that they need legislation. And at that time I was sort of indifferent because the year-long river case was so broad that we were in the pregnancy. And so legislation, in fact, was a bit of a compromise we lost in things. But it's better to have a law on the books on it. So it finally passed after America ditches. One of the brain leaders against it was Jack Galt who was then a major rapture in Mark County. And I later went on a tour, maybe at the same time, headed by the Justice Frank Morrison, his wife, to the Soviet Union in China. China and Jack Galt and his wife, Louise Rankin, former Wellington Rankin wife, were with us on the tour. So I remember the oddity of sitting there in the Leningrad, it was then called Leningrad Airport, wreaking a Russian beer with Jack Galt. It was pretty cordial, gentlemen, even though he was a fiercely opponent. Debating extreme accidents in Montana. But anyway, the legislation passed. It was challenged, fishing game defended it, mostly they've always appealed some minor changes. And then one other footnote, in around 2000, 2002, a group under these right-wing public agencies, Lofren's Challenge streams of access on the O'Dell Creek out of Venice, the Stillwater River over by Columbus and the Ruby, excuse me, the Ruby. And on a sort of a constitutional takings theory, we defeated that and we won in the Ninth Circuit. And that leaves me, I wanna come back in a few minutes and talk about one venture case and then come and wrap up some comments. But my colleague, Deadlin Geddes, from my firm, is going to speak for a few minutes on the, what we call the Bridges of Madison County, the Ruby River access cases. And Deadlin is a Montana state graduate, former great bobcat football player. Two weeks ago, he was inducted into the Bobcat Hall of Fame. He was all-conference defense in hand. The more important thing was an academic, all-American. And Deadlin handled the Ruby, I was tired by that time, man. And there Ruby remember things, so he's gonna talk in a few minutes and then I'll come back and wrap up. Deadlin Geddes, I'm at the honor of working with Jim now for 20 years, which is pretty crazy. It's been just an indiable learning experience to me and I've appreciated all those teaching moments. When I first got to the firm in the early 2000s, Tony Schoen came and talked to me about some Bridges in Madison County. I called the Bridge Access Cases, but some Bridges that cross the Ruby River between Sheridan and Twin Bridges, Montana, and you can't really see the labels there very well. Sheridan's down there to the bottom right. Twin Bridges is up to the top. The reason why this interested Tony is because Tony grew up in the orphanage in Twin Bridges and as a child of the orphanage, I spent many and many days floating and trapping and fishing on the Ruby River. What had happened is, go to the next slide, in 2000, the landowners in the area started fencing the roads off from the river going so far as on the Lewis Lane to actually electrify the garden so that people wouldn't walk over the garden rail and go down to the river and use it for recreational purposes. Tony had stories about using flat-body boats, just dropping them over the edge of the bridge, right down to the river, hopping in, going duck hunting and fishing, even doing some guiding in his teens on the Ruby. So the successor entity to the coalition, Public Lands Water Access Association, came to me and said, what can we do about it? And with the public trust doctrine in mind, I worked on easement issues. I kind of thought of the public trust doctrine as being a movement to an easement. The public has an easement to use the water that we can see in this photo. And then the public has an easement to use the roads, a quick test case, because the bottom road there, the Duncan District Road, which was fenced off, was a petitioned county road. The next one to the north was a dedicated county road. And the last one to the north, Saylor Lane, was a prescriptive road. So we have all three types of public roads available to us to test. And fortunately for us, we had enough wealthy, out-of-state landowners that fenced off these three roads so that this became our test case. But we were tired of suing wealthy, out-of-state landowners, so we actually brought the claim against Madison County under the theory that these public easements are for the benefit of the public, so the county should step up and remove any encroachments that prevent the public from using the easement. Madison County said no. And Judge Tucker agreed with Madison County, and so we moved to the next step, and that was to involve the public landowners. And the famous name there is James Kennedy of Cox Kennedy Media, so a billionaire. And so we knew he was taking it to the end, so it was the perfect case. Fortunately, we were able to get summary judgment on the petitioned and the dedicated county roads because Montana Law Statute says those are all 60 feet rock wide, but the Saylor Lane Road is prescriptive, which gave us two things that we were able to test. One, how wide is that prescriptive easement for public purposes? And two, what are the things that a public prescriptive easement can be used for? Because this might be a little dull. Typically, a prescriptive easement is limited to historical uses, so if I walk through your backyard for enough time, I have an easement to walk through your backyard. Public easements can be established in public use, but the question would be, would they be limited to historical public uses? We litigated that case for 13 years with public lands access paying for it, albeit at a significantly reduced rate, the theme remained, and ultimately, despite Judge Tucker ruling against us initially, the Montana Supreme Court held that a public prescriptive easement may be used for all purposes, including accessing rivers and streams. The result of those cases ended up being codified by the legislature after a couple of sessions, I call it the bridge access bill, where the legislature agreed the Supreme Court saying that members of public may use these easements to access rivers and streams of Montana, and then, I think it was about a decade or so after that, there was a second bill that was passed to actually fund the FWP to go in and clean up the fences that might interfere with public use of waterways. Fortunately, to go back to the next slide, hopefully, these are things that have passed, that have not passed, I don't think so, because I have fished around the state, and I still see issues like this, so I encourage you, if you're out angling, or just recreating our waterways, and you see pediments to your access rights on the river, let FWP know they have a budget for fixing those problems and working with landowners to resolve those issues. Again, based on being here, if I get a gym, I'm gonna pass it back to him so he can finish up. Some years ago, a lawyer in Helen approached my partner, Brian Gallick, who's in Eurasia, then partner, Brian Gallick, saying, well, if the state owns the stream bed, why isn't the state getting rents before the hydroelectric facilities on the stream beds, which was a good question, and he approached us because we'd done our work on availability and stream access. So we developed a case with the late ex-partner, Dick Dolan, as lead plaintiff on behalf of the state school trust, suing a number of the utilities, including PPLL, saying, you owe the state money, and we had to strive mightily to sell this theory to the state attorney general, who was then Mike McGrath, now Chief Justice of the Montana Supreme Court, so I don't wanna say anything bad about it, but they thought we could fool it, and so we proceeded in federal court on the Dolan case, and we did a lot of research, and we survived the motion to dismiss before the federal judge. Then the state got interested, and they came in and took the case away from us, and then Judge Malloy dismissed Dolan in our cause. So the state took it over, and they ultimately wanna verdict it over 40 million dollars for the state school trust. Now then PPLL appealed that to the U.S. Supreme Court. It was argued on the other side by probably the top appellate attorney in the United States, Paul Clement. The state managed to lose on that appeal. The U.S. Supreme Court held that you can't decide maverickability on a total stream basis, that you have to do it on a segment basis, and most of the dams on the Missouri just below Great Falls are on rapids that even Lewis and Clark couldn't surmount. They had it 40 to around 17 miles, as you all know from your ministry. So the U.S. Supreme Court held that it's not maverickability, reversed on that, but then they sent the case back, remanded it, for issues on the Madison, Madison Power Dam, and the Clarksburg, and so I think that's still going. Brian is firm is still working on that with others. But what I was really worried when that case went up the U.S. Supreme Court about what might happen to our stream access spectrums. So what happened, even though the state lost the case, at the very end of the case, I wanna bring up some language. If you look at the first top line, the public trust doctrine is of ancient origin. It's roots traced to Roman civil law, and its principles can be found in the English common law on public navigation and fishing rights over tidal lands, and in the state laws of this country. So that was incredible, even though in the state laws that it case, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the ancient public trust doctrine put its stamp in approval. And while that's important, I mentioned that it's kind of a morphist doctrine, its provenance is unclear, and by the way, one of the leading scholars is very critical of the public trust doctrine. It's right here in Bozeman, Jim Huffman, he was a college friend of mine, still is a friend of mine, he ended up going to Chicago law school and was dean for many years at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland. He's written a lot about how bogus the history is, how terrible he's by the way, affiliated with the local political economy resource center, which is sort of a right of the center, to put it mildly, think tech. But anyway, he's very critical. So this was the stamp of approval by the U.S. Supreme Court on the doctrine. And then if you look in the middle of the court under the case citations, unlike the Equal Footing Doctrine, however, which is the constitutional foundation of the navigability rule of the river bed, the title, the public trust doctrine remains a matter of state law. So we're, along the short of this language, which was almost a foot in the midst of the very end of it, is that the public trust doctrine is alive, it's recognized, and it's up to the states. So in concluding, I just wanna stress how important these Supreme Court justice races are, how very important they are in a public forum. I can't tell you who to vote for it. I can just tell you and I can't tell you who I'm going to vote for. Her initials are angry gusts. And it couldn't be more critical. I mean, of course, we send to Washington's very critical. But this Supreme Court race is very, very critical. And particularly with this roger effort to try to amend the constitution. So that's all I had to say. We were lucky in those cases. I was happy to do them, and we're fine. And we have, I think, the best rematches laws of the country. I'm on the dean of the library, and in the water theme, we have a catch for you. So these are some thank you gifts, water themes, and wow, what a talk back to follow. Yeah, so I just have a few remarks about the library, and we feel free to sit down and vote. So I'm, like I said, being in the library, I've only been dean for six weeks. So you're my first crowd that I've gotten to represent the library in this kind of venue. I've been at MSU for 21 years, and so I'm not new to MSU, but I'm new in this role. And the theme of this talk has been waters to long to everyone. And I think this extends more broadly into what the library is trying to do for all of you. So information belongs to everyone. Knowledge belongs to everyone. Libraries belongs to everyone. Public education belongs to everyone. So this is all really closely related. And so things like this are possible because people have given money to help preserve information, share that information, make it available to future generations. So, as some of you may know, we have a Trout and Salmon Convention in the library that's preserving the history around fly fishing, handling, waters, all the things associated with that. So I want to thank anybody who's given towards that, and I thank you all for coming and taking advantage of the opportunity to share that information. I also want to thank the addition to Jim for spending his time and for you spending your time. Some of our staff who are here today, so Jim Foole is one of our archivists and he's our lead person with Trout and Salmon and outreach in those areas, and I'm Annette Sincuera, and Gavin Herzog, our staff who helped make this event happen. Jody Allison Benel, who's our head of the Special Collections, and senior archivist who's helped make this event happen. And several other library folks are here. I have some envelopes in front of you if you are interested in donating more, that would be great to help make events like this continue to happen. I also want to convey something that was interesting conversation I had earlier tonight, the idea that glitter libraries today, and one thing that library's trying to do right now is trying to reduce the barriers to information. So we talked about the billionaires who are preventing access potentially to water and streams. There are a lot of things that are barriers to information. So right now we have a situation in higher education where textbooks are super expensive. And students are having to make choices between buying a textbook and buying their dinner. And so one of the things a library has done is we have a grant program without open educational resources. And this might be a new concept to many of you, but basically we can make textbooks that don't have a cost to students. And we can incentivize faculty to adopt textbooks that have been vetted, that are nationally have a reputation on them if we work together as a university community with other universities. And so over the past three years we've invested $150,000 to incentivize faculty to adapt freely available textbooks, adapt them to their classes, and ultimately we save students $1.5 million in textbook costs because of that initial investment. So that's a big deal. And these students are students who might not even take a class because of textbook costs. They might drop the class because they don't have access to the textbook. They may not persist in the class because they didn't have access to the textbook. They might be waiting for their financial aid to kick in. So these are the kinds of things, we're fighting for the same kinds of things I think you are in our own way how we provide the public access to the information that we need. So we might seem a little alien in terms of books maybe are not in the middle of the room. Our books are in the spaces where people can still get to them but we're preserving information and we're making access to information. So from the older information that's archived and made for generations to come to the newer information for students who are trying to get to it today. So the library might not seem like the most glamorous place that we're really doing some amazing things. So I'm glad to talk to any of you who wanna know more about some of the things I talked about but I think some of you may like to talk to Jim's more and ask for refreshments, so I will go from there. And if I'm supposed to convey anything else that I look up about. Are you good? Okay, so stick around, there's a reception out there and thank you very much for coming and for your time.