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evolve over time, get fleshed out here and there, and continually evolve. It's a work in progress, the Compact plus the other parts of the Law of the River. There's some notable silences in the Compact, probably some intentional, some not. The Compact is silent on marketing, for example, and interstate or interbasin transfers of water. We now argue about that issue in terms of the Compact's definition of "beneficial consumptive use," which, by the way, is not defined in the Compact - there's a silence, a particularly interesting silence for you. It's silent on water quality, which also has some modern reverbera- tions. It's silent on groundwater which, in particular parts of the basin, is an emerging issue. Furthermore, the Compact's basic working assumption that state law controls water rights was subject to some exceptions that were acknowledged in the Compact itself. One is international obligations that have already been mentioned. That was carried out in a 1944 treaty with Mexico and in a 1973 Minute on Water Quality, both of which have important implications for basin water management. The Compact acknowledged the federal government's obligations to Indian reserved rights- although it didn't use the word "reserved rights" - but the Winters case, the foundation for those Indian rights, had been decided 14 years earlier. The Compact drafters clearly knew about it, although it is also fair to say that the standard for quantifying those rights was not really known at the time and wasn't really known until 35 years later in Arizona v. California. That case in 1963 also made clear that there were other federal reserved rights in the basin with respect to non-Indian federal reservations. The Compact, as has already been mentioned, was written against the backdrop of pending legislation in Congress to authorize the Boulder Canyon Project Act. As we heard Dave Kennedy say, obviously one of California's very strong interests here was in putting in place an interstate arrangement that would allow that project to go forward. Again, we didn't know it at the time, but six years after the Compact passed, the Boulder Canyon Project Act was adopted by Congress, and 35 years after that, as Jerry Muys mentioned, the Supreme Court rewrote the Boulder Canyon Project Act in a way that put the secretary of the Interior fully in charge of Lower Basin water, both along the river and in the Lower Basin states. Congress not only allocated the waters of the Lower Basin among the three states in 1928, so the Supreme Court said in 1963, but also gave the secretary power to contract under the Boulder Canyon Project Act that really overshadowed state law. How the secretary went about implementing that power to contract in the Boulder Canyon Project Act is worth mentioning because it has some modern resonance. What the secretary did was go to Califor- nia and say, "I can contract for water, but I want the state's recommendations on who I should contract with, and in what amounts." That resulted in the state of California and its warring interests coming together in the seven-party agreement of 1931, which is one of the foundation documents in the Law of the River. And that idea of the secretary setting a pattern here of going to the states, actually asking for recommendations - but being prepared with certain federal power to forge an agreement - is something that is still being talked about. It's also noteworthy, by the way, that 15 years after the Supreme Court in Arizona v. California rewrote the Boulder Canyon Project Act and put the secretary in charge of the Lower Basin and the lower river, the Supreme Court came back to the whole subject of state-federal relations and reclamation law in Califor- nia v. the United States and rewrote several of its earlier opinions on Section VIII. But the interesting thing is Justice Rehnquist in that case went quite out of his way to reaffirm and reconfirm the notion that the lower Colorado I think it's useful to FEDERAL AND STATE ISSUES think of the Compact as a kind of a constitution. - John Leshy River was unique, and that the secretary of the Interior remained in charge of the lower Colorado River, and none of the rewriting the Court was doing in California v. US. would change that. The other major area of federal interest, again following on the Boulder Canyon Project Act, was more federal projects. This is what Jeff Fassett and others talked about - federal money and having the federal mother-in-law along with it. Federal money has been involved in numerous projects throughout the basin, most of them in the Upper Basin, autho- rized by a whole handful of acts, some of them not built - or not yet built, anyway - and I'm sure we'll hear more about that. It's also interesting to note that one of the first Arizona v. California Supreme Court decisions, back in 1931, was the first time the Court ever invoked the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution to justify the authority of Congress to build multi-purpose projects that really had nothing to do with naviga- tion. And out of that constitutional step forward came the whole idea that the federal government could constitutionally build projects throughout the basin. SYMPOSIUM PROCEEDINGS MAY 1997 o