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law of the river, has developed to govern the River and <br />allocate its water among the Colorado Basin states and <br />between the United States and Mexico. The cornerstone of <br />the law of the river, the Colorado River Compact of 1922, <br />materialized principally as a result of fear of a recurrence <br />of floods that devastated parts of the lower River in 1905-07 <br />and again in 1916. Ironically, though, the condition which <br />has most troubled the law of the River since its inception <br />has been the opposite problem: insufficient quantities of <br />water. <br />Despite the apparent intentions of the framers of the <br />1922 Compact, the burden of these deficiencies is often <br />assumed to fall largely on the states of the Upper Basin. As <br />the director of Colorado's natural resources department <br />recently assessed this predicament, "The ultimate problem for <br />the Upper Basin is how to build a future on the right to <br />leftovers.117 Perhaps, however, the more pertinent and <br />fundamental question is really whether the Upper Basin should <br />have to build its future on the right to leftovers, instead <br />of an equal portion of this common resource. Th objective <br />of this paper is to explore briefly the salient features of <br />the law of the River ahd survey the prospects for <br />its most glaring inequities. <br />II. THE PRINCIPAL PARTS OF THE LAW OF THE RIVER <br />A. The Colorado River Compact of 1922 <br />correcting <br />t <br />t <br />-2-