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"By the law of nature, these things are common to mankind: the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the shores of the sea..."
- Institutes of Justinian, 2.1.1 (529 A.D.)"...So neither can the king intrude upon the common property, thus understood, and appropriate it to himself or the fiscal purposes of the nation. [T]he enjoyment of it is a natural right which cannot be infringed or taken away, unless by arbitrary power, and that, in theory at least, [can]not exist in a free government..."
- Arnold v. Mundy, 6 N.J.L. 1, 87-88 (1821)
The Public Trust Doctrine has a very long and noble pedigree. It has been handed down with little change from the Roman Empire, via the English Common Law, to become part of present American legal thought. The preeminent scholar on the subject, Joseph L. Sax, describes the Public Trust Doctrine most eloquently in this excerpt from his book entitled Defending the Environment: A Strategy For Citizen Action, 163-165 (1970).
The scattered evidence, taken together, suggests that the idea of a public trusteeship rest upon three related principles. First, that certain interests—like the air and the sea—have such importance to the citizenry as a whole that it would be unwise to make them the subject of private ownership. Second, that they partake so much of the bounty of nature, rather than that of individual enterprise, that they should be made freely available to the entire citizenry without regard to economic status. And, finally, that it is a principal purpose of government to promote the interests of the general public rather than to redistribute public goods from broad public uses to restricted private benefit...
| Last modified April 11, 1999. | Berkman Center for Internet & Society |