Playing by the Rule (2010)

This is an obscure law still underlying (so to speak) much of resource extracton, in the US and elsewhere, even if moderated somewhat. It played an outsized role especially in the history of oil and gas development (see especially chapter 13 of Daniel Yergin's The Prize, as well as many contemporary accounts of the Pennsylvania, Spindletop, Kern River/Longview, and East Texas oil strikes), and has echoes in present attitudes expressed in surveillance capitasim as practiced by Google, Facebook, Amazon, telcos, financial firms, and other data brokers.

And yet information on it is exceedingly hard to come by.

Quoting TFA on the law's history:

Much of this fussing and fighting comes courtesy of the Rule of Capture, an archaic piece of British common law carried to these shores. The Rule states that whoever owns a piece of property owns the water beneath it. The Texas precedent was set in 1843 in the case of Acton v. Blundell, when Texas was a republic and people were largely ignorant about the nature and movement of groundwater. The Rule of Capture was upheld in 1861, when Frazier v. Brown was decided, and again in 1904 when the Texas Supreme Court heard The Houston & Texas Central Railway Co. v. East case. The court upheld The Rule by reasoning water below the soil was too “mysterious, secret, and occult” to regulate.

Copies of these rulings are hard to come by. Should anyone have access to PDFs, please contact me at dredmorbius <at> protonmail <dot> com.