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This week's addition to the digital library of historical environmental law is Thomas Baker's  The Laws Relating to Salmon Fisheries in Great Britain, published in London by Horace Cox in 1866. Baker, the title page tells us, was a barrister of the Inner Temple and the Salmon Fisheries Office, and also the author of works on public health law. In the preface to the work Baker explained the need for a work on salmon law: The Salmon Fisheries of this country have, by long neglect, become greatly injured. Poachers, thoughtless anglers, ignorant fishermen, and, above all, the abuses arising from the use of fixed engines, and the loose manner in which the close seasons were fixed, threatened the total destruction of the fish. To remedy this state of things, several statutes have at length been passed, applicable to Great Britain. The first pages of the work proper have this Python-esque clarification: To prevent any misapprehension, it is defined [by the Salmon Fishery Act of 1861...

This weeks addition to the digital library of historical environmental law is Joshua Toulmin Smith's  The Laws of England Relating to Public Health , published in London by S. Sweet in 1848. The full title continues: Including an Epitome of the Law of Nuisances, Police, Highways, Waters, Water Courses, Coroners, Burial, &c. Relating Thereto; with an Historical Review of the Law of Sewersl and an Examination of the Proposed Measure of Sanatory* Legislation Now Before Parliament. As you can tell from the title, "public health" in the Victorian era included much of what we would today label "environmental law" . You wouldn't know it from the title, but Toulmin Smith was a major critic of England's mid-nineteenth century public health legislation, as Noga Morag-Levine has explained . A sort of "free-market environmentalist" of his time, he argued that the new centralized, administrative regulatory mechanisms enacted under Edwin Chadwick's...

In the common-law world, historical and legal argument are frequently intertwined, a phenomenon reflected in the title of this week's addition to the digital library of historical environmental law , Stuart A. Moore's A History of the Foreshore and the Law Relating Thereto , published in London by Stevens & Haynes in 1888 ( available on the Internet Archive and in Gale's The Making of Modern Law ). Moore's work was part of a wave of antiquarian interest in early writings on property rights in the seashore (today this topic would be labeled "public trust doctrine") that seems to have been motivated largely by legal and economic issues at stake during Britain's industrial revolution. So in addition to his treatment of a legal manuscript by the Elizabethan-era mathematician Thomas Digges and other early sources , Moore reproduced in his work "A New Treatise by Sir Matthew Hale, from a MS. in his Handwriting", which Moore believed to be an early ...

After beginning the digital library of historical environmental law with works from the last few hundred years, we go back in time this week to the fourteenth century and the  Tractatus de fluminibus seu Tyberiadis  (1355,  1576 edition (source of the images in this post) here ) of the great medieval Italian jurist Bartolus of Saxoferrato. As Bartolus explained at the beginning of the work, he was inspired to write the book while on vacation near Perugia, despite his attempts to enjoy his vacation and stay away from legal scholarship: This river [Tiber]... circles that splendid mountain on which the city of Perugia is situated and while flowing a great distance through its district, the river itself is bordered by plains, hills and similar places. These places are also well inhabited, enhanced with many beautiful buildings and luscious orchards bearing lots of fruit. Thus, when I was resting from my lecturing and in order to relax, was travelling towards a certain villa situated near ...

This week's installment in the digital library of environmental law moves ahead to the twentieth century with Carl E. Geuther's Compendium of Water Pollution Laws ,  published in 1959 by the Manufacturing Chemists' Association, headquartered in Washington, DC. This was the fifth in a series of "Water Pollution Abatement Manuals" published by the trade organization, evidently with a target audience of engineers, managers, and other non-lawyer employees of the chemical industry. Geuther, a lawyer, worked at the time for Du Pont Chemicals; he also seems to have represented them and other chemical companies in court at various times. The Preface explains that the manual is: a compendium of the laws of the forty-nine states (including the District of Columbia, the Territory of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the federal laws of the United States as they pertain to water pollution and water pollution abatement). Statutes and regulations of archaic vintage that are ignored by ...

Following up last week's post on Michael Lobban's piece on the British Rivers Pollution Prevention Act, 1876 , the second work to be added to our digital library of historical environmental law is Clement Higgins's  A Treatise on the Law Relating to the Pollution & Obstruction of Watercourses ,  published in London by Stevens and Haynes in 1877 (a year after enactment of the water pollution legislation). (An 1882 advertisement for the work is here .) Just as the treatise on game law covered here last week emphasized the inherent conflict of interest between different social groups and the distributive effects of the law, Higgins writes in the Preface: It is to the interest of the public, and to the majority of riparian proprietors, to protect the purity of our rivers, whereas it is generally to the convenience of sanitary authorities and of manufacturers to pollute them. An attempt is made in this book to place before the protectors of our rivers the nature of their ri...

So (as Ann Wilson sang), the first post in the digital library of historical environmental law series is on  A New Treatise on the Laws for Preservation of the Game,  first published in 1764; the second edition, available online , was printed in London in 1766 by His Majesty's Law Printers. The title page gives the author as "a Gentleman of the Middle-Temple"; said gentleman was apparently one Timothy Cunningham , a prolific author of law books in eighteenth century Britain. The title of "Gentleman" may have been about more than manners or class, as the long title of the treatise has this explanation ( Oklahoma!, anyone? ): "Containing All the Statutes, Cases at Large, Arguments, Resolutions and Judgments concerning it; equally useful to the Gentleman and Farmer; as the Gentleman may learn how far his Privilege extends, and the Farmer may be enabled to know when the Gentleman exceeds the Limits prescribed by Law, and the proper Methods of Redress." So ...

In order to add some variety to the Environmental, Law, and History blog, as well as to create something I hope will be of lasting value to those interested in the field, I've decided to begin a series of posts on old books on environmental law, and then collate links to the works in an online "digital library". By "environmental law" I mean anything substantially focused on the interaction of law and what we think of today as environmental issues (including "natural resources"), and by  "old" I mean written no later than 1970. My preference will be for works in the public domain and easily accessible on line, though I'll also link to editions available only in for-pay databases when appropriate. (I also admit to a preference for the odd, the funny, and the bizarre, though these are admittedly subjective criteria and I do not intend to limit myself to them.) I hope to be able to do this on a weekly basis, so please look for the posts on S...