Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

this bizarre…and the other thing about water is that people who have done it a
long time believe that it is magic. So, Bob Lynch, for example, whom you
probably will speak to or should sometime who goes way back in the history of
representing Arizona’s water interest, every time I’d ask a question I felt like Bob
Lynch would pop up in the audience and say “Well that’s prohibited by the Law of
the River”. Now I’ve been a lawyer for a long time and I’ve never heard of the
“Law of the River”. So I go to the Arizona Revised Statute books and I pull it
down and I look it up “River comma Law of” and it’s not there. So I thought it
must be a Federal “Law of the River” so I pull out the U.S. Code and I look up
“River comma Law of” and its not there either. It turns out “The Law of the River”
is kind of like the British Constitution, it’s whatever the people who have really
been hanging around it a long time think it is. It’s the embodiment of all kinds of
different treaties, acts of Congress, and different complex Federal regulations
and oral traditions. That’s all the “Law of the River”, and if you’ve been around
long enough you’re allowed to say what it is, but if you haven’t been led in the
gate, the Water Buffalo ceremonial admittance initiation rights, then you don’t get
to talk about the “Law of the River”.
Q. So you get to talk about the “Law of the River”
A. I do. I’ve graduated to the point where I can now say, “Aah, that would violate
the ’Law of the River’”.
Q. I want to know what the initiation was
Interview with Grady Gammage
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