ABSTRACT
The politics of Mining Law reform currently embrace a complex mosaic of interests and concerns. Nearly all defenders of the Mining Law are really defending only one part of it, the free-access, self-initiation policy. No one defends the "ingenious machinery" that Congress erected as a superstructure over this policy. No one seriously questions the need to do something about the distinction between lode and placer claims, the ambiguities surrounding pre-discovery protection and discovery itself, the uncertainties over assessment work, claim relocation, amendment, and the like. Industry remains divided, sometimes seriously so, about precisely what should be done in reforming these various shortcomings, but the larger political debate today is about the continued viability of the free-access policy, and the concomitant question of the relation between mining activities and the environment. Those more fundamental questions now set the parameters of any discussion of Mining Law reform. Their domination of the reform debate has united the disparate elements of the industry and led it to paper over its internal divisions in the face of the common external threat.
