ABSTRACT
Since the beginnings of the oil industry, production activity has been governed by the 'law of capture,' dictating that one owns the oil recovered from one's property even if it has migrated from under neighboring land. This 'finders keepers' principle has been excoriated by foreign critics as a 'law of the jungle' and identified by American commentators as the root cause of the enormous waste of oil and gas resulting from US production methods in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet while in almost every other country the law of capture is today of marginal significance, it continues in full vigour in the United States, with potentially wasteful results.
In this richly documented account, Terence Daintith adopts a historical and comparative perspective to show how legal rules, technical knowledge (or the lack of it) and political ideas combined to shape attitudes and behavior in the business of oil production, leading to the original adoption of the law of capture, its consolidation in the United States, and its marginalization elsewhere.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |83 pages
The Beginnings Of The Rule Of Capture In The United States
chapter |15 pages
The Rule Of Capture: Naming Aand Blaming
chapter |33 pages
The Leading Cases And Their Legal Background
chapter |33 pages
Practice And Belief In The Early Petroleum Industry
part |83 pages
Alternatives And Parallels
chapter |35 pages
The Minneral Water Industry In France: Protection And Competition
chapter |17 pages
Asphalt Trinidad: Digging Your Neighbors Pitch
part |134 pages
Modified Capture: The United States In The Twentieth Century
chapter |36 pages
Correletive Rights And he Beginnigs Of Conservation
chapter |29 pages
Oil And Gas In The Public Lands
chapter |67 pages
Conservation Regulation And The Institutionalization Of Capture
part |105 pages
Evading Capture?
chapter |32 pages
Securing Unified National Control Of Petroleum Resources
chapter |33 pages
Capture Revivified? COMPETITIVE ACREAGE ALLOCATION BY GOVERNMENTS
part |30 pages
Conclusion