ABSTRACT
The law of water use bears a larger significance than might be immediately apparent. Not only did waterpower play a significant role in the industrialization of the Atlantic world, but in addition, the concurrently created riparian law exemplifies a distinct class of legal entitlements. The 1805 case of Bealey v. Shaw was a straightforward example of the influence of Blackstone's occupancy principle in early-nineteenth-century British water law. Bealey involved competing mills on the heavily developed Irwell River. In the early nineteenth century, the Massachusetts courts quite determinedly pursued the idea that rights in flowing water should be acquired through a doctrine of occupancy in developing this law, they seldom referred to Blackstone's authority, and they appear to have arrived at an occupancy rule on their own, without borrowing from treatises. The circumstances of Palmer v. Mulligan one of New York's most important early-nineteenth-century mill cases, perhaps fortuitously reversed the typical Massachusetts fact pattern.
