Idaho Code
Idaho Code § 42-501 (2026)
legislative intent.
✓ current as of May 2026
Find cases:
SyfertCases citing this section
IClegislature.idaho.gov
Justiaon Justia
CornellLII Search
CasesGoogle Scholar
legislative intent.
In the landmark case of Joyce Livestock Company v. United States of America
In Joyce, the court held that the United States:
"bases its claim upon the constitutional method of appropriation. That method requires that the appropriator actually apply the water to a beneficial use. Since the United States has not done so, the district court did not err in denying its claimed water rights."
The court also held that federal ownership or management of the land alone does not qualify it for stockwater rights. It opined:
"The United States claimed instream water rights for stock watering based upon its ownership and control of the public lands coupled with the Bureau of Land Management’s comprehensive management of public lands under the Taylor Grazing Act…The argument of the United States reflects a misunderstanding of water law…As the United States has held, Congress has severed the ownership of federal lands from the ownership of water rights in nonnavigable waters located on such lands."
The court went on to state:
"Under Idaho Law, a landowner does not own a water right obtained by an appropriator using the land with the landowner’s permission unless the appropriator was acting as agent of the owner in obtaining that water right…If the water right was initiated by the lessee, the right is the lessee’s property, unless the lessee was acting as the agent of the owner…The Taylor Grazing Act expressly recognizes that ranchers could obtain their own water rights on federal land."
A rancher is not unwittingly acting as an agent of a federal agency simply by grazing livestock on federally managed lands when he files for and receives a stockwater right.
It is the intent of the Legislature to codify and enhance these important points of law from the Joyce case to protect Idaho stockwater right holders from encroachment by the federal government in navigable and nonnavigable waters.
Notes of Decisions
Cited in 1
case, 2007–2007 · leading case: Joyce Livestock Co. v. United States, 156 P.3d 502 (Idaho 2007).
Joyce Livestock Co. v. United States, 156 P.3d 502 (Idaho 2007). “That statute, enacted in 1939, 3 permits the Bureau of Land Management to “appropriate for the purpose of watering livestock any water not otherwise appropriated, on the public domain” by using the permit procedure for obtaining a water right.”
Annotations are extracted automatically from the opinions in the
Syfert caselaw corpus and ranked by authority, recency, and
treatment. Dots show Syfertize treatment of the citing case itself.