After way too long, I finally used a GPT to track down the case citation for Houston Texas Central Railroad Company v. W.A. East, including an online copy of the case itself.

TL;DR: Hathi Trust for once actually comes through:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044103152245&seq=301

Texas Supreme Court cases are recorded in West's South Western Reporter. WestLaw is famously obsessive with copyright, but all cases prior to 1928 are now in the public domain. Yay, P.D.

There's an online archive of South Western Reporter at Hathi Trust:

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100333420

(Via the Online Books Page at University of Pennsylvania: https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=swreporter)

The full citation for the case, which gives the volume and page number, is:

So we want South West Reporter, volume 81, page 279.

Which is here:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044103152245&seq=301

(Hathi infuriatingly doesn't permit full-volume downloads, but you can download PDFs one page at a time...)

The process by which I'd done this seems interesting (IMO):

I'd turned this up using a GPT (FastGPT from Kagi), asking it what the early-20th century Texas case concerning rule of capture was, whether that case was online anywhere (reply: not really, though there are several discussions of it), and then where Texas State Supreme Court rulings were published. OCLC failed to give reasonable references, the Internet Archive doesn't seem to carry these, but the UPenn Online Books Page (Homepage: https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/, a hugely useful tool I'm deciding) pointed me to Hathi.

On GPT: the ability to go through a series of questions about a topic, rather than just doing a keyword search, really is transformational. I'd been an early user of Google (1998/9), and online library catalogues for over a decade before that. Being able to inquire about topics and narrow down where to find things is tremendously useful, and I'm still wrapping my head around this as a tool.

cc: @pluralistic

#RuleOfCapture #HathiTrust #Texas #TexasSupremeCourt #FastGPT #GPT #Kagi #UPenn #OnlineBooksPage

@benhamill The Strait Dope covered this in 2015, for another opinion. TL;DR: no established law.

https://www.straightdope.com/21344309/do-property-lines-extend-to-the-center-of-the-earth

The question's come up in several contexts.

#RuleOfCapture is a #CommonLaw (case law) doctrine which arose from wild game but which came to be applied to mineral rights, notably water, oil, and gas. It's ... really bad law, IMO, but still serves as precedent.

Mineral rights played a role in the Iraq-Kuwait War of 1992, in which Iraq claimed Kuwait was tapping oil reservoirs within Iraq's borders.

It's also been mooted in the context of carbon capture:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-and-comparative-law-quarterly/article/abs/digging-deep-property-rights-in-subterranean-space-and-the-challenge-of-carbon-capture-and-storage/408416F3ACB16666E74AF08B1D6D17DD

It's worth recognising that much law is based on 1) experienced conflicts and 2) effectual enforcement ability. Maritime territorial waters came to be defined largely by the effective range of shore-based cannon. Five-mile guns -> five-mile law. 20-mile guns -> 20 mile law. 200 miles isn't the outer bound of radar and fighter aircraft or missiles, but does reflect a reasonable limit for same. Note that the US claims airspace (and transit fees) for much of the Pacific Ocean AFAIR.

#PropertyRights #SovereignTerritory #SubterraneanRights #MineralRights #Law

@pluralistic And if you want to dive down a rabbit hole, there's the set of interrelationships between economics, law, property, externalities, religion, monopoly, and oil through the Rule of Capture, Texas case law, Union Oil, Biola University (Bible Institute of Los Angeles), Lyman Stewart, the science of geology (and its joined-at-the-crotch relationship with the oil industry), the Fundamentals (of Christian Fundamentalism), young-earth creationism, Harold Hotelling, University of Chicago, Standard Oil, Hotelling's Rule (of natural resources pricing ... which does not in fact describe pricing behaviour).

https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/99662418097389845

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5w1zw3/rule_of_capture_fort_stockton_texas_groundwater/

(Inspired back on G+ when someone asked if there might be any relationship between the oil industry and religious-based denials of evolution, age of the earth, and of course, anthropogenic climate change. Yes. Yes there is...)

#RuleOfCapture #LymanStewart #UnionOil #BiolaUniversity #HotellingsRule #theFundamentals #ChicagoSchool