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SHERWOOD'S INDEX TO AND OUTLINE OF
MORRISON'S MINING REPORTS
by Don
H. Sherwood of the Denver Bar
INTRODUCTION
Robert Stewart Morrison (1843-1920) was the author or editor of many legal publications, mostly on topics within the field of mineral law. He was best known in his own time and in ours for small volumes eventually called Mining Rights on the Public Domain. The first edition in that series appeared in 1874. The fifteenth edition, published in 1917, was his last, as he was killed three years later in an interurban railcar accident between Boulder and Denver. By that time, the books in that series were co-authored by his brother-in-law, Emilio Dominguez De Soto (1865-1937). The sixteenth and last edition, published in 1936 by Mr. De Soto and Mr. Morrison's son Arthur Robert Morrison (1883-1945), both Colorado lawyers (Bender-Moss Company, San Francisco), is still in regular use by mining lawyers.
Those books were intended for prospectors, surveyors and mining companies as well as attorneys. For attorneys, however, the most valuable work by Robert Stewart Morrison was his remarkable series of annotated volumes of selected cases on mineral law: Mining Reports (published by Callaghan & Company, Chicago). Over the course of twelve years, he produced a set of sixteen volumes covering the whole of the field, completed in 1894, and he both corrected some omissions in and supplemented the set with six additional volumes published from 1903 to 1906. By that time, the modern system of national reporters had supplanted such individual efforts, and the series was discontinued. A complete set of Morrison's Mining Reports, better illustrated, annotated and digested than any other source, primary or secondary, has always been and still is for mining lawyers a prized possession extremely useful in researching antecedents of our present law.
There are three shortcomings in Morrison's Mining Reports. First, not all cases on mining law were included. Second, the cases are divided among the first fifteen volumes by topics alphabetically and supplemented in the same fashion in volumes fifteen and sixteen, but in later volumes chronologically. Third, there is neither a consolidated index to the topics nor a combined table of cases. There is nothing to be gained now in identifying or supplying omitted cases (many of which are mentioned incidentally in Mr. Morrison's annotations), but something can be done about the unwieldy and inconsistent sorting and the lack of a convenient, all-inclusive index and case table. If the absence of personal computers and an Internet helped to create such problems, such modern devices can help to solve those problems. Recognizing that Morrison's Mining Reports are still among the best resources available to lawyers working with cases on mining law in general and American public-domain mining law in particular up through the earliest years of the Twentieth Century, this index honors the monumental work of Robert Stewart Morrison by making it easy to search that work for cases which matter.
With but one or two exceptions, the topics selected by Mr. Morrison are entirely familiar to lawyers working three generations later. His preference, however, for the topic "apex" over the usual "extralateral rights" in both of his major works can only be explained by the fact that he chose the former before the latter was popularized by others; in retrospect, his was the better choice, and no other reference to the right of lateral pursuit will here sully his list.
This is not to say that all the parts of Morrison's Mining Reports are equally useful, as much of the work is of no real use today. So the purpose of this index and outline is not only to facilitate research in Morrison's Mining Reports but also to sever that therein which continues to be useful from that which is not. The overriding purpose here is to make available to the owner or user of Morrison's Mining Reports an index and guide to those cases, and to Morrison's annotations thereto, which are still valuable in the practice of mining law on the public lands in the Western United States.
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Click ahead to General Outline of Morrison's Mining Reports
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