Ernst Seidler von Feuchtenegg · 1907
Ernst Seidler von Feuchtenegg’s published lecture examines how Austrian water law reconciles competing claims to hydropower. Its central argument is that the concession system rests on sound modern principles, but requires more precise statutory guidance and procedures adapted to technical and economic development. Moving from alternative legal regimes through conflicts among different water uses to competition between proposed enterprises, Seidler seeks an accommodation between acquired rights, productive investment, and the public interest.
The opening rejects unrestricted private development as a recipe for conflict. Assigning water-use rights to riparian owners encourages speculation; state ownership or monopoly, meanwhile, makes private interests excessively dependent on administrative discretion. State control would be ideal only if the state could exploit all available waterpower efficiently. Seidler instead supports concessions, granted when statutory conditions are met:
Der Ausgleich widerstreitender Interessen vollzieht sich im Rahmen der Konzessionsbedingungen.
English translation: The reconciliation of conflicting interests takes place within the framework of the concession conditions.
Concession conditions are thus the principal instrument of coordination, not merely restrictions upon an otherwise independent property right. Yet the legislation leaves authorities too much discretion in determining public interests. Without statutory direction, Seidler warns, the concession system risks approaching the discretionary prerogative regime of a police state. His proposed modernization therefore concerns both economic efficiency and the legal constraint of administration.
The lecture gives this institutional argument technical substance. Raft passages, movable weirs, and allocated operating times can reconcile hydropower with timber transport. Fisheries occupy a less secure position: fishing-right holders generally receive compensation rather than a veto over other water uses, although legislation protects objections aimed at preventing pollution. Disputes over what constitutes contamination and which purification measures may be required expose the limits of abstract legal rules. Existing waterworks, by contrast, ordinarily retain protection for their authorized water requirements through conditions governing impoundment height and abstraction.
Seidler nevertheless refuses to make acquired rights absolute:
Die strenge Durchführung des Grundsatzes, daß bestehende Rechte gegenüber jedwedem Interesse zu schützen sind, würde jedoch den Tendenzen der modernen Rechtsentwicklung keineswegs entsprechen.
English translation: The strict implementation of the principle that existing rights must be protected against every other interest would, however, by no means accord with the tendencies of modern legal development.
Public welfare can be embodied in private enterprises as well as public institutions. This conceptual move justifies restrictions on existing rights, and sometimes expropriation, where a competing use has demonstrably greater economic importance. During water shortages, priority may accordingly go to the enterprise of greater importance to the national economy; where no such superiority is established, equitable sharing and operating schedules provide alternatives.
Seidler identifies an important asymmetry: forestry and agricultural water management possess expropriation mechanisms that industry also needs. Small existing installations can obstruct projects capable of supplying thousands of horsepower. Yet increased production need not always require dispossession. He also proposes statutory authority to require more rational construction of an older installation, thereby releasing water for another enterprise. Technical improvement becomes a potential means of reducing conflict rather than simply choosing its winner.
For competing new projects, economic significance likewise takes precedence over filing order:
Hier entscheidet nicht, wie sonst häufig im Verwaltungsrecht die Priorität des Ansuchens, sondern die überwiegende Wichtigkeit für die Volkswirtschaft.
English translation: Here the deciding factor is not, as is otherwise often the case in administrative law, priority of application, but greater importance to the national economy.
Seidler defends this rule against speculative applications designed to extract payment from serious developers. Nevertheless, it can leave genuine applicants indefinitely exposed while authorities await a larger project that may never materialize. His proposed preliminary concession would impose deadlines for registering competing proposals and submitting complete plans; failure to comply would give the original applicant priority.
The lecture’s significance lies in this double demand: water law must enable economically valuable development without surrendering applicants to unchecked administrative judgment. Its reforms combine substantive assessment of public benefit, equitable coordination, technical adaptation, and procedural certainty. Modernization means refining an existing concession framework, not abandoning its foundations.
This work was divided into 1 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 1 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian