Like the tides forever sculpting our coastline wave by wave, so goes Florida’s legal landscape on water rights. Court precedents seemingly cast in stone for decades are being ceaselessly battered by appeals and opinions that can transform established case law into something altogether new.

For nearly 70 years, the Florida Supreme Court’s decision in Hayes v Bowman has been the seminal case for determining riparian rights – the right to access and use natural waterways based on ownership of land on the adjacent shoreline.

Hayes v. Bowman resolved a dispute between private landowners on Boca Ciega Bay in Pinellas County, and in doing so, established criteria for determining riparian rights by focusing on an equitable distribution.

In the decades since, the decision was interpreted and applied in such a way that riparian rights are now equitably distributed through the drawing of riparian lines. For example, if someone wanted to build a dock, which is their riparian right, what geographic parameters are they to work within? In the 1980s, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection developed a series of non-binding guidelines to assist surveyors and others in identifying riparian lines based on Hayes and the decisions that followed it.

Today, the equitable distribution criteria in Hayes together with FDEP’s Guidelines largely drive the issuance of permits by FDEP and resolve disputes in the courts. But that may change.

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