This book covers a broad spectrum of issues shaping the current paradigm of minerals sector governance. The ultimate aim of the book is to understand trends and developments in mineral law and policy occurring at international, regional, cross-border and in some selected cases at national level and also to identify some of the challenges lying ahead. With these objectives in view, the book brings together a representative selection of the most knowledgeable authors on the subject. The contributions deal with a diverse range of issues tackled from interdisciplinary perspectives. Topics are divided into five main chapters: international and comparative aspects of mineral law; actors and policies in the minerals industry; investment prospects, financial and fiscal issues; sustainable development and regional outlooks. The book aspires to serve as a useful reference for scholars, practitioners, students and all those with an interest in current developments in the areas reviewed. Elizabeth Bastida is the Rio Tinto Research Fellow and the Director of the Mineral Law and Policy Programme at the Centre for Energy, Petroleum, Mineral Law and Policy at the University of Dundee (CEPMLP/Dundee). Thomas W?lde is the Professor of International Economic, Natural Resources and Energy Law and was (until 2001) the Executive Director of CEPMLP/Dundee. He currently runs TWA, his private consultancy firm, which provides advisory services in natural resources and energy law, regulatory reform, investment promotion, state enterprise/agency appraisal and restructuring, privatisation, contract assessment, negotiation and dispute management. Janeth Warden-Fern?ndez is a Research and Teaching Fellow, an advisor of the Mineral Law and Policy Programme and the Manager of the Distance Learning Programme at CEPMLP/Dundee.

In this highly entertaining as well as profoundly scholarly study of the 1872 Mining Law, John Leshy has produced both a legal treatise and a history of the West written from the vantage point of mineral exploration and production. The Mining Law illuminates some of the more obscure corners of Western history, federal land and resource policy, and the relationships among various branches of government in making and carrying out policy. For more than a century the mining of hard-rock minerals in the United States has been carried out under this law, which was written to promote mineral development in the age of the pick-and-shovel prospector. It is the last important survivor of the great laws undergirding the westward expansion. The Mining Law has never been changed to reflect modern mining technologies or newer social values that question whether mineral extraction is the best use of the land and its resources. From its enactment, the Mining Law's inadequacies have given rise to illegal abuse, litigation, and patchwork regulation by federal agencies and judge-made law. Leshy explains how the law has survived by a combination of executive and judicial manipulation in the face of legislative paralysis. Today, as concern mounts about economic efficiency, government regulation, environmental protection, the rebuilding of the nation's industrial base, and competing uses of the land and its resources, the argument for reform of the law becomes compelling. The present law not only obstructs the very mineral development it was designed to promote; it may no longer be in the national interest. Certainly any future attempts to rewrite or amend the Law will start off with Leshy's exposition and analysis of its origins, operation, and implementation, and his detailed examination of the issues surrounding the law, its interpretation by courts and administrative agencies, and the attempts to adapt the law to changing conditions and social goals. Assessing the prospect for reform in today's political climate, he suggests arrangements regarding the law's reform that might be concluded by industry, small operators, and environmental protection advocates as well as creative measures that might be taken by Congress, the president, and the courts.