Adjudication
A court or administrative proceeding that determines and confirms all water rights on a stream system, producing a decree of record.
Adjudications sort out competing claims across an entire basin and produce the authoritative list of who holds what and in what order. Some western basins have been fully adjudicated for decades; others are still in proceedings that have run for a generation.
Whether a basin is adjudicated changes the risk profile of everything in it. In an adjudicated basin, the decree is the record. In an unadjudicated one, claims may be unquantified and the eventual ruling can materially change what a right is worth.
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