Stand Up for Local Access

Eighty-year-old Roger Hill used to go fishing on the Arkansas River in Colorado. But he sometimes had to duck baseball-size rocks thrown at him by landowners who insisted he was trespassing. When he got back to his car, he sometimes found notes threatening him with arrest if he returned. Worse, a fellow fisherman was shot at by a landowner, who got 30 days in jail for the attack.

Rather than risking either injury or arrest, Hill sued the landowners, claiming that the bed of the Arkansas River is navigable. If that assumption is true, then Hill can legally stand on the riverbed and fish.

But Ro...