Patenting Mining Claims — Legal Aspects
By Wm. B. Murray, LL. B., J.D.

[ Editors Note: If you have done your due diligence homework you may have picked up that Wm. B, as I called him, a larger than life mining attorney, Chief Council for the Alaska Prospectors Association, and crony to many, was my father.

It was his fault —and grandfather ‘Midas’ MacAdams, a prospector who climbed the Chilkkot Pass, floated the Yukon to Dawson, before being starved out and rushing on to Nome, where he was robbed, and finally making it big enough to be awarded a unusual nickname, in South Africa— that I started my career working my way through grade school as a mining lawyer's office boy.

You also may have picked up by reading articles in this e-magazine that, with a few exceptions, I do not have much respect for what the legal profession has become. My sour grapes attitude has nothing to do with having to work my way through grade school. I wouldn’t have traded a moment of the excitement.

It also sort of gave me a right to publish this Seminar Paper presented by Wm. B at the University of San Francisco, September 17, 1977. He died in 1983. Nothing much has changed with his logic that “your rights to a perfected located claim are constitutionally protected, “ and that “the United States made an offer to citizens…. And when this offer is accepted, it becomes a contract.”

Nothing much… except a Secretary of the Interior issuing a Secretarial Order 3163 putting a moratorium on in mineral patent applications. This followed with President Clinton landing by helicopter in a Wilderness Area for a press conference where with one sweep of his arm he rewrote what still is the law of the land.

It is expected that the Bush Administration may continue the checks and balance system of our government by correcting the wrong done to the mining industry in support of votes from an illogical and extremely militant environmentalists who all seem to live a life of excess — driving gas guzzling SUVs, to commute to estates that have disturbed far more habitat than most small mining operations.]