§ 830.Purpose and Applicability of Chapter

Section 830 opens Chapter 7 by describing its purpose: establishing methods and procedures for a comprehensive adjudication of groundwater rights in a basin. A comprehensive adjudication is not an ordinary two-party lawsuit — it's a proceeding designed to determine, in one case, the competing rights of everyone who extracts or claims the right to extract groundwater from a shared basin, which can mean hundreds or thousands of parties.

Subdivision (b) lists seven principles the chapter must be interpreted consistently with. These include protecting water rights as required by the California Constitution, promoting efficiency and due process, encouraging settlement, aligning with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act's timelines, following federal law on federal and tribal water rights, and providing enough notice and due process for a court to establish priority even for water rights that haven't yet been put to use. Subdivision (c) then makes the rest of the Code of Civil Procedure applicable to comprehensive adjudications to the extent it doesn't conflict with this chapter.

Read together, this section frames everything that follows — the notice rules in § 835, the intervention rules in § 837, the special master provisions in §§ 845 and 846, and the judgment provisions in §§ 850 through 852 — as machinery built specifically for resolving groundwater rights across an entire basin at once.