If you want your family enterprise to prosper and carry on your legacy after you're gone, then you need to learn "The Metronome Method," a metaphor for the creation of a Family Agreement.

Hugh MacDonald, owner and founder of the Canadian Succession Protection Company, provides a fun approach to succession and estate planning with this guidebook. Relying on his background as a musician, he uses the metaphor of music and the metronome to show that a family needs to compose its own songbook in the form of a Family Agreement and rehearse it before their opening performance as owners.

There are simple steps you can take to get your house in order before you, the conductor, leave the stage. You can learn how to prepare family members for the responsibility of ownership; provide a framework for your enterprise to survive for centuries; create a plan that establishes a shared vision for future generations; and build consensus among family members in and outside the business.

Help your family deal effectively with succession and estate planning, and have fun along the way by learning from an expert who has years helping family enterprises succeed.

The history of the Rio Grande since the late nineteenth century reflects the evolution of water-resource management in the West. It was here that the earliest interstate and international water-allocation problems pitted irrigators in southern New Mexico against farmers downstream in El Paso and Juarez, with the voluntary resolution of that conflict setting important precedents for national and international water law.

In this first scholarly treatment of the politics of water law along the Rio Grande, Douglas R. Littlefield describes those early interstate and international water- apportionment conflicts and explains how they relate to the development of western water law and policy and to international relations with Mexico. Littlefield embraces environmental, legal, and social history to offer clear analyses of appropriation and riparian water rights doctrines, along with lucid accounts of court cases and laws. Examining events that led up to the 1904 settlement among U.S. and Mexican communities and the formation of the Rio Grande Compact in 1938, Littlefield describes how communities grappled over water issues as much with one another as with governmental authorities.

"Conflict on the Rio Grande" reveals the transformation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century law, traces changing attitudes about the role of government, and examines the ways these changes affected the use and eventual protection of natural resources. Rio Grande water policy, Littlefield shows, represents federalism at work--and shows the West, in one locale at least, coming to grips with its unique problems through negotiation and compromise.

Through a compelling story about the conflict over a notorious Mexican-period land grant in northern New Mexico, David Correia examines how law and property are constituted through violence and social struggle.
Spain and Mexico populated what is today New Mexico through large common property land grants to sheepherders and agriculturalists. After the U.S.-Mexican War the area saw rampant land speculation and dubious property adjudication. Nearly all of the huge land grants scattered throughout New Mexico were rejected by U.S. courts or acquired by land speculators. Of all the land grant conflicts in New Mexico's history, the struggle for the Tierra Amarilla land grant, the focus of Correia's story, is one of the most sensational, with numerous nineteenth-century speculators ranking among the state's political and economic elite and a remarkable pattern of resistance to land loss by heirs in the twentieth century.
Correia narrates a long and largely unknown history of property conflict in Tierra Amarilla characterized by nearly constant violence--night riding and fence cutting, pitched gun battles, and tanks rumbling along the rutted dirt roads of northern New Mexico. The legal geography he constructs is one that includes a surprising and remarkable cast of characters: millionaire sheep barons, Spanish anarchists, hooded Klansmen, Puerto Rican terrorists, and undercover FBI agents. By placing property and law at the center of his study, "Properties of Violence" provocatively suggests that violence is not the opposite of property but rather is essential to its operation.