Juniper Katz, public policy, has published a new article in Interest Groups & Advocacy titled "Breaking down barriers to litigation and judicial advocacy research: a comparison of legal data sources" with co-authors Christopher Rea (Brown University) and Jennifer Kagan (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa). The paper examines six major sources of U.S. federal court data and finds that a simple question of "how much environmental litigation is there?" produces opposite answers depending on the database. While commercial legal databases show it rising sharply for four decades, federal court administrative records show it declining over the same period. The difference reflects how each database was built, and it has real consequences for how researchers and policymakers understand who is fighting in court, over what, and with what effect on environmental law.
New research by Juniper Katz questions how we measure environmental litigation
