Environmental Law

Environmental politics and policy in the United States are heavily shaped by legal conflict, but there is precious little social science research focused on environmental law and litigation. In the course of studying the U.S. environmental politics and policy, in particular, RESL is also focused on deepening social scientific understandings of the role of law and the courts in shaping environmental politics and regulation. (Litigation plays a smaller role in other countries, like Germany, because of distinctive institutional features that make it harder to use the courts to change policy.)

Mapping Patterns of Federal Civil Environmental Litigation

A first step towards understanding environmental legal conflict in the United States is simply mapping who drives environmental lawsuits, who wins, who loses, and what kinds of environmental issues these legal conflicts are focused on. To this end, RESL has assembled the first-ever comprehensive accounting of environmental legal conflict in the United States, from the late 1980s to the early 2020s.

It turns out that the vast majority of federal environmental-legal conflict in the United States is driven by just three types of organizations: the federal government itself, mostly suing private firms as a means of enforcing environmental laws; firms and industry associations, mostly suing each other over liability for cleanup costs; and environmental non-profits, mostly suing the federal government and firms to step up enforcement of environmental laws. It also turns out that the broadly pro-regulatory government and environmental non-profits win far more often than firms do. In other words, pro-regulatory forces dominate the courts as a means of shaping and enforcing environmental policy. Read our draft paper, and dive into the supplemental materials if you want to dig into the nitty-gritty details of the data and analysis.

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