Global Water Law Judicial Decisions from Brazil, Canada, and the Netherlands (2016-2026)

Global Water Law Judicial Decisions Dataset is a comparative corpus of 83,596 court rulings on water law, sanitation access, and water governance. It was compiled by independent researcher Claudio Klaus for the Legal Last Mile project, covering decisions from 2016 to 2025 with some historical Brazilian data from 1997. Each decision is coded with seven jurimetric variables, such as human rights framing and dispute type.

Use Cases

• Comparative analysis of judicial framing in water disputes based on the human rights and sustainability language variables.
• Studying litigation outcomes for sanitation access cases based on the win_loss variable available for Brazil.
• Analyzing trends in water governance dispute types based on the governance_cat variable.
• Researching the involvement of public institutions in water law cases based on the mp_involvement variable for Brazil.
• Examining the representation of Indigenous water rights in case law based on the indigenous_water variable.

Strengths

• Contains 83,596 judicial decisions, providing a substantial corpus for analysis.
• Covers three distinct jurisdictions (Brazil, Canada, Netherlands) for comparative study.
• Each decision is annotated with seven specific jurimetric variables for structured analysis.
• Data collection spans from 2016 to 2025, with some Brazilian data extending back to 1997.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The win_loss outcome variable is only available for Brazilian decisions, limiting cross-jurisdictional outcome analysis.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to the three selected jurisdictions.

Provenance

Source

Claudio Klaus - Legal Last Mile Research

Collection Method

Collected from national legal databases (Rechtspraak Open Data API, CanLII REST API, Brazilian state court portals) using purpose-built scrapers.

Time Range

Primary coverage 2016-2025, with 200 Brazilian decisions from 1997-2015.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-04 20:59:28; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Brazil, Canada, Netherlands