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

33,511 judicial decisions on water law form a comparative jurimetric corpus across Brazil (11,724), Canada (3,218), and the Netherlands (18,569). The dataset includes seven coded jurimetric variables such as sustainability language and governance categories. It was created by C. Klaus and is archived on Zenodo and Dataverse.

Use Cases

• Comparative analysis of water law jurisprudence based on the coded jurimetric variables across three countries.
• Training NLP models to identify sustainability or human rights language in legal texts based on the `hr_language` and `sust_language` variables.
• Studying the involvement of public interest actors or indigenous groups in water litigation based on the `public_interest` and `indigenous_water` fields.
• Analyzing litigation outcomes and governance frameworks based on the `win_loss` and `governance_cat` variables.

Strengths

• Corpus of 33,511 judicial decisions provides a substantial sample for analysis.
• Explicitly coded jurimetric variables (7) enable quantitative legal research.
• Open-source scraping and coding engine allows for reproducibility and extension.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data coverage is limited to three specific countries, which may not be globally representative.

Provenance

Source

DANS Data Station Social Sciences and Humanities Collection

Collection Method

Scraped and coded judicial decisions using an open-source engine.

Time Range

2016-2026

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-19 08:12:37; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Brazil, Canada, Netherlands