The effectiveness of litigation to enforce environmental protections in the United States is the subject of a new study led by Christopher Rea, assistant professor at Brown University.
Published in the Nature Sustainability journal, the study analysed more 25,000 lawsuits and 4,000 federal judicial decisions spanning from 1988 to 2022, and found that while the courts have largely been an effective tool for enforcing environmental laws, this differs from state to state.
According to Rea, pro-regulatory plaintiffs filing environment-focused civil lawsuits tended to achieve success, with a higher rate of success than anti-regulatory ones.
‘The courts really matter’
“An important finding is that the courts really matter, and that environmental nonprofits and the federal government have pretty effectively used them to enforce environmental law,” he said.
However, organisations’ lawsuits predominantly focus on land conservation issues in the western United States, rather than on environmental issues in the eastern part of the country.
“These organisations have basically ignored what’s happening east of the Rockies, which is where most people in the U.S. live and is also where most legacy pollution is,” said Rea, who is affiliated with the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
“This means that environmental groups are focusing on a specific set of concerns that is not reflective of the broader set of concerns that many people face in their day-to-day lives.”
Nearly 40% of the cases examined were concentrated in just 10 of the 90 federal court districts, the study found, illustrating the geographical inequality in environment-focused litigation.
Eastern United States
‘This lack of legal attention to regions east of the Rocky Mountains, many with long industrial histories like the Midwest, South and East Coast […] and where the unevenly distributed threats of toxic exposure are generally higher, means that the federal government faces less legal pressure to robustly enforce anti-pollution laws in these places,’ the study noted.
Another finding of the study challenged perceptions that environmental groups frequently filed ‘frivolous’ lawsuits, with cases driven in about equal share by environmental organisations, the federal government, corporations and trade associations.
The study was co-authored by Nikolas E. Merten and Casey J. Rife. Read more here.
