Climate Change Litigation: An Empirical Assessment of the Role of Science in Climate Change Lawsuits
Open AccessThe dissertation consists of three essays that collectively evaluate how science has been used in climate change litigation in the United States from 1990 to 2018. The research objective is to conduct empirical assessments to find how science affects judicial decisions in climate change lawsuits. The first essay investigates the following research question: to what extent does scientific evidence presented in courts influence the judicial outcome of climate change lawsuits? Based on the analysis of all publicly available legal documents from all 222 lawsuits, the essay explores how much scientific discussion occurred in each lawsuit and its implications on case outcomes. Using the ordered logit regression model, the essay finds that there is a significant correlation between scientific information brought into courts by both plaintiffs and defendants, and the courts' scientific discussion. Furthermore, the essay finds that, while both plaintiffs and defendants significantly affect the courts' scientific discussion, the defendants are more influential than the plaintiffs to the courts' scientific discussions. The second essay takes a qualitative approach to study the same research question studied in the first essay. Using the qualitative methods, the essay explores the legal contexts in which scientific communication becomes critical. The qualitative analysis of 82 in-depth interviews with participants in 13 climate change lawsuits, in which climate science played a major role, shows that there are three contexts in which science becomes (or will become) critically influential in legal decision-making processes. First, science is critical in proving injury-in-fact in lawsuits, and when a state government is a plaintiff (or a part of a plaintiff group), the court is more likely to grant standing for the plaintiffs. Second, attribution science is not yet strong enough to prove causation and redressability. Third, courts mostly credit agency science, which can, at times, become a problem for the scientific community outside of government agencies. The third essay investigates how judges address scientific uncertainty in climate change lawsuits against federal agencies. The essay assessed the court opinions of 54 lawsuits selected from the database of 222 climate change lawsuits to evaluate how scientific uncertainty influences the judges' decision-making. There are three main findings. First, when certain scientific information is perceived to be undisputed among the scientific community, the judges are more likely to credit it. Second, judges are more likely to scrutinize the currency of the data if an agency is accused of using outdated data. Third, judges pay close attention to the scientific uncertainty issues when they are convinced that there is a notable contradiction within the agency decision. projects.
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