Global Water Law Judicial Decisions Dataset (2016-2026)

A comparative corpus of 83,596 judicial decisions addressing water law, sanitation access, and water governance across three jurisdictions: Brazil (11,724 decisions, 2016-2025 plus 200 historical TJSP decisions 1997-2015), Canada (3,218 decisions, 2016-2025), and the Netherlands (68,654 decisions, 2016-2025). Decisions were collected from national legal databases (Rechtspraak Open Data API, CanLII REST API, and Brazilian state court portals) using purpose-built scrapers. Each decision is coded with seven jurimetric variables: hr_language (human rights / right-to-water framing), sust_language (sustainability framing), governance_cat (dispute type: tariff, connection refusal, water quality, etc.), win_loss (litigation outcome, Brazil only), mp_involvement (Ministerio Publico, Brazil), indigenous_water (First Nations / Indigenous water rights), and public_interest (collective action framing). This dataset supports preliminary research on administrative law and sanitation access (the Legal Last Mile project) by an independent researcher. Scrapers and coding engine are open-source at https://github.com/jrklaus8/water-law-dataset. Also archived on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19836413