Excavating landmarks—empirical contributions to doctrinal analysis

Abstract

The idea of landmark cases is ubiquitous in legal scholarship and adjudication. Both scholars who rely on ‘landmark’ cases and those who avoid the label often focus too much attention on a small sample of individual cases when researching legal doctrine. This risks missing important cases and pieces of the doctrinal picture. The article proposes an updated methodology that returns ‘to the basics’ of doctrinal scholarship, but with an empirical twist enabled through modern database technology. The approach is exemplified through the case study of López Ostra v Spain, a well-known environmental human rights decision under the European Convention on Human Rights. Based on a comprehensive data set of all environmental decisions, the article argues that the ‘landmark’ status of López Ostra is less empirically and doctrinally clear than conventionally accepted in legal scholarship.