Institute of Governmental Studies

How effective are courts as policymaking institutions? To investigate thisissue, I examine two species – polar bears, and loggerhead sea turtles – as theynavigate the conservation regimes in the US and Canada and the US andAustralia, respectively. Generally speaking, courts play a far greater role in theAmerican endangered species protection process than they do in Australia andCanada, allowing me to examine the impact of the courts in a comparativecontext.Overall, the results of this study are fairly positive. In both the polar bearand the loggerhead sea turtle cases, the American system functioned at least aswell as, and sometimes better than, the biodiversity programs in the other twocountries I examine. For both species, litigation helped enforce important legalprovisions and forced government officials to address critical shortcomings intheir regulatory agendas. In addition, contrary to the predictions of otherscholars, lawsuits did not appear to slow the American policymaking processsignificantly, at least compared to the Canadian and Australian systems. In thesecases, then, litigation acted as a productive and useful part of the policymakingprocess.