Getting to the root of the problem

First there were trees, then there were people, then there were court cases about trees. Between 2011 and 2020, thousands of court cases involved disputes about trees in the state of New South Wales, Australia.

How are these cases connected? Which local councils have the most tree disputes? What legislations are in place to protect trees, people and property?

Intertwining cases

In Australia, judges make decisions based on rules and principles derived from previously decided cases. In this visualisation, each circle represents one case and each link represents a citation of another case. The more a case gets cited by others, the larger it becomes.

Councils on the defence

Local councils are the last line of defence against overzealous land clearing in the name of progress. They get sued whenever developers don't get their way. Occasionally, councils will also prosecute unsanctioned tree cutting.

A multitude of laws

In addition to the highly specific "Trees (Disputes Between Neighbours) Act 2006", case decisions also cite a myriad of environmental legislations, policies and plans at different jurisdiction levels.

Notes

Land and Environment Court of New South Wales cases 2011-2020, Australasian Legal Information Institute, https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewtoc/au/cases/nsw/NSWLEC/

Legislation groupings generated by TF-IDF (frequency–inverse document frequency) and k-means clustering.