Developing this platform involves a multi-step process incorporating both computational methods — data analysis and AI-driven language processing — and qualitative methods — legal research and case interpretation. In summary, we:

1. Compiled a list of 222 individual legal statute codes that correspond to anti-SLAPP laws across the country
2. Searched federal and state court dockets on Reuters’ Westlaw , which claims to be “the most comprehensive collection of primary and secondary law for thorough research,” to locate all cases in which a judge referenced an anti-SLAPP statute in a decision
3. Systematically scraped case files and metadata from Westlaw databases and organized them into a central, searchable repository of national scope
4. Cleaned case metadata, removed outliers, and deduplicated case information
5. Developed jurisdiction-specific language models using Google Pinpoint, a new research tool for journalists, to aid a direct research process to determine case outcomes, categorizations and summaries
6. Conducted a rigorous fact-check of each case to confirm summaries, outcomes and categorizations, and removed additional cases that fell outside of the scope of our analysis.

From our original set of citations, we removed all matching cases with decision dates after Dec. 31, 2024, and removed all records without a date attached (one from Illinois, three from Texas, and three from California). We also removed any case with a decision date listed before the passage of their state’s anti-SLAPP law: six from Florida, two from New York, one from Texas, and 100 from Oklahoma. A larger number of cases were removed from Oklahoma because a law from 1910, which is not an anti-SLAPP law, correlated with its current anti-SLAPP statute code.

Cases that had an exact match for title, docket number, decision date, and court name were treated as the same unique case and deduplicated. These adjustments to the raw data left us with 10,257 individual cases in our database. Within those cases, 209 of them (2.0%) are missing a defendant and 70 of them (0.7%) are missing a docket number.

We welcome contributions from our national community of lawyers, journalists, and advocates to help make the database more comprehensive and to include cases we may have missed. Since our November 2025 launch, we've received dozens of tips from users across the country submitting alleged SLAPPS to be added to the database. We review these cases on a rolling basis, using the same checks outlined in our methodology.

Know of a SLAPP-related case that we don't yet have in our database? Send us a tip at slappback@nyu.edu.

Here we define the terminology that appears in our database.

Docket: Unique docket numbers assigned to each case as seen in state and federal court dockets.

Case Title: Formal case titles for each case, typically identifying a plaintiff versus a defendant.

State: The state of the court in which the case was decided. This also includes a “federal” designation for decisions from courts in federal circuits that have accepted the application of state anti-SLAPP laws.

Court: The formal court name in which each case was decided.

Type: The general nature of the case. Some cases may fall into multiple categories here.

• Activism: Includes cases in which a litigant was involved in advocating for a cause or associated with a known advocacy group.
• Alleged Misconduct: Includes cases involving allegations of serious wrongdoing made in police reports, hearing transcripts, circulated petitions, misconduct tribunals or social media.
• Artificial Intelligence: Includes cases involving disputes at the intersection of free speech and artificial intelligence.
• Bad Review: Includes cases involving a negative review of a product, service or business.
• Business: Includes cases involving disputes over trade practices, payments or contracts.
• Employment: Includes cases involving disputes between employers, employees or unions over working conditions, compensation and termination.
• Estate: Includes cases involving disputes over family estates and trusts.
• Family: Includes cases involving disputes over custody, adoption and pets.
• Housing: Includes cases involving disputes between landlords and tenants over repairs, rent and eviction.
• Insurance: Includes cases involving disputes over insurance claims.
• Legal: Includes cases involving disputes with lawyers or law firms over malicious prosecution or inadequate representation.
• Media: Includes cases against news organizations, individual journalists, book publishers, streaming services, documentary filmmakers and production houses.
• Other: Includes cases that were not immediately classifiable.
• Political: Includes cases involving elected officials, candidates and campaigns.
• Property: Includes cases involving ownership disputes over property or real estate, including homeowners association disputes.
• Social Media: Includes cases in which the underlying dispute centers around online speech posted to a social media platform.
• Whistleblower: Includes cases in which a litigant has either specifically claimed to have acted as a whistleblower or has allegedly been retaliated against for speech about alleged misconduct.
• Zoning: Includes cases involving disputes over land-use regulations.

Dismissed?:

• Yes: A judge agreed with an anti-SLAPP motion, dismissing related claims because they targeted public expression;
• No: A judge denied an anti-SLAPP motion, decided it was not applicable, or fell within an exception, allowing related claims to move forward;
• Partial: A judge dismissed some elements of a case for targeting public expression but allowed others to move forward;
• Unresolved: Claims in a case involving an anti-SLAPP motion have yet to be fully decided.

Date: The date the 2024 decision was filed.

PDF: A link to the related filing.