Hughes’s bit part in uncovering these dramatic developments brings rare attention to the tedious work of academics, who often toil in obscurity and fixate on tiny details that few would bother to notice. Hughes spends countless hours combing through filings in the nation’s 94 federal judicial districts to track terrorism cases. In the past three years, he and his colleagues have pulled together some 15,000 pages of legal documents to give policy makers and the public a better picture of the nature of terrorism threats in the United States.