The Left’s preferred avenue for enacting its radical agenda is not persuading voters at the ballot box, but weaponized lawfare. That is the conclusion of a damning new report from the Alliance for Consumers, Lawfare in America, which meticulously documents “woke lawfare”—the use of strategic litigation not to remedy specific harms or enforce existing law, but to extract sweeping policy mandates that activists could never win through Congress or state legislatures.
Woke lawfare departs from traditional civil litigation in several respects: Instead of compensating plaintiffs for past harms, it aims to change future behavior, typically through settlement agreements and consent decrees. It seeks mandates from judges that apply to entire organizations rather than limiting them to the parties that engaged in alleged wrongdoing. The ensuing compliance obligations can last for years, even decades, after settlement, and they may saddle corporations with permanent internal compliance bureaucracies or give power to outside groups over corporate operations. Those arrangements in turn often carry substantive mandates with specific ideological content.
To take one example recounted in the Alliance for Consumers report, consider the 2020 settlement of a shareholder derivative lawsuit against Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Cohen Milstein—a law firm that in 2017–2020 directed 100% of its major federal political campaign donations to Democrats—brought the case alleging sexual harassment and discrimination on behalf of union pension funds among other shareholders. Instead of bringing direct compensation to individual victims, the settlement imposed a $310 million commitment to DEI initiatives, a new internal DEI advisory council that included people outside the company, and an overhaul of corporate oversight systems. As the firm’s own attorney boasted, “The settlement fundamentally alters Alphabet’s workplace policies.” Indeed it did—through litigation, not legislation.
Or consider Rich v. Georgia: In 2022, Georgia state employees represented by the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund (TLDEF) filed suit seeking coverage for “transgender-related health care” under Georgia’s State Health Benefit Plan. The state settled in 2023, agreeing to remove its exclusions for transgender procedures from its health plans, to be permanently barred from reinstating similar exclusions, and to follow TLDEF’s definition of transgender health care coverage. Of the $365,000 the settlement generated, a portion went directly to an LGBTQ advocacy group, The Campaign for Southern Equality—making Georgia taxpayers involuntary donors to a cause their own elected representatives never approved.
Environmental and climate litigation represents perhaps the most ambitious front in the Left’s woke lawfare campaign. In 2024, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a coalition led by the Sierra Club filed companion suits alleging that ExxonMobil’s production of plastics constituted a public nuisance and that its decades-long promotion of plastic recycling constituted unfair and deceptive marketing. Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, which represented plaintiffs, had directed 100% of its federal campaign contributions to Democrats in 2024. The relief sought goes far beyond compensating any identifiable victim. It seeks the creation of an abatement fund addressing plastic cleanup and removal, a court order prohibiting ExxonMobil from making any public statements about recycling, and sweeping permanent injunctive relief. The California legislature did not enact such measures, but of course the whole point is to have the courts do it instead. And California v. ExxonMobil is just the tip of the iceberg. The report also documents other cases, including two prominent ones I discussed in prior posts: A Hawaiian municipality’s use of state court litigation to try to dictate the entire country’s energy policy in City and County of Honolulu v. Sunoco LP and multiple Louisiana municipalities’ reversion to tenuous legal arguments in state court in search of windfall judgments against oil companies in Plaquemines Parish v. Chevron USA, a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court.
What makes this system of woke lawfare so insidious is the self-reinforcing financial machine that powers it. Contingency fees generate tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for the law firms involved. Those firms funnel money into Democratic campaigns and ideological organizations. Those organizations bring more lawsuits. The cycle repeats, and with each turn of the wheel, more corporate governance, more government policy, more of American social life gets restructured by consent decrees rather than democratic consent.
This is not how self-governance is supposed to work. The judiciary is responsible for interpreting and applying the law, not serving as an end-run around legislatures that declined to write the law activists wanted. Leave policymaking and legislating up to state legislatures and to Congress. When trial lawyers and advocacy groups use the threat of litigation to extract policy concessions that no elected body ever authorized, they aren’t vindicating rights. They’re subverting democracy.