The justices recently kicked off the current Supreme Court term by hearing the important climate-lawfare case Suncor v. Boulder County. Much has been written about this case, but it’s worth stepping back and looking at its place in the broader context of the climate-lawfare effort, including the now well-documented efforts by the climate activists and plaintiffs to suborn the court system.
The week before the Suncor argument, the House Judiciary Committee released an interim staff report on the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) and its efforts to improperly sway judges in favor of climate activists. The product of a months-long investigation, the report shows how CJP, a project of the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), was running an intentional scheme to indoctrinate judges in critical jurisdictions to advance a litigation strategy that I have termed “judicial collectivization.”
The report contained numerous critical revelations. To begin with, it found that CJP’s founder “bragged about CJP’s success in persuading judges to accept unsettled matters of climate science and even admitted that CJP’s efforts would ‘make a great difference in the final outcome of cases.’”
It also shed new light on the problems with the Federal Judicial Center (FJC)’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Fourth Edition. For more background on this issue, see these articles, but the short of it is that the FJC put out a chapter on “Climate Science” that seemed to have been authored in significant part by a prominent climate plaintiff. It turns out, from the relevant emails subpoenaed by the House, that this was not the surprise that FJC leadership later claimed it to be. Indeed it turned out that officials at the FJC knew full well (1) that a climate plaintiff was working on the chapter and (2) that it would be very controversial. Indeed, FJC officials asked the climate plaintiff to stop working on the chapter, but emails obtained by the House indicate that he continued to do so anyway. This is a significant scandal that is only getting worse.
The House investigation also demonstrated that CJP had made fare more significant inroads into the federal judiciary than had been previously understood. That this was the report’s focus makes sense because the House has oversight authority over the functioning of the federal judiciary. Most climate-lawfare cases, though, are in state court, like Suncor. And CJP has made it clear that their primary targets are state-court judges. What’s to be done about that?
Enter Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird and her allies. Attorney General Bird and 23 other Republican AGs recently sent an excellent letter to the National Judicial College (NJC), a Nevada-based organization that seeks to educate judges at all levels throughout the country. The letter lays out in detail NJC’s concerning relationship with ELI and urges them to investigate it and bring it to an end.
Attorney General Bird notes that ELI had given NJC a $215,000 grant in to support a CJP project — the Judicial Leaders in Climate Science. As part of this project, NJC used its connections with the state judiciary to recruit judges for the climate-indoctrination program by asking “the Chief Justice of each State to designate judges” from which “23 judges from 21 States and Puerto Rico participated in the program.” It’s very similar to what the House found about CJP, namely: “CJP selected a location for the seminar and invited experts in the fields of environmental law and environmental science to present at these events. Once those details had been finalized, CJP’s partner organization, the Federal Judicial Center (FJC), invited judges to attend the seminar.”
The letter lays out in detail the problems with NJC and ELI and asks “that NJC immediately cease distributing, promoting, hosting, or endorsing materials produced or funded by ELI or CJP; remove ELI and CJP co-branding from NJC platforms; and suspend all related courses, faculty arrangements, financial relationships, and cooperative programming pending an independent review.” It also urges the NJC’s board to consider an independent review of the relationship.
Obviously the NJC should take Attorney General Bird and her allies up on their requests. CJP is an outrageous enterprise to defraud the courts and a supposedly reputable operation like the NJC should want nothing to do with it. That said, I’m not sure I’d hold my breath on it doing so voluntarily.
To pick one example showing where NJC’s priorities lie, look at its Appellate Judges Education Institute. It purports to be “preeminent provider of appellate judicial education in the United States.” It has also spent decades trying to counter-program the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention, hosting its appellate-judges summit at the same time. Perhaps this is merely a very longstanding coincidence? Perhaps, but there are also 51 other weeks in the year. The programming doesn’t inspire further confidence. Sure, it has token conservatives such as Judges Richard Sullivan and Jeff Sutton. It also has noted flouter of federal civil rights laws Erwin Chemerinsky and Steve Vladeck, a man Mitch McConnell called “one of the field marshals of the academic project to undermine the judiciary.”
The summit has at least two sessions on judicial ethics. Perhaps any right-thinking attendees should ask about how judicial ethics should take into account systemic efforts to influence judges on behalf of parties? Perhaps someone should investigate previous summits to see if anyone from ELI or CJP presented.
Regardless, it’s safe to say that the fix is probably in at the NJC. But it shouldn’t be. Attorney General Bird’s was a letter asking nicely, and the House Judiciary report shows that, when someone with subpoena power stops asking nicely, things can get very hairy for CJP and ELI’s patsy partners. If Nevada elects a Republican attorney general, Aviva bar the doors. Even if it doesn’t, other Republican attorneys general may choose to investigate efforts by the NJC to suborn their state judiciaries. Texas, for example, seems to have ample evidence to support such an investigation.
If the NJC wants to err on the side of prudence, it will take Attorney General Bird up on her suggestion and begin a credible, independent investigation of its activities.