Report: How Radical Environmental Special Interests Manipulate the Federal Judiciary

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the House Judiciary Committee released an interim staff report titled, "How Radical Environmental Special Interests Manipulate the Federal Judiciary." The report reveals how the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), a left-wing environmental activist group that pushes for greater regulation of American industries, and its Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) target judges whom they believe may be likely to hear disputes surrounding climate change with one-sided judicial training seminars intended to influence the outcome of litigation. This targeted influence campaign undermines the American tradition of unbiased neutrality by predisposing federal and state judges in favor of plaintiffs bringing novel lawsuits against American energy producers.

Since August 2025, the Committee and its Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet have been conducting oversight of ELI's attempts to bias federal judges through its judicial "educational" programs. To date, the Committee and Subcommittee have received and reviewed more than 15,000 pages of documents and compelled day-long testimony from key players in ELI's initiative.

The Committee's and Subcommittee's oversight has highlighted the scope of radical environmentalists' efforts to indoctrinate and bias judges, including:

CJP intentionally invites judges who have a likelihood of presiding over climate cases to participate in its biased environmental law education programs. These judges are from regions where CJP anticipates a growing volume of climate-related cases. When a climate event occurs, such as a drought or wildfire, oftentimes plaintiffs bring legal claims in an attempt to recoup damages caused by the climate event. When selecting a location for a judicial "education" seminar, CJP looks for areas "where climate impacts would be significant" because it expects an increase in cases in those areas;
Under the guise of providing neutral educational information about climate science, CJP presents seminars that are designed to predispose judges to rule in favor of radical environmentalists. In private emails to aligned academics, CJP's founder bragged about its success in persuading judges to accept unsettled matters of climate science as fact and even admitted that CJP's efforts could "make a great difference in the final outcome of cases." CJP documents make clear that it seeks to influence litigation outcomes because "real government action [on climate change] might still be derived from court decisions";
Documents show that CJP lacks a formal conflict-of-interest policy to ensure that authors and presenters at its seminars are not also participating in active climate litigation before the judges in attendance. Instead, CJP relies on internal reviews conducted by its founder and senior staff to assess the neutrality of potential presenters and identify potential conflicts;
Evidence indicates that one CJP contributor coordinated with an environmental special interest attorney while the attorney represented Multnomah County, Oregon, in its $50 billion lawsuit against energy producers. Dr. Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a contributor to CJP, shared with this attorney a nonpublic CJP judicial training document explaining how attribution science can be used to connect greenhouse gas emissions to specific weather events, localized impacts, and resulting economic or human harms. In other words, a lawyer with an active dispute before the federal courts had prepublication access to a training module that was meant to influence judges about the very subject matter at issue in his case.

America's judicial system is based on the premise of fair proceedings before a neutral arbiter. However, from documents and testimony available to the Committee and Subcommittee, it appears that ELI and CJP are working to influence federal judges outside the courtroom and away from public eyes. Their judicial "education" seminars seek to bias federal and state judges about disputed issues in climate-change science, such as attribution and causation. By biasing judges that these issues are "settled" science, ELI and CJP stacks the deck against some litigants before they even enter the courtroom. The Committee and Subcommittee will continue to conduct oversight to inform legislative reforms to better protect the integrity of the judiciary and judicial proceedings.

Read the full interim staff report here, Exhibit part one here, and Exhibit part two here.

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