In The Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton famously promised that the federal judiciary would have "neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment." The climate lawfare movement has spent the better part of a decade trying to prove Hamilton wrong.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, in which Boulder seeks to use Colorado public nuisance law to make two energy companies pay for the effects of global climate change.
The case is the culmination of a long campaign.
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A small, well-funded network of climate activists, convinced that drastic action is needed to save the planet and frustrated that their fellow citizens have not voted to dismantle the fossil-fuel industry, have turned to state and local courts after the Supreme Court unanimously shut down federal climate-nuisance suits in 2011’s American Electric Power v. Connecticut. Their strategy rests on a single premise: When the front door of democracy is closed, try the courthouse back door.
But thanks to documents released September 30 by the House Judiciary Committee, we no longer have to guess. One of the movement’s architects put the strategy in writing.
CLIMATE SEMINARS FOR JUDGES FACE FUNDING TRAIL PROBE AMID FEARS OF OUTSIDE INFLUENCE ON COURTS
"It seemed to me that without legislative or executive action to address the climate problem, real government action might still be derived from court decisions," Paul Hanle wrote in a May 2022 email. Hanle founded the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project, which has put at least 140 federal judges through its climate "education" seminars. In the same email, he laid out CJP’s strategy to target "key judges" with seminars, hoping to "make a great difference in the final outcome of cases."
The crown jewel was the judges’ own science manual. In December 2022, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine invited Michael Burger to write the climate chapter of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, the federal judiciary’s go-to science guide. Burger runs Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and is of counsel at Sher Edling, a firm representing many of the cities and counties suing oil companies. The Federal Judicial Center balked, citing his litigation work.
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The next day, Burger told his Sabin Center colleagues, the chapter’s eventual named authors, that he’d "be happy to contribute behind the scenes." Within weeks, one of them was circulating a draft with "Mike’s edits" and revising the legal section in response to his comments. Soon after the manual was published, the FJC withdrew the climate chapter. The National Academies finally followed suit in August.
Why all the stealth? Because climate plaintiffs have a causation problem they cannot solve in the open.
SUPREME COURT CAN RESTORE SANITY AND STOP THE LEFT’S RADICAL CLIMATE AGENDA
At the Suncor Energy oral argument, Justice Elena Kagan told the oil companies’ lawyer, "Well, you sound like you have a very good causation argument." She meant it as a brush-off; she immediately questioned why causation should matter for preemption.
But Kagan is right: No climate plaintiff has a good causation argument. Greenhouse gases mix globally, and about 90 percent of emissions occur outside the United States. Tying a drought in Boulder to any particular company’s barrels of oil is simply not possible.
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That is why the climate lawfare movement needs judges to swallow "extreme event attribution." Boulder’s trial court has already shown what the endgame looks like, declaring, "in a multiple contributor tort case, there is no need to tie specific injuries to the actions of defendants." If you can’t meet the standard, lower it.
This is precisely what the Constitution’s structure exists to prevent: a small minority weaponizing federalism to impose its policy preferences on the entire nation. One county cannot regulate the world. If Boulder prevails, the companies’ lawyer warned, some 90,000 municipalities could make national energy policy through jury awards. Pressed by Justice Clarence Thomas at oral argument, Boulder’s lawyer conceded that "nothing in our theory" prevents suing retailers too.
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And it won’t stop with oil companies. The Climate Judiciary Project’s own curriculum for judges shows where this is headed. One module touts "source attribution" studies tracing nearly two-thirds of all carbon dioxide emitted since the 1750s to 90 fossil-fuel and cement producers. Then it turns to the dinner table: "Though its members have not yet been named as defendants in climate change lawsuits, the heavily concentrated industrial animal agriculture industry also has been subjected to source attribution analysis." Note the word "yet."
The module is candid about the point of the exercise. These studies take an alleged problem that could be attributed to "several billion past and present human individuals" and reduce it "to one driven by a few dozen companies," which makes climate change "appear to be more amenable to traditional tort law adjudication." This is regulation by litigation, pure and simple. Punish the companies that supply Americans’ fuel, food and building materials, and every family pays the bill at the pump and the grocery store.
Chief Justice John Roberts cut to the heart of the matter: "Isn’t your suit an attempt to evade those decisions?" He meant the Court’s long line of cases treating interstate air pollution as a matter of federal law, which Justice Brett Kavanaugh had called "a wall of precedent." Kavanaugh then read aloud from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opinion in AEP: Federal judges "lack the scientific, economic, and technological resources" to set emissions policy. If that is true of federal judges, Kavanaugh asked, doesn’t it apply to "a six-person state jury in Boulder?"
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Take it from Ginsburg herself. Greenhouse-gas regulation, she wrote, "cannot be prescribed in a vacuum." It demands weighing environmental benefits against "our Nation’s energy needs and the possibility of economic disruption."
The climate lawfare complex lost at the ballot box. It lost in AEP. So its backers went behind the scenes—into judicial seminars and judges’ own science manual. Enough already. The Supreme Court should shut the courthouse door for good.
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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone public dissenter in a Thursday decision allowing New Hampshire to block the use of student ID cards in the upcoming midterm elections.
Other justices on the court cited the longstanding precedent "that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election," and said that lower courts failed to argue that the specific case in New Hampshire warranted an exception to the tradition. Jackson, however, argued the proximity to an election should not get in the way of properly applying the law.
"I respectfully dissent because — even, and perhaps especially, when an election is looming — I would not disturb a clearly justifiable federal-court order issued to ensure that the public receives accurate information about a State’s electoral processes," she wrote.
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The underlying dispute stems from a law signed in April that went into effect in June, striking student ID cards from the list of forms of identification that election officials can accept when an individual requests a ballot. A voting rights group sued New Hampshire on the grounds that the law illegally discriminated against young voters by making it more difficult for them to vote.
New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan then issued guidance saying that student IDs could not be used to establish voter identity, even as supporting evidence under the state's alternative verification procedures. A district judge blocked that portion of the guidance, arguing that it went beyond the scope of the law itself, which only removed student IDs from the list of expressly accepted forms of identification.
Among the supporters of the guidance was the Republican National Committee.
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While Jackson was the lone public dissenter, it is possible that other justices dissented as well, but opted not to be named on the court order. During her roughly four years on the Supreme Court, Jackson has broken from the rest of her colleagues in areas such as campaign finance, immigration and congressional map litigation.
In 2023, she was the lone dissenter in an 8-1 ruling allowing a concrete company to sue striking union workers. She also stood alone in a May 2026 decision involving federal prisoners seeking to challenge their convictions through compassionate release.
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New Hampshire is holding a handful of close races on Election Day, putting some weight behind the court’s decision. Fox News’ power rankings rate the state’s Senate race as leans Democratic, meaning that liberals have a slight advantage in a race that could decide control of Congress. The state’s governor’s race, meanwhile, is rated as likely going to the GOP.
College students typically favor the Democratic Party, though it is unclear how many voters will be affected by the court ruling, as students who previously relied on their student IDs will now need another accepted form of identification.
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Some Democrats, however, believe allowing voters to use student IDs would be a good thing. Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, for instance, has pushed for such a thing in his state.
Several NC legal aid organizations say the removal of their court-mandated funding was an unconstitutional move.
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The Limassol permanent criminal court found four men guilty of the premeditated murder of Thanasis Kalogeropoulos on Friday, a verdict that carries a mandatory life sentence.
The court concluded that the guilt of all four was proven “beyond all reasonable doubt” and that the killing was the result of pre-planning.
The men, aged between 23 and 46, faced 11 charges between them, with the court also finding them guilty of the remaining counts, which included conspiracy to commit murder, possession, transport and use of firearms, as well as arson.
The 24-year-old, who also faced a charge of aiding and abetting murder, was cleared of that count.
Kalogeropoulos, 55, was killed on October 30, 2023, in a car park next to a beach restaurant on Amathus Avenue in Limassol, on his way to a morning swim; a post-mortem found he had been shot ten times.
Police said he was shot at close range from a vehicle by two people, one using a pistol and the other a Kalashnikov.
The attackers then set fire to their getaway vehicle and left on a motorcycle.
Kalogeropoulos was “well known to authorities” for his previous involvement in organised crime.
Police had alleged that the 24-year-old was the mastermind of the plot and that another defendant was one of the two gunmen.
They said the oldest defendant owned the house where the killing was planned and the youngest was the getaway driver.
The defendants will now be sentenced, with premeditated murder carrying a mandatory life term under Cypriot law.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday allowed New Hampshire officials to reject student IDs as a valid form of identification when voters cast their ballots in next month's midterm elections.
A lower court judge previously found that state officials had improperly gone further than a new law restricting the use of student IDs to obtain a ballot, ruling that officials still had to consider student IDs alongside other evidence when voters lacked other means of verifying their identity.
But the Supreme Court took issue with the judge intervening this close to the elections.
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The high court has said orders handed down too close to an election can cause voter confusion, an idea known as the Purcell Principle. The court cited the recent legal back-and-forth over Missouri’s redistricting maps.
"Here, the District Court did not point to anything that would justify deviating from that principle," the majority wrote in its opinion.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, saying the rule did not apply since the lower court judge was helping ensure the public received accurate information.
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"When a federal court determines that material misrepresentations are being made about a State’s election rules, an injunction to prohibit that conduct does not contribute to public confusion, it prevents that very problem," Jackson wrote. "I would not disturb a clearly justifiable federal-court order issued to ensure that the public receives accurate information about a State’s electoral processes," she wrote.
This comes after Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed House Bill 323 into law in April, removing student IDs from the list of identification expressly considered valid for obtaining a ballot. The law took effect June 2. After the law went into effect, New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan issued guidance to election officials about the change, and multiple trainings were held.
"New Hampshire has a responsibility to protect the integrity of its elections and ensure that election laws are applied as written," New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella, a Republican, said in a statement.
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"The Supreme Court’s decision is an important victory for our efforts to defend those laws and prevent last-minute court orders from creating uncertainty for voters and election officials. We will continue to defend New Hampshire’s election laws and the safeguards they provide," he continued.
The Supreme Court's decision was not a final ruling on the merits of the case, and the underlying litigation over the law remains ongoing.
Two Minnesota federal judges who took the unusual step of publicly criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown to the New York Times are now fighting the administration’s efforts to disqualify them from cases involving immigration enforcement.
One of those judges, Patrick Schiltz, is overseeing the Justice Department’s effort to strip U. S. citizenship from Salah Osman Ahmed, a Somali-born man who pleaded guilty in 2009 to providing material support to terrorists after joining al- Shabaab. The other, John Tunheim, is presiding over the prosecution of a South African national accused of falsely claiming U. S. citizenship and illegally voting in the 2024 election. The Justice Department filed separate motions asking Schiltz and Tunheim to recuse themselves, arguing that their participation in the New York Times report criticizing President Donald Trump's Operation Metro Surge has raised questions about whether they can fairly preside over the cases.
"Impartiality is imperative to ensuring public trust in our Nation’s judiciary," the Justice Department said in a statement posted to X this week. "Judge Schiltz’s and Judge Tunheim’s on-the-record participation in a recent highly partisan New York Times Article, along with Judge Schiltz’s subsequent public comments, unquestionably calls into doubt whether they can be impartial in these cases."
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The Justice Department's formal recusal demand follows reporting by Fox News Digital last month detailing unusual behind-the-scenes coordination among Minnesota's federal bench as judges confronted a massive influx of immigration cases stemming from the administration's enforcement operation. The report came after Schiltz and Tunheim were among seven Minnesota federal judges who spoke with the Times in September about Operation Metro Surge. Schiltz sat for a roughly 90- minute interview during which he described the administration's handling of the operation as having created a "grave threat to the rule of law," while Tunheim suggested to the Times that agents carrying out the administration's immigration crackdown were not primarily apprehending dangerous criminals.
DOJ had already raised the prospect that judges who publicly discussed the administration's immigration cases might need to step aside when the Times report was released in September. Last month, DOJ filed a judicial misconduct complaint against Schiltz, Tunheim and other Minnesota judges who participated in the Times report, accusing them of violating judicial ethics rules and asking the Eighth Circuit to investigate. Attorney General Todd Blanche said their conduct had "undermined public confidence in an impartial judiciary in Minnesota."
"It is remarkable that sitting federal judges are giving on-the-record interviews attacking this Administration's policies rather than ruling from the bench," a Justice Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital in September. "Judges who have made public comments on pending or related matters should consider whether recusal is warranted going forward."
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The Times report in question revealed that Schiltz, Tunheim and the other Minnesota judges handling the flood of Operation Metro Surge cases regularly met, communicated through running email threads and used an informal spreadsheet created by court clerks to identify judges to consult about recurring legal questions. Chief Judge Eric Tostrud previously told Fox News Digital that the judges nevertheless independently decided every case assigned to them.
"The bottom line is that each of us made an independent decision with respect to the merits of each and every petition we were assigned," Tostrud said at the time.
The Justice Department, however, has accused Schiltz and the other judges of "publicly" taking sides in the ongoing battle over Trump's deportation agenda.
"A judge who has publicly taken sides on the political issue of immigration enforcement cannot then preside over a case concerning one of the Justice Department’s key immigration initiatives: pursuing the largest denaturalization effort in Department history to restore trust and integrity in U.S. citizenship," Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward wrote.
Schiltz declined to comment on the Justice Department's new effort to disqualify him when reached by Fox News Digital this week. But when Fox News Digital asked him about the possibility of recusal in September, Schiltz argued there was no basis for him to step aside — and pointed to the fact that DOJ had not asked him to do so.
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"I have seen suggestions from the Administration that I might have to recuse in immigration cases, but no one has yet identified any basis for my recusal, which is presumably why the Justice Department has not asked me to recuse," Schiltz said at the time.
"Neither in the New York Times article nor anywhere else have I commented on the merits of a particular case," he continued. "Instead, I have spoken in defense of the rule of law, a component of which is compliance with court orders. That is not a cause for recusal."
Tunheim did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Charles "Cully" Stimson, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation who previously served as a federal prosecutor and military judge, told Fox News Digital that judges ordinarily avoid publicly commenting on matters that could intersect with cases before them.
"These judges did something extraordinarily imprudent, and that is to talk to any newspaper, much less the New York Times," Stimson said. "That was a big no-no."
Asked what he would do if the New York Times interviews were the only facts at issue, Stimson said he would step aside.
"If we were to just go off of the New York Times interview ... I would recuse myself," Stimson said, noting the recusal would only be from the particular case at issue as opposed to all future cases adjudicating the same principles.
Stimson cautioned, however, that recusal motions put judges in the unusual position of effectively judging their own impartiality and said it would be inappropriate to predict how either motion should ultimately be resolved without the complete record.
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If either judge denies DOJ's request, Stimson said the government could seek review from the Eighth Circuit, where a three-judge panel would determine whether the government has met the legal standard for recusal.
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DOJ declined to comment further Thursday beyond its public statement. A DOJ spokesperson also did not answer Fox News Digital's question about whether the department would appeal if Schiltz or Tunheim denies the recusal motions.
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