For many months, conservative lawmakers and political operatives have targeted the scientists and lawyers behind the project. Climate Judicial Project, a program intended to educate the courts on climate science, alleging that their efforts constitute a conspiracy to influence federal judges and persuade them to rule against the oil industry.
Now, as congressional investigators open a formal investigation into the project, a separate program Closely aligned with the fossil fuel industry and free-market conservatives, he is hosting a symposium for 150 judges in Nashville, Tennessee. The program, run by the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, also aims to train judges, but in a way that prioritizes the interests of corporate America and challenges climate science.
These dueling efforts come as a number of high-profile lawsuits seeking to hold fossil fuel companies responsible for climate damage make their way through the courts and as oil industry-aligned attacks on climate policies, as well as the legal arguments supporting them, sharply increase.
ProPublica reported in April that political agents linked to conservative activist Leonard Leo were coordinating an effort in 11 states to pass laws protecting fossil fuel companies from liability for climate damages. Over the past three weeks, similar liability waiver bills have been introduced at the federal level in the House and Senate. Last week, the Florida attorney general’s office launched an investigation into alleged judicial influence by the organization that oversees the climate justice project, the Environmental Law Institute, a nonpartisan legal scholarship group funded until recently by the Environmental Protection Agency.
These developments follow a campaign last winter to get the Federal Judicial Center, the publishing arm of the federal judiciary, to remove a roughly 90-page chapter devoted to climate science from the latest volume of its technical manual for judges. Twenty-two Republican attorneys general wrote to Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, demanding that the committee investigate the center’s publication of documents on how to evaluate scientific evidence on climate and weather because the chapter’s authors appeared biased. In their letter, they pointed out that the authors worked for Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and alleged that the chapter was influenced by Michael Burger, the center’s executive director who works closely with the Sher Edling law firm, which represents several climate plaintiffs. The Republican attorneys general also noted that some Sabin Center staff members work with the Environmental Law Institute and the Climate Judiciary Project. Although the chapter was peer-reviewed and approved by the Federal Judicial Center, as well as the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the center removed the climate chapter in February.
On April 28, Jordan went further, releasing letters accusing Burger, the Environmental Law Institute, and Sher Edling of bias, conspiracy, and collusion. Jordan demanded that all three parties produce private communications, receipts and records of funding sources, and that recipients be interviewed before the committee.
The Sabin Center, Jordan wrote, “produces materials intended to be used to bias federal judges on new climate-related legal theories” and coordinates to bring climate-related litigation to court. The activity raises questions about “the integrity and independence of the judicial process” and “ex parte contact with the courts,” Jordan wrote, referring to the inappropriate conduct of contacting a judge without opposing counsel present to discuss issues related to a pending case.
Neither Sher Edling, the Sabin Center, nor Burger responded to a request for comment. A representative for the Environmental Law Institute said in an email that the Climate Judiciary Project “does not participate in litigation, coordinate with parties related to any litigation, or advise judges on how they should rule on any issue or in any case. CJP’s goal is to provide judges with the tools they need to understand climate science and how it appears in the law.”
Jordan’s office responded to a request for comment by reaffirming statements in letters he sent, and he did not respond to a detailed list of questions.
Amid allegations of impropriety and conflicts of interest, the George Mason University program has barely been noticed.
The George Mason Conference, called “Judicial Symposium on Scientific Methodology, Expert Testimony and the Judicial Role” opened the day after Jordan sent his letters and will continue until Saturday, May 2. It is managed by the university’s Legal and Economic Center, which oversees a project called the Judicial Training Program. The center is funded in part by ExxonMobil, which is a defendant in several climate-related lawsuits. ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment.
The conference includes speakers who have filed amicus briefs — filed by people who are not part of the case but have a strong interest in its outcome — in support of the oil industry in several of these cases, as well as at least one attorney who has represented fossil fuel companies in court. Reading assignments prepared for the judges include a Substack article by a notable climate opponent accusing the authors of the retracted climate chapter in the Federal Court Reference Manual of including material from Burger and hiding his authorship. They also include a legal review argument that a key principle of climate science used to identify the cause of disasters should be inadmissible in their courtrooms. One session, titled “Debates over the Reliability of Scientific Assessment Tools in Courtrooms,” focuses entirely on the federal court reference manual.
In an emailed response to ProPublica, Donald Kochan, executive director of George Mason’s Law and Economics Center, which organized the event, presented the symposium as a robust and objective discussion. The program’s advisory board, he writes, is a politically and jurisprudentially diverse group, including “some of the most progressive jurists in the country, including on climate issues.” Kochan, who did not respond to a list of specific questions, added that the lectures are given by leading academics in science and law and that he invited the authors of the judicial reference manual to speak but they declined, as did several others who he said would have represented more centrist views on the climate issue.
The conference is one of dozens of meetings, retreats and “intimate week-long gatherings” regularly hosted by the Law and Economic Center as part of an initiative to instill free market values and greater knowledge of the economic consequences of policy in judicial decision-making. In 2016, the law school was renamed in honor of former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the center expanded with $30 million in donations, adding faculty and fellowships and launching additional “colloquiums.” The center now runs several parallel initiatives under the umbrella of the Judicial Education Program, each aimed at bringing judges together and educating them. The Science and Evidence Symposium is one such event.
According to a 2020 internal fundraising document obtained by ProPublica, the gatherings are often luxurious, all-expenses-paid affairs, created to foster lasting relationships and networking opportunities with the judges. The document included a solicitation for more than $930,000 sent by the center to the Charles Koch Foundation, a libertarian organization that provides grants to universities and scholars. At the time of the proposal, more than 5,000 judges representing all 50 states had participated in at least one of the organization’s programs, the document said.
The goal of the symposium, according to the document, is to steer judges toward a libertarian economic viewpoint in their decisions – the very kind of “bias” that Jordan has accused the Sabin Center and the Climate Judicial Project of.
“The purpose of this project is to expose judges to the intellectual history of the role of capitalism, economic freedom, and constitutionally limited government as fundamental characteristics of a liberal society,” the document states. It is also about establishing a community of like-minded judges “with synergistic effects on the justice system as a whole” and influencing the outcome of cases brought before the courts. Judges, the fundraising proposal continues, “must urgently cultivate an understanding” of economic analysis and its relevance to the legal system if they “are to make decisions that advance the rule of law and the American free enterprise system.”
According to the George Mason University website, the Law and Economics Center’s 2025 funders include DonorsTrust, a dark money transfer organization intended to protect the identities of contributors. DonorsTrust is often used by organizations linked to Leo, who brought George Mason a $20 million gift, in addition to $10 million from the Charles Koch Foundation, which made the expansion of the law school’s program possible.
This weekend’s symposium in Nashville is one of the most important elements of the center’s outreach efforts to judges. According to the 2020 fundraising letter, the goal of these gatherings is to challenge the status quo in science. The conference “will give judges a comprehensive understanding and healthy skepticism of the invocations of ‘science’ that lurk in the background of the cases they hear,” the center’s director at the time wrote, and it will help judges understand that “much of what passes for ‘science’ for leverage never faces tests of rigor, reliability, and quality before a neutral arbiter.”
One of the events s of the symposium features Philip Goldberg, managing partner of the law firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon and special counsel to the National Association of Manufacturers’ political lobbying arm, the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, which the group describes as “the leading voice for manufacturers in court.” MAP, as it is known, has publicly rejected allegations in a landmark case the city of Honolulu brought against Shell, ExxonMobil and other oil companies, alleging they misrepresented the risks of using their fuels and are responsible for the damages they caused. Goldberg wrote a brief for the group that was submitted to the United States Supreme Court on the case in 2024.
Goldberg, who did not respond to a request for comment, also authored briefs in climate liability cases brought by the city of Baltimore against BP and other fossil fuel companies — a case the defendants won in March — as well as a case brought by Colorado’s Boulder County against Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil, which alleges the companies misrepresented the risks of using fossil fuels. Attorneys from Shook, Hardy & Bacon are also present at the conference. Other attorneys at the firm wrote a brief in support of Chevron in a case brought by Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. (The oil companies dispute these allegations and each of these cases is ongoing.)
For the assigned reading in a session on the judicial manual, the symposium offered an article by political scientist Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Pielke wrote that he found evidence that the true authorship of a significant portion of the reference manual’s climate chapter was obscured. He used the artificial intelligence program Claude to perform an analysis comparing the text of the chapter to an article co-authored by Sab. in’s Burger and said he found a correlation.
“Michael Burger did not write any of the text for the climate science chapter and he had no control over the content and scope,” one of the chapter’s two authors, Jessica Wentz, who denied that the chapter was biased, wrote to ProPublica. The other author did not respond, and Burger declined to comment.
The conference did not offer readings from the climate chapter of the textbook itself, which is still available on the website. website of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. It also did not offer readings from UN climate science authorities or climate-related readings from other peer-reviewed scientific journals.
In its final session, the symposium will feature attorney Matthew Wickersham of Alston & Bird, who has represented Chevron in several lawsuits. Wickersham did not respond to a request for comment. The only reading assigned to the justices for this session is an article Wickersham wrote in the Rutgers Law Record in 2025 about why attribution science — the field of study that helps connect climate disasters to specific amounts of pollution and their sources — should never be admitted into court.