A House Judiciary Committee staff report released Wednesday concludes that a judicial education program has worked to tilt climate lawsuits toward plaintiffs suing energy companies, raising alarms about the integrity of the bench. The committee’s probe of the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project, begun in August 2025, found the group used training materials, speaker choices, and coordination with plaintiff-side lawyers in ways that endanger judicial impartiality.
Just the News reported that the investigation confirms long-running critic claims: the Climate Judiciary Project, or CJP, supplies activist-driven materials aimed at predisposing judges who oversee climate litigation. The report says the project seeks outcomes favorable to parties claiming damages from global warming they attribute to petroleum companies.
Dozens of climate suits already move through courts nationwide. At stake is whether judges hear those cases after receiving what the committee calls biased science and legal framing, rather than neutral instruction.
The Environmental Law Institute established the Climate Judiciary Project in 2018. CJP describes its mission as giving judges “authoritative, objective, and trusted education on climate science, the impacts of climate change, and the ways climate science is arising in the law.”
The House report rejects that framing. It finds CJP curriculum presents a slanted legal and scientific framework built to advance climate litigation. Materials, the committee says, were developed by activists dedicated to anti-fossil fuel policies pursued through lawsuits against oil companies.
Investigators obtained internal documents and interviewed CJP founder Paul Hanle. The report alleges the project intentionally invites judges likely to preside over climate cases, runs seminars meant to “predispose judges to rule in favor of radical environmentalists,” lacks effective conflict-of-interest controls, and coordinates with attorneys on the plaintiffs’ side of climate suits.
The report states the group tries to undermine impartiality “by falsely claiming to present federal and state judges with unbiased information about climate science during their judicial training seminars.”
A core committee finding centers on who writes and delivers the training. The report says CJP claims it picks authors, presenters, and advisory members for expertise, standing, objectivity, and skill. In practice, the committee found, the project does not evaluate or disclose ties to climate litigants, advocacy groups, or active climate cases.
"Although CJP states that it selects curriculum authors, presenters, and Advisory Committee members based on expertise, professional standing, objectivity, and presentation skills, the entity does not evaluate or disclose participants’ affiliations with climate litigants, advocacy organizations, or ongoing climate litigation,"
Internal reviews by Hanle and senior staff stand in for a formal process to bar people in active climate litigation or other conflicts, the report found.
One example involves Roger Worthington, lead counsel for Multnomah County, Oregon, in a climate-related suit. A CJP contributor shared a prepublication training module with him. The county is seeking $51 billion from energy companies, alleging they contributed to a 2021 heat wave that caused more than 100 deaths. Worthington has also been tied to climate research supporting litigation, including funding for studies that could favor plaintiffs.
The committee put the problem in blunt terms.
"In other words, a lawyer with an active dispute before the federal courts had prepublication access to a training module that is meant to influence judges about the very subject matter at issue in his case,"
The report also details coordination with Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and Of Counsel at Sher Edling, a firm that specializes in suing oil companies over alleged climate damages. The Sabin Center advocates climate litigation against oil companies as a path to “climate justice.” Its founder, Michael Gerrard, appears in the document trail as well.
In a June 2019 email, Hanle asked Gerrard to present at a seminar the next month and discussed “back-channel efforts” to have a Supreme Court justice attend. When committee staff interviewed Hanle in July of this year, he said he could not recall what that phrase meant.
Internal records, the report says, show CJP leadership communicating with people and groups that backed climate litigation and talking about “back-channel efforts” aimed at states and key judges. Hanle told the committee the Federal Judiciary Center handled invitations to judges. The report contrasts that claim with the internal paper trail.
Committee materials describe Hanle boasting to academics that CJP had success persuading judges to accept unsettled climate science points, including a link between carbon dioxide emissions and extreme weather. He also admitted the project’s advocacy would “make a great difference in the final outcome of cases.”
That line sits at the center of the committee’s case. Judicial education is supposed to equip the bench, not campaign inside it. The staff report treats the admission as evidence the project measured success by results in litigation, not by neutral instruction.
The committee’s bottom line on the system itself is stark.
"The importance of impartial judicial proceedings is to ensure the outcomes of cases are determined by facts and evidence, not bias or opinion. ELI’s and CJP’s work to corrupt such an essential judicial tool endangers the foundation of the U.S. judicial system,"
An ELI spokesperson told Just the News the institute strongly disagrees with the report’s claims and characterizations. The spokesperson cast the findings as a partisan staff product and said the same allegations have circulated for more than three years.
"The report issued by the Republican staff of the House Judiciary Committee recycles the same unsupported allegations about the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) and our Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) that have circulated for more than three years,"
ELI says it cooperated and turned over thousands of pages of documents. The spokesperson insisted the facts still support the institute’s account of its work.
"After cooperating with the Committee by providing thousands of pages of documents, the facts remain clear about who we are and what we do: CJP provides evidence-based judicial education about climate science, impacts, and solutions, and how they arise in the law. CJP does not tell judges how to rule in any case or on any issue, nor are its programs designed to achieve a particular outcome. We are proud of our work supporting an independent judiciary and remain focused on our mission."
ELI also posted a fuller statement on its website. The committee report and the institute’s reply now frame a direct clash over whether the seminars are education or advocacy in a robe-friendly package.
The House Judiciary Committee opened the inquiry in August 2025, collected internal emails and records, and interviewed Hanle, including on the 2019 “back-channel” message. The Wednesday release is a staff report on that investigation, not a court judgment and not a criminal charging document.
No public ethics referral, statute citation, or formal judicial discipline action is laid out in the available committee findings beyond the report itself. Investigators have not publicly identified specific seminar dates, named sitting judges as compromised, or listed case captions they say were altered by the training. The Federal Judiciary Center’s own account of invitation duties is not quoted in the released material.
What the report does assert is structural: speaker and author conflicts left unchecked, plaintiff-side lawyers given early access to modules, targeting of judges likely to hear climate claims, and an internal culture that treated case outcomes as a measure of success. ELI denies design for any particular result and calls the allegations unsupported.
Climate suits will keep landing on federal and state dockets. Multnomah County’s $51 billion action is only one of the matters already filed. Who trains the judges, who writes the modules, and whether conflicts are disclosed are no longer side debates. They are now the subject of a formal House record.
Courts only work when the public can trust the referee. If special interests can script the seminar before the hearing, the robe still looks neutral while the scale quietly tips.
