Out-of-court manipulation of the courts is the latest play for climate activism. Recognizing the weakness of the merits of their novel litigation theories, trying to hold myriad defendants liable for climate change impacts, climate activists are trying to make an end run around the rigors of the legal system.
The basic strategy: When the law is against you, convince, or even just fool, the arbiters of the law, judges and juries, to abandon their neutrality or become the policymaking saviors of the planet in the face of a claimed broken and gridlocked legislative system — essentially, pushing an only you, the judges or jurors, can save us mentality.
This is not advocacy in the traditional sense — it is a long-term plan to influence institutions that were meant to referee political conflicts, not participate in them.
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For example, Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) House Judiciary Committee recently launched a federal investigation into left-wing climate groups, such as the Environmental Law Institute and Climate Judiciary Project, secretly training judges on ways to evade the strictures of the law in global-warming cases under the guise of “education.” But a close look at the content of these programs reveals the ends-based, outcome-driven nature of the campaign, quite distinct from programs that truly educate judges in graduate school-like settings.
Ostensibly about science and policy, these sessions actually frame climate activism as settled law, urging judges to interpret statutes through an ideological lens. Legal experts call this “shocking” and “inappropriate” — yet the programs persist, often with even the judges and court administrators approving attendance, mistaking advocacy for professional development. This can at best be labeled “agenda-driven education,” not standards-based education in the way we expect education to be.
These examples show that activists are perfecting a subtle form of persuasion — sculpting the very systems meant to ensure neutrality by curating the inputs. Once, activists tried merely to lobby the rulemakers. Today, they seek to train, guide, and even rewrite the rulebook for those meant to enforce it.
Indeed, the influence campaign’s infiltration strategy most recently targeted official judicial guidance. After it was revealed that the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence incorporated climate policy bias into its guidance language, 27 state attorneys general demanded transparency. The FJC quietly deleted the indefensibly tainted material — but the climate chapter lives on at the National Academies of Sciences website, where they defend it. The FJC dodges scrutiny by redirecting to this proxy.
This cannot be dismissed as inside-baseball stuff. The stakes are huge. It is about telling judges how to decide cases and curating what they read as authoritative, not about giving the judges information from which they can draw when evaluating law, applying judicial expertise, and neutrally exercising judicial duty.
If we are not vigilant at calling these things out, pretty soon, activism in the guise of expertise just becomes normal. When the official handbook nudges judges toward certain views on science or policy, for example, even thoughtful and independent judges become prone to believing, “Everyone agrees on this.”
It doesn’t stop at the bench. That same activist mindset now targets the jury box, where ordinary citizens deliver justice. In Minneapolis and Washington, Soros-backed groups run “jury nullification” training sessions, teaching jurors to ignore the law they dislike — especially in immigration or police cases.
Jury nullification once had a narrow, noble, and organically-generated, bottom-up role: protecting individuals from unjust prosecution when written law collided with fundamental fairness. The activist reinterpretation turns that principle upside down. It ex ante encourages jurors to defy legitimate law for ideological reasons, not because of unjust processes, effectively inviting anarchy by another name. Jurors are sworn to apply the law impartially — reprogramming them into political agents hollows out the promise of equal justice and corrodes the civic trust that makes jury service meaningful.
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These aren’t random efforts. Shaping judges, rigging handbooks, and politicizing juries are all tactics from the same playbook aimed at redefining “neutrality” ever further left. Climate seminars normalize the bias. Revised manuals codify it. Jury trainings weaponize it. What looks like scattered incidents is actually a coordinated capture.
In a constitutional republic, the strength of the law lies not in who writes or argues it, but in the integrity of those who apply it. When the referees are trained to call the game one way, faith in the outcome collapses. Courts cease to resolve disputes — they validate agendas. Juries stop administering justice — they stage political performances. That loss of neutrality doesn’t just distort individual cases — it undermines the constitutional balance itself.
Donald J. Kochan is a professor of law at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.