The fossil fuel lobby is purchasing federal judges through closed-door seminars.
Federal judges sit on dockets they do not pick, and the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law operates on a defensible premise. Judges handling complex municipal and state climate-deception suits are generalists trained in torts and contracts, not atmospheric physics or the epidemiology of fossil-fuel combustion. The center describes its Judicial Education Project as a neutral provider of continuing legal education, closed to the public for security, with judicial attendance tracked in an annual report. The stated assumption is that jurists, like any professionals, benefit from exposure to outside economic and scientific perspectives, and that they remain fully capable of independent judgment afterward. That is the steel-man.
The documentary record says something different.
As ProPublica reported, the center told the Charles Koch Foundation—an affiliate named as a defendant in multiple climate suits—that its seminars give judges “a healthy skepticism of the invocations of ‘science’ that lurk in the background of lawsuits they are hearing.” The correspondence is not ambiguous. The center was not pitching balanced scientific literacy to the bench. It was selling funders on its capacity to install a presumption of doubt in the minds of the judges who would hear their cases.
The speaker lists confirm the direction. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in his former role as CEO of Liberty Energy, addressed private judicial audiences at center events at least three times, in June 2021 and June 2024, documented in the publicly available agendas cited in a May 27 letter from the firm Sher Edling to the House Judiciary Committee. His 2024 appearance landed three months after Liberty Energy sued the Securities and Exchange Commission to block a rule requiring companies to disclose climate-related financial risks. The man who taught judges to question climate science was simultaneously suing the federal government to hide his own company’s exposure to it. Wright was not an outlier. The agendas placed Phil Goldberg, special counsel to a trade association initiative opposing climate suits and managing partner at a law firm representing Murphy Oil in one, on the same stage. The project is less a legal education program than a judicial influence operation—one that the same companies funding it are simultaneously accusing their opponents of running.
The funding trail anchors the capture. The center takes money from ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Koch Industries, all defendants in active climate-deception litigation. Paul Singer’s hedge fund, which holds stakes in Suncor, Citgo, and BP, financed the project directly. When the defendant funds the judge’s seminar, and the defendant’s former executive or current counsel stands at the lectern, the pedagogical claim is neutral education. The substantive reality is captured cognition. This is not an isolated lapse. It is the architecture of the Federalist Society network and its institutional outposts operating as designed: converting a corporate-liability docket into a tuition-free curriculum for the federal bench, teaching judges to distrust plaintiff science while treating defense skepticism as professional rigor. The environmental-law apparatus is castigated as corrupt; the industry’s own funding pipeline is called judicial education.
The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Jim Jordan, has spent months investigating the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project, subpoenaing lawyers involved in climate litigation and demanding documents under the allegation of an “improper attempt … to influence federal judges.” The standard is inverted. When a nonprofit presents peer-reviewed atmospheric data to the bench, it is “corruptly influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law.” When fossil fuel executives and industry-funded economists present at closed, defendant-paid retreats, it is continuing education. The committee has not directed a single inquiry at the Law and Economics Center. ELI’s peer-reviewed contacts look like a journal next to the LEC’s defendant-funded machine. The Department of Justice, meanwhile, has moved to block Minnesota’s climate fraud lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Koch, and the American Petroleum Institute—a case that may well land before the same federal judiciary the center has been educating.
The question of whether state-law climate deception claims are preempted by federal statute, or whether plaintiffs satisfy Article III standing, is live on the dockets and genuinely contested among district and circuit judges. The working bar debates the viability of these torts. But contestation over the legal theory does not immunize the funding mechanism for the instruction. A judge’s hesitation to grant standing is a judicial act. Accepting a defendant’s donation to attend a seminar that trains the judge to doubt the plaintiff’s science is a captured act. Federal judges routinely classify third-party seminar funding as administrative education, but this arrangement crosses the line. The Code of Conduct for United States Judges, Canon 3C, and 28 U.S.C. § 455(a) require recusal whenever a judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned. No publicly available record suggests any judge who attended these programming cycles recused from a fossil-fuel case. A reasonable observer would have ample grounds to question the bench’s neutrality. The appearance is the capture. The appearance is the record.
The fossil fuel industry’s response to the wave of climate-deception suits has been to discredit the litigants, the lawyers, and the science. Its fallback position, less visible and more effective, has been to purchase the judge.