How Left-Wing Climate Plaintiffs Have Hijacked the Federal Judiciary

The defining feature of the American judicial system is that every litigant walks into the courtroom with the belief that they will have a fair shot to present their case. That foundational principle is under assault.

Several weeks ago, The Oversight Project published a report highlighting the threat to judicial independence posed by the left-wing climate plaintiffs’ bar. We highlighted how the Federal Judicial Center, the taxpayer-funded “think tank” for Article III federal judges, exploited its institutional credibility to predispose judges toward pro-plaintiff positions in climate litigation.

The Supreme Court held more than 30 years ago, in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, that judges must act as gatekeepers for scientific expert testimony and assess whether proposed testimony reflects genuine scientific knowledge that will assist the trier of fact.

A December 2025 publication by the FJC puts the longstanding role of judicial gatekeeping at risk. In its role as the “research and education agency of the judicial branch of the U.S. government” the FJC recently published the fourth edition of its Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the foreword of the Reference Manual and praised the publication, noting that the “instruction that the manual offers in scientific principles and methods can improve the quality of judicial decision making.”

Our report focused on significant problems with the Manual’s Reference Guide on Climate Science, which presents the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change propaganda as settled scientific fact, and gives climate plaintiffs a roadmap for fulfilling the Daubert standard to have left-wing biased climate “science” entered into judicial proceedings.

The Reference Guide on Climate Science lists two Columbia University professors, Jessica Wentz and Radley Horton, as its authors. Wentz and Horton are climate change advocates who have published scholarship and participated in cases that called for the elimination of fossil fuels.

Wentz and Horton acknowledge the “insights and helpful feedback provided by” lawyer Michael Burger in drafting the Reference Guide on Climate Science. The Oversight Project’s investigation found, however, that Mr. Burger’s contributions went far beyond the suggested peripheral reviewing role contained in the acknowledgments.

We found that the Reference Guide on Climate Science repeatedly cites a 2020 law review article by Burger entitled, “The Law & Science of Climate Change Attribution.” We used a research integrity software to conduct an originality analysis and found that the Reference Guide on Climate Science contains a 23% similarity match and overall similarity index of 33% to Burger’s 2020 paper. Our report outlined instances where whole paragraphs—and nearly whole pages—of the Reference Guide on Climate Science were lifted verbatim from Burger’s 2020 law review article.

This level of overlap is not consistent with the acknowledgment of a reviewer who offered occasional comments. It is consistent with a contributor who supplied a significant portion of the chapter’s analytical framework and content. But what makes this overlap so significant is who Burger is outside of academia.

Burger is not a disinterested scholar. He is an active litigator on the plaintiff side of the very category of cases for which the Reference Guide on Climate Science purports to offer neutral judicial guidance.

Burger notably works at Sher Edling, the law firm that has positioned itself as the coordinating force behind the wave of municipal and state climate liability suits. With his Sher Edling hat on, Burger’s name is literally on the complaints for the plaintiffs with Honolulu, Delaware, and New York City in their lawsuits against energy producers.

In each of these cases, Burger’s clients seek to establish precisely the causal chain between fossil fuel production, global warming, and localized harm that the Reference Guide on Climate Science presents as scientifically settled. The scientific conclusions the chapter treats as settled fact are the live issues on which Burger’s clients depend to prevail in court.

The Reference Guide on Climate Science, in other words, imports the analytical conclusions of an active plaintiff-side litigator into a reference guide used by the federal judges before whom his cases may appear.

None of this is disclosed in the Reference Guide on Climate Science. A judge reading the manual would have no way of knowing that the scholar whose work substantially shaped its content is simultaneously litigating to establish the very propositions the chapter treats as settled science.

The FJC has received between $34 million and $35 million per year in federal tax dollars since at least 2023. While House and Senate committees have opened investigations into the FJC’s publication of the Reference Manual on Climate Science, more needs to be done.

Climate cases often turn on which side’s asserted facts prevail, and those questions hinge on evaluating expert testimony. By “working the referee” before ever setting foot in court, climate plaintiffs benefit from the massive head start given to them by the Reference Guide.

Our system appoints federal judges and gives them the responsibility to make the hard decisions of fact and law in the cases before them. The FJC’s decision to delete the Reference Guide on Climate Science months after publication is an inadequate half measure considering it was in the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence for months and is easily accessible on the internet today.

Congress is right to investigate and should defund the FJC to return the hard work of judicial decision making back to judges, where it belongs.

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