William P. Barr served as U.S. attorney general from 1991 to 1993 and 2019 to 2020. His law firm represents energy clients.
A federal judge without a PhD in environmental chemistry hasn’t always been out of luck. For years he might have turned to the Federal Judicial Center, the research and educational arm of the federal courts, and its Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. Prepared jointly with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the manual is supposed to be a “dispassionate guide” to scientific disputes. The document has served a bedrock principle of our legal system: that judges are impartial and must receive unbiased assistance when navigating technical matters.
It came as some surprise, then, when the most recent edition took a sharp left turn. Released Dec. 31, the FJC’s manual included a chapter on “climate science,” written not by impartial experts but by people deeply involved in climate-change litigation. Four former U.S. attorneys general — Michael Mukasey, Jeff Sessions, John Ashcroft and I — recently sent a letter to the center’s director, Judge Robin L. Rosenberg, asking her what gives.
The chapter in question was written by Radley Horton, a climate researcher at Columbia University, and Jessica Wentz, a fellow at its Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. The latter’s mission is to develop “legal techniques to combat the climate crisis and advance climate justice.” Wentz also works with the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project, which the House Judiciary Committee is investigating for its alleged “improper attempts … to influence federal judges.”
The upshot of their handiwork under the government’s auspices: Judges and their clerks may be relying on a reference guide that reads less like neutral science and more like one side’s legal brief. The climate science chapter adopts contested claims and methods as if they were settled fact and sidesteps the vigorous debate that remains around “attribution science” — the effort to link specific weather events or economic harms to the conduct of individual companies.
Much of its discussion simply tracks a law review article, “The Law and Science of Climate Change Attribution,” that they co-wrote with environmental lawyer Michael Burger. Never mind that Burger has represented the city and state plaintiffs in cases such as Honolulu v. Sunoco, City of New York v. Exxon Mobil and Delaware v. BP America — none of which the authors disclose.
Although the FJC has since removed the chapter from its website, the National Academies has stood by it. Its president, Marcia McNutt, has argued that the “draft chapter was reviewed by an oversight committee that included judges and scientists and was further evaluated by a different group of judges and scientists serving as anonymous, expert peer reviewers.”
A quick glance at the list of reviewers puts that contention to rest. Among others, it includes Donald Wuebbles, a climate plaintiff expert witness, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, co-founder of the notoriously biased FactCheck.org, and some of the most liberal judges in the country, such as James Wynn, who rescinded his plans to retire after Donald Trump won in 2024.
The National Academies continues to distribute the full version, still bearing the FJC’s seal of approval. That creates the faulty impression that the judiciary formally endorses a partisan and litigation-driven account of climate science. Meanwhile, passages in other portions of the manual still cast doubt on the credibility of “stakeholders” such as energy companies, implying that their arguments should be treated with suspicion — a stunning posture for a publication intended as a neutral judicial reference.
This isn’t a matter of partisan debate about climate policy. It is about the integrity of our courts. The judiciary cannot allow its educational materials to become tools of advocacy, no matter how noble the cause may appear. While judges can evaluate competing expert views, they cannot do so fairly if their aides are quietly tilting the scales. The FJC exists to arm the courts with neutral tools, not advocacy briefs.
Either the National Academies ought to withdraw its climate chapter or publish the manual without the FJC’s name. The FJC, for its part, needs to work on weeding out bias elsewhere in the manual. If the evidence is strong enough, its advocates won’t have to rely on deception to win in court. The damage to public trust and an impartial judiciary in the meantime isn’t worth the cost.
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