CCG Live: The Shadowy Supreme Court
Join me on Friday at 12:30 p.m. PT to hear from the nation's top climate lawyers.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published a startling investigation into the origins of the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” a secretive tool that the court’s conservative justices have used to grant President Trump vast executive powers.
The Times published a series of private memos from 2016 detailing how the justices first used the shadow docket not to indulge executive authority, but to restrict it — specifically, to block President Obama from regulating climate pollution. Chief Justice John Roberts was so freaked out about Obama pushing coal plants to shut down that he and his fellow conservatives broke with precedent and created a new way for the court to stop the rule before it took effect.
Roberts justified the move by describing Obama’s Clean Power Plan as “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector.”
With a high-stakes oil industry accountability lawsuit pending before the justices — and future climate laws and regulations almost certainly subject to their judgment — the whole thing makes me wonder: How worried should we be? How much is riding on the Roberts Court, and what can we learn from the newly revealed memos? Does the best path forward today look any different than it did last week?
This Friday at 12:30 p.m. PT, three fantastic legal minds will join me on Zoom to try to answer those questions. Please join us if you can, for a moderated discussion followed by an audience Q&A:
Ann Carlson, founding director, Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, UCLA School of Law
Michael Gerrard, founder, Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia Law School
Joanne Spalding, legal director, Sierra Club
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