An under-the-radar legal switcheroo should concern every business leader, investor, and taxpayer in America. Now, 23 state attorneys general have taken notice and sent a letter to the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts that bolsters the efforts of three eminent scientists who sounded the alarm.
Climate activists have found a way to get their preferred evidence standards into the hands of roughly 6,000 federal and state judges—before those judges hear more than 1,000 pending climate cases that could reshape the American economy.
They did it through a handbook.
The Federal Judicial Center (FJC) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) jointly publish the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. Likely very few Americans realize Congress established the FJC in 1967 as the research and education arm of the federal courts and made the Chief Justice of the U.S. its chair. For decades, the FJC collaborated with the NAS to give judges objective, apolitical guidance on how to evaluate scientific claims in the courtroom. The motivation is obvious, if often taken for granted by the American public: give judges the tools and standards to admit scientific evidence that is objectively true, and reject quackery and scientifically invalid hypotheses that would bias the judicial proceedings.
The manual is that guidance, and the fourth edition has just been released.
Three eminent scientists who’ve read the manual immediately started ringing alarm bells. According to Richard Lindzen of MIT, William Happer of Princeton, and Steven Koonin of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, its new chapter on “How Science Works” has a problem. In an April 1 letter to Chief Justice John Roberts, the three scientists argue that the chapter—which balloons from 18 pages in the prior edition to 65—quietly swaps out the scientific method for something inherently more political: “scientific consensus.”
In so doing, the new version flies in the face of Supreme Court precedent that has shaped the legal evaluation of scientific evidence since 1993.
Hellbound and Down 