|
Combats
Anti-Environmental Judicial Activism
"...[T]he
new reality is an activist conservative judiciary prepared
to overturn Congress's work, especially on regulatory and
environmental issues."
- Bush's Judges, E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington
Post, November 1, 2002
|
|
Polluting
corporations and ideologically-allied special interests are
waging a strategic and increasingly successful backdoor attack
on community protections. Having failed to advance their anti-environmental
agenda in Congress, these forces have turned to the courts.
Their strategy is to convince activist judges to re-interpret
the Takings Clause, the Commerce Clause, and other provisions
of the U.S. Constitution in a way that dismantles communities’
efforts to protect their health and environment.
It
may be the most comprehensive and expensive campaign ever
mounted to use the court system to overturn democratically-
enacted protections.
The Pacific Legal Foundation, the Defenders of Property
Rights, and a dozen other conservative legal foundations,
with a combined annual budget in excess of $15 million, provide
free, expert legal assistance to corporations, and developers
in challenging environmental statutes.
The Federalist Society and the Institute for Justice
recruit, train, and supervise an army of over 1,000 practicing
lawyers who have volunteered to litigate cases free of charge
to their clients. The
Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE)
each summer hosts over fifty federal judges at all-expenses-paid
junkets, teaching judges how and why to strike down environmental
protections.
CRC
has established itself as a leading voice in critiquing and
combating anti-environmental judicial activism and the special
interest campaign to propel this activism forward.
CRC's 1998 report, The
Takings Project: Using Federal Courts to Attack Community
and Environmental Protections, exposed and critiqued rulings
where judges ignored flatly contradictory precedent in order
to establish the Takings Clause as a barrier to community
and environmental protections.
(For more about the Takings
Project report, click here).
The July 2001 Hostile
Environment report (issued jointly by CRC, NRDC and
Alliance
for Justice) chronicles the gauntlet of unjustified hurdles
judges have established to thwart environmental protections.
Our work has helped galvanized the environmental community
around the threat posed by anti-environmental judicial activism.
At the Hostile
Environment press release, representatives of a dozen
national environmental organizations came to express solidarity
with the reports' findings and recommendations.
(For more about the Hostile Environment report, click here).
Following
up on the Hostile Environment report, CRC has joined together with Earthjustice
Legal Defense Fund to create the Judging the Environment
Project, an effort intended to inject environmental concerns
into the judicial selection and confirmation project.
Together, we have already begun researching judicial
nominees and educating the Senate and the public about the
critical connection between judicial appointments and environmental
protection. For
more about the Judging the Environment Project,
click here.
|
