Scott Walter testifies before the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs

Scott Walter’s Testimony to the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs

Senator Bryan Hughes, Chairman 

September 15, 2026

Oral Testimony (below):

Chairman Hughes, distinguished members of the Committee, thank you for the honor of testifying. I’m president of the Capital Research Center, where for decades we’ve investigated special interests.  

You’re charged with studying advocacy groups that try “to improperly influence the judiciary with biased informational seminars” that are “based on skewed information” designed to affect “the outcome of cases.” Texas law requires continuing education for judges every year,1 and various groups offer education for judges. While outside observers have criticized a number of these private groups, one special interest group stands out for its brazenness and its multifaceted influence campaign. 

I speak, of course, of the Climate Judiciary Project or CJP, run by the Environmental Law Institute, so notorious it’s drawn fire from both the United States House and Senate Judiciary Committees as well as from the legislative and executive branches of the great state of Texas. Other states, too, are investigating this effort to improperly influence their courts; for example, Florida. 

The Climate Judiciary Project and its allies have not contained their influence operations within their own “educational” programs. They’ve reached out to the Federal Judicial Center and the National Academy of Sciences to manipulate their publications in ways designed to reinforce CJP’s bias toward plaintiffs in climate lawsuits. As my fellow witness Michael Toth has documented, the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence had its 2025 edition “commandeered” by CJP leaders, plaintiffs’ lawyers, and their allies, who briefly succeeded in having a new chapter on climate science inserted into the Manual before public outcries forced the chapter’s removal. A co-author for the chapter is a CJP presenter and curriculum author. Worse, she and the chapter’s other author co-wrote an article with Michael Burger, who’s of counsel with Sher Edling, the leading climate law firm attacking American energy companies. The now-discarded chapter borrowed substantially from the CJP-Sher Edling trio’s article, without disclosing Burger’s ties to lawsuits that the chapter and the whole CJP influence campaign are designed to help him win. 

This shameful Federal Judicial Center publication was co-published by the National Academy of Sciences, and it’s only one of the tools created there by CJP and its allies, as Toth has also documented. The Academy’s Attribution Report was developed by a committee who chose as featured speaker at its first public meeting the same Sher Edling attorney whose work was lifted for use in the now-discarded chapter of the Federal Judicial Center Reference Manual. Another public meeting of the committee featured a member of the CJP curriculum advisory committee. 

A further dimension to the influence campaign run by the CJP and the climate lawyers at Sher Edling and other firms involves an echo chamber of nonprofit groups pressuring cities and states to sue American energy companies. This front is led by nonprofits like the Center for Climate Integrity. All the fronts in the influence campaign are tied together by common funders.  

Here are just some examples: 

The Hewlett Foundation has sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Collective Action Fund that supports climate lawsuits by Sher Edling.8 Hewlett has also given millions to the Climate Judiciary Project’s parent, the Environmental Law Institute.  

Similarly, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has supported a climate activist at the Climate Accountability Institute whose work is cited in CJP training materials for judges,10 and the same Fund has also sent hundreds of thousands to Sher Edling’s funder the Collective Action Fund. 

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation plays the same game, sending six figures directly to the National Academy of Sciences for the edition of its Reference Manual that had the discarded, CJP-spawned chapter,12 and another six figures to Sher Edling’s piggybank, the Collective Action Fund.

The James D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has contributed both to the Sher Edling piggybank and CJP’s parent. But the most impressive funder playing this game of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose is the Freedom Together Foundation, which has given at least $3 million to CJP’s parent Institute and also given millions to Sher Edling’s piggybank. Incidentally, the Freedom Together Foundation is the legacy of Jeffry Picower, one of the closest friends of Bernie Madoff and one of the biggest beneficiaries of Madoff’s outrageous Ponzi scheme. A heart attack saved Picower from possible criminal prosecution, but his wife was forced to return billions to the Madoff bankruptcy trustee, who stated the “blatant and obvious fraud” must have been evident to Picower. 

Thank you for investigating these threats to the impartial administration of justice in Texas.