Community Rights Counsel has spent much of the last decade researching and documenting undue, anti-environmental corporate influence on the federal judiciary, exposing the proliferation of privately-funded junkets billed as “judicial education seminars.” Through reports such as 2004’s Tainted Justice, we’ve highlighted the agenda of particular hosting groups, one steeped in libertarian economics and a regulatory agenda that is deeply opposed to government efforts to combat global warming. Recent ethics rules for the federal judiciary have addressed judges’ participation in these junkets, but contained loopholes that have continued to benefit their supporters.
One of the organizations involved in this arrangement is the Montana-based Foundation for Research on the Environment and Economics (FREE), a pro-business/anti-regulation outlet that has received heavy funding from corporate interests such as Exxon-Mobil and ideological forces such as the foundations run by the Scaife and Coors families. Two years ago, in response to an ethics petition filed by CRC, the federal judiciary’s Committee on Codes of Conduct authored a non... Read more
