![]() Not every youth climate case has been as successful as Montana’s: Judges in Alaska, Utah and Virginia have been reluctant to second-guess lawmakers. Our Children’s Trust is scheduled to be in court in June to argue the nation’s second youth-led climate trial, which accuses Hawaii’s transportation agency of falling short on climate action. “We won’t stop this work until children’s rights are recognized.” “We want to scale our litigation up and be in as many states as we can get in,” said Olson, who holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado and a law degree from the University of California. Montana - will serve as a “road map” in 2024 for her Oregon-based law firm’s efforts to hold other governments accountable for greenhouse gas emissions, Olson told supporters on a call in December. Julia Olson hopes to repeat that success in 2024 and beyond. The founder of Our Children’s Trust scored a major victory last year when a Montana judge ruled that state officials had violated young people’s right to a clean and healthful environment by ignoring the effects of climate change. “How could you watch and not want to become a police officer, a prosecutor or defense attorney or a judge?” he said. He told Lawdragon that his brother likes to say Anderson wanted to become a prosecutor because he liked watching “Law & Order” as a kid. He is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and Yale Law School. ![]() Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. The cases, he said, “present challenging questions about the appropriate forum to address climate change, and whether disagreements about energy and climate policy are actionable.”īefore joining Paul Weiss, Anderson was a federal prosecutor with the U.S. In 2022, Anderson told the legal outlet Lawdragon that he had been defending Exxon in climate litigation for more than six years, across multiple jurisdictions. He also represented Exxon in a lawsuit from Massachusetts that accused the company of “greenwashing” - or misleading the public about its environmental practices - by running ads about its research into algae as a source for biofuels. Justin Anderson, who represented Exxon Mobil in fighting the local governments’ lawsuits, joined the company’s legal team in 2023 as assistant general counsel for litigation.Īs outside counsel, Anderson, a partner at Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, was part of a team that in 2019 helped Exxon defeat New York Democratic Attorney General Letitia James’ claims that the company’s disclosures of climate risks violated state law. One high-profile oil industry lawyer in the climate liability cases is now working behind the scenes. She has been selected four times as one of the 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America by the National Law Journal, which called her “a pillar of the plaintiffs’ bar.” The Wall Street Journal profiled her in 2016, noting that she’s “made a career of suing big businesses.”Ĭabraser, who holds law and undergraduate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, told the newspaper that she aspired to be a theoretical physicist or a law librarian before co-founding her law firm in 1978. The state has also retained the powerhouse San Francisco-based firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein as co-counsel.įounding partner Elizabeth Cabraser - who, along with her colleagues, will help fashion California’s legal arguments against the oil and gas industry - has been involved in other high-profile legal battles, including multistate litigation against the tobacco industry and lawsuits that followed the Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez oil spills.Ĭabraser led litigation over faulty General Motors ignition switches and was lead counsel in a case that delivered a nearly $15 billion settlement against Volkswagen Group of America over the automaker’s skirting of emissions standards. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a lawsuit against five of the world’s largest oil companies and their subsidiaries. Elizabeth CabraserĬalifornia in September became the biggest player in the climate liability fray when Democratic Gov. ![]() ![]() Here are some of the lawyers to watch in the year’s biggest climate cases. GOP critics say the approach leaves the fossil fuel industry - and investors - at financial risk. But one such case is still pending before the justices: an appeal from oil companies in a lawsuit brought by Minnesota.Įlsewhere in the federal courts, investment funds and pension funds in 2024 will play defense against Republican lawsuits over the use of environmental, social and governance factors in investment decisions. While the fossil fuel industry has tried to move the climate liability lawsuits out of state courts - where oil companies fear they might lose - the Supreme Court last year largely rebuffed those efforts.
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