By James M. Taylor and H. Sterling Burnett
Heartland Institute

The Energy and Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal)…trounced government hacks in the grips of climate alarmist mania in two court battles recently. In the first case, Arizona’s appellate court issued a terse, seven-word decision, “Motion for Stay Pending Appeal is DENIED,” in a case in which, in late 2017, Arizona Superior Court Justice James Marner ordered the University of Arizona (UA) to release emails by university researchers tied to the Climategate email scandal. The Climategate emails released so far show researchers at universities around the world discussed suppressing data raising questions about the evidence used to support the claim humans are causing climate change, and pressured science journals not to publish articles by climate realists…

In the second case, Vermont Superior Court Judge Mary Miles Teachout ordered the Vermont Attorney General’s office to pay $66,000 in legal fees to E&E Legal…for costs they incurred undertaking a lawsuit to force the AG’s office to turn over public legal documents related to Vermont’s dealings with disgraced former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s lawsuit against several oil companies. The lawsuit in question attempts to coerce major oil companies into paying for the states’ purported costs from climate change. E&E Legal and FMELC had requested the documents under Vermont’s freedom of information laws, but the AG refused to turn them over…

“Because of AG Sorrell’s unwillingness to turn over public documents required under Vermont’s public records laws, E&E Legal was forced to seek remedies in the Vermont courts,” Craig Richardson, president of E&E Legal, told Liberty Headlines in an email. “We won at nearly every stage, which was memorialized by the court’s recent decision to award us cost and fees since we ‘substantially prevailed’ in several cases.”

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