OpenMarket: CEI Litigation

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In an era...

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This week turned out to be a momentous one in the saga of the climate change subpoenas.  It started with three pending subpoenas from U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker; it ended with none. In between there was a court hearing, but the demise of subpoenas had little to do with the hearing. And CEI still has a fight on its hands. We continue to pursue...

A climate change witch-hunt is expanding to include conservative groups that have never received a penny from Exxon. Attorney General Maura Healey is part of a multistate investigation of “climate change deniers” brought by 20 Democratic state attorneys general. As the Daily Caller notes, last week she issued a sweepingly broad subpoena that

demands decades worth of records from prominent conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation and activist group Americans for Prosperity, and also from smaller, lesser known state-based right-leaning groups, such as Boston’s Beacon Hill Institute and the Acton Institute. . . At least two of the...

New in the climate change subpoena saga: Last Thursday New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman delivered a speech (video below) at the Bloomberg Big Law Business Summit defending his investigation against claims that it violates free speech rights.  One charge that Schneiderman repeatedly made was that his critics were guilty of “First Amendment opportunism.”

Schneiderman characterized the statements of the...

Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker filed his opposition last week to CEI’s motions for attorney fees and sanctions. As you may know if you’ve been following this subpoena saga, on April 7 Walker served CEI with a massive document request, covering a decade’s worth of all our work on climate change and energy policy, including confidential information on our donors. This was a violation of both our First Amendment rights and those of our supporters—a view shared by many commenters regardless of their political leanings, and a position forcefully presented by our outside counsel, Andrew Grossman and David Rivkin of Baker Hostetler. Forty-three days after serving the subpoena, Walker withdrew his DC subpoena, though he graciously...

The average merger and acquisition has as much chance of escaping litigation as you have of winning the lottery.

OK, that’s a slight exaggeration. In recent years, about 97 percent of sizable mergers (those valued at $100 million or more) have been hit by shareholder challenges. These challenges usually produce bupkis for shareholders themselves; the typical settlement results in meaningless additions to the proxy materials, extravagant attorney fees to the lawyers bringing the case, and nothing else.  And that, unfortunately, is not an exaggeration. The supplemental proxy additions hardly ever provide useful information to the shareholders themselves, who essentially pick up the tab for their attorneys and get nothing in return. And because the merging companies are as eager to finish the deal as the shareholder attorneys are to collect their fees, the settlement proposals...

On Monday, U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker agreed to revoke a subpoena he obtained from the D.C. Superior Court last month, in which he demanded from CEI essentially every document and communication related to climate change policy that we created, sent, or received during the 10-year period from 1997 to 2007.

His withdrawal follows a letter that CEI received on Friday, May 13, from his D.C.-based counsel Linda Singer on his office’s behalf, which purports to rebut some of CEI’s...

J. K. Rowling made international headlines this week by defending free speech in an address to the PEN Literary Gala in New York. She referenced the much-discussed public petition that was circulated at the end of last year calling for Donald Trump to be banned from entering the UK over “hate speech,” arguing that someone like Trump should, if fact, have the right to say things she (and others) find bigoted or offensive:

“His freedom to speak protects my freedom to call him a bigot,” Rowling continued. “His freedom guarantees mine. Unless we take that absolute position, without caveats or apologies, we have set foot upon a road with only one destination. If you seek the removal of freedoms...