OpenMarket: CEI Litigation

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...

After a recent victory in a FOIA lawsuit, Horner and CEI v. GMU, a Richmond court allowed the  Competitive Enterprise Institute to release records on Friday that showed George Mason University’s Ed Maibach and Jagadish Shukla, both taxpayer-funded instructors, organized a campaign calling for prosecution of those who disagree with their views on climate policy.

In one of the many documents released, Shukla denies he and his collaborators were attempting to silence dissent on climate change.

Some quick background. Early last September, Shukla, Maibach, and 18 other climate advocates sent a ...

Today, the Virginia Circuit Court in Richmond issued a ruling in our case under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA), Christopher Horner and Competitive Enterprise Institute v. George Mason University.  This is an important case in which we prevailed on all counts—seeking public records showing how the "RICO-20" group of academics used public funding to organize their call for a federal racketeering investigation of "corporations and other entities" who disagree with them. Their targets’ crime—dissenting from the party line on climate change. 

The suit was filed when George Mason University (GMU) falsely claimed that no such records existed in response to a VFOIA request...

Today, CEI, the Consumer Advocates for Smoke-free Alternatives Association (CASAA), and CEI employee Gordon Cummings, as a private individual, filed a lawsuit challenging the Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) recent regulation extending the existing statute prohibiting smoking aboard aircraft to cover electronic cigarettes. The reason is simple: Congress never gave regulators the power to prohibit e-cigarette use aboard aircraft.

The agency is inventing authority it clearly does not have. Congress granted USDOT power to implement its law under ...

Yesterday, the Competitive Enterprise Institute responded to U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker, who recently sent us a subpoena demanding we turn over essentially all of our documents on climate change policy during the 10-year period from 1997 to 2007. We told Mr. Walker that we object to his subpoena, as it’s a blatant attempt to intimidate us for advocating views that he opposes. Simply put, the subpoena is nothing more than attempt to punish CEI for our public policy views and silence our advocacy, under the guise of an...