The Kids Who Sued Trump Just Lost Big in Court. Or Did They?
A federal judge threw out their climate lawsuit against the president a few days ago. But legal experts say there was a silver lining in the judge’s opinion.
When a judge threw out a lawsuit this week accusing President Trump of violating the Constitution, it was a major setback for a group of young people trying to fight climate change in the courts.
But the ruling had a silver lining. The judge also said the plaintiffs had successfully argued that climate change constitutes a “children’s health emergency.”
Legal experts said that language reinforced a yearslong strategy by an organization called Our Children’s Trust, a public-interest law firm, to put children and young people in the courtroom and on the stand to argue that governments should do more to rein in global warming.
Daniel Metzger, a senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said the judge’s opinion offered “very detailed guidance for designing cases that can overcome the challenges this one faced.”
The court “went out of its way,” he said, to establish that the plaintiffs in the case, Lighthiser v. Trump, had successfully tied health risks for children to the Trump administration’s climate policies. “It didn’t have to,” Mr. Metzger said. But by doing so, the ruling — even though it’s a clear loss for the plaintiffs — “will shape how other courts weigh similar arguments” in the future.
The strategy of filing climate lawsuits with children and young people as plaintiffs has become a fixture of the legal landscape worldwide in recent years. It can win sympathy and public attention for a case, but it has its risks, too.
For the plaintiffs, there is the risk of putting children or young people on the stand and exposing them not only to cross-examination but also potential public criticism or attacks more broadly. As for the defense, young plaintiffs can raise difficult questions about when or how aggressively to go about cross-examining people who might be as young as elementary-school age.
For example, in the Montana case thrown out this week, the Justice Department declined to cross-examine two of the underage plaintiffs, ages 17 and 11, during a two-day hearing last month.
That hearing, held before Judge Dana L. Christensen in the federal court in Missoula, had moments of drama.
In the case, filed in May, a group of 22 young people led by Our Children’s Trust sued the federal government, arguing that three of President Trump’s executive orders promoting fossil fuels would intensify climate change, threatening the health of young people and violating the Constitution’s guarantees of life and liberty. Government lawyers countered that the lawsuit was meritless and should be dismissed.
Jorja McCormick, 17, of Livingston, Mont., was one of the plaintiffs who took the stand, testifying about the difficulties of caring for her horses during wildfires. Later, listening to a defense argument that involved making a point about laws against speeding, she scribbled a note to her lawyer. “People get a choice on how fast they go on the highway,” she wrote. “We can’t choose how much coal is driven through my town.”
Later her lawyer, Julia Olson, read the note in court, saying, “The plaintiffs always make me cry, Your Honor.”
But the case could not overcome what the defendants — the president and a dozen federal agencies — said was its fatal flaw. They argued that it was a facsimile of a case filed a decade ago by Our Children’s Trust, Juliana v. United States.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (the same court that would hear an appeal in this case) previously had dismissed Juliana, finding that the political branches of government, not the courts, were the appropriate venue for the plaintiffs’ demands. Judge Christensen essentially concluded that his hands were bound by the precedent set by that earlier decision.
Ms. Olson has vowed to appeal his decision.
After the lawsuit was dismissed, Adam Gustafson, the acting head of the Justice Department’s environmental division, called it a “sweeping and baseless attack on President Trump’s energy agenda” and said the judge was correct to conclude that legal precedent blocked the case.
Jonathan Adler, a professor at William & Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Va., who is not involved in the litigation, said the lawsuit was built on “fanciful” theories and its dismissal wasn’t particularly surprising. Having young plaintiffs may make cases “a more interesting drama” for publicity reasons, he said, but it doesn’t add legal heft. “This litigation is more about the court of public opinion than the courts of law,” he said.
Despite the recent setback, Our Children’s Trust has had some high-profile successes with the strategy of putting young people at the center of climate lawsuits. The group won a closely watched case in Montana State Court in 2023, and came to a settlement last year in a lawsuit against Hawaii’s Department of Transportation.
Patrick Parenteau, an emeritus professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, was also unsurprised by the decision in the Lighthiser case, given the precedent. But he called the judge’s 31-page opinion groundbreaking, and said it would help build a body of law on climate change and its effects on children. “No other U.S. court decision has gone this far,” he said.
He also pointed to similar cases in Colombia and Germany, as well as a recent International Court of Justice advisory opinion on the legal obligations of states with regard to climate change, which was spurred by a yearslong campaign led by students from Pacific island countries. That court’s ruling, while lacking an enforcement mechanism, said that governments must protect people from the “urgent and existential threat” of climate change.
The Juliana case has no path forward in U.S. courts since the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. However, Our Children’s Trust is now bringing it to an international body: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is part of the Washington-based Organization of American States.
In a petition filed last month, the group argued that the United States had violated international law by blocking access to justice for the young plaintiffs. James R. May, a professor at Washburn University School of Law who worked on the filing, said it was the first time that the International Court of Justice’s new climate opinion had been invoked in a legal action.
Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center, said it was exceedingly rare to have testimony about climate change in a U.S. federal court. Having minors on the stand was also somewhat rare, though it has happened in a few notable cases in the past, including Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, a watershed Supreme Court case that cemented free speech rights in schools, according to Lisa V. Martin, a professor at the University of South Carolina’s Joseph F. Rice School of Law. That case started with students’ plans to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.
And in her closing argument at the recent hearing in Montana, Ms. Olson invoked another case in which children were plaintiffs: Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case that declared segregation in schools unconstitutional.
“I think it’s a great thing when children are able to access the courts to assert their rights,” said Professor Martin, who is not connected to the Lighthiser case. “This is one of the few parts of democracy where they can easily participate. They can’t vote, and so that takes them out of some of our other democratic processes.”
Professor Parenteau also pointed to the risks and limitations of climate litigation. In the Lighthiser case, the legal risk is that an appeal could result in an even stronger decision by the Ninth Circuit against the plaintiffs, one that could potentially be affirmed by the Supreme Court. For example, a ruling on the ability of plaintiffs to sue over presidential executive orders could have broad consequences for all sorts of cases.
He also said he believed that Our Children’s Trust, which he supports and has donated to but has no formal relationship with, might have more success in electoral politics than in courts of law. Climate change is “ultimately a political issue,” he said. “It may be that these kids could have more of an influence on parents and grandparents in the voting booth than they are in the courtroom.”
Karen Zraick covers legal affairs for the Climate desk and the courtroom clashes playing out over climate and environmental policy.