This article presents an overview of the issues as the center of the June 4 oral hearing before a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in the Juliana v. U.S. case, better known as the climate kids’ lawsuit. Filed in August of 2015, the twenty-one plaintiffs sued the Obama Administration alleging that the government’s policies on fossil fuels advanced catastrophic climate change and therefore violated the right, guaranteed to them under the Fifth Amendment, that no one shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Ninth Circuit must decide whether the case can proceed to trial, a decision that could be appealed for yet another hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court. “When our great-grandchildren look back at the twenty-first century, they will see that government-sanctioned climate destruction was the constitutional issue of this century.”
By Carolyn Kormann. The New Yorker. June 15, 2019
