Scientists Decry 'Political Attack' on Reference Manual for Judges
Source: New York Times
March 2, 2026 Updated 6:32 p.m. ET
More than two dozen contributors to a widely used reference manual for judges are raising alarm bells about political interference after the deletion of a chapter on climate science.
The uproar is over the latest edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, which has been published since 1994 by the Federal Judicial Center, an agency that provides resources to judges. A group of Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to the center on Jan. 29, claiming that the climate chapter was biased and demanding its retraction. About a week later, the center deleted the chapter from its online edition of the nearly 1,700-page manual.
A new letter posted on Monday, signed by 28 experts in science, technology and law who had written other chapters of the manual, strongly criticized the move. The topics they had written about included engineering, neuroscience and toxicology. Their letter was posted online by Science Politics, a publication of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
“The coordinated effort by 27 state attorneys general to remove that peer-reviewed content is a direct challenge to the independence of the federal judiciary and an attack on a thoroughly vetted exposition of climate science that those attorneys general do not like,” the letter said.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/climate/climate-science-judges-manual.html
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Link to LETTER - An Open Letter from Authors of the Fourth Edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence