When is it appropriate to privatize the work of public prosecutors? And does it make things better or worse when “cause” lawyering is at issue? As Jeff Patch reports at Real Clear Investigations, a project called the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at New York University supplies seasoned lawyers to the offices of nine state attorney general offices, plus D.C. They serve there in such roles as special assistant attorney general while being paid by the NYU project, which is funded by and closely identified with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The catch, which explains why the program is not likely to hold appeal for AGs in some other states: “Under terms of the arrangement, the fellows work solely to advance progressive environmental policy at a time when Democratic state attorneys general have investigated and sued ExxonMobil and other energy companies over alleged damages due to climate change.”
Private funding of lawyers inside public prosecutors’ offices is not a new idea. Iowa’s AG office, for example, told Patch that it has employed legal talent from an American Bar Association-supported program. In another variation, it is not unusual for prosecutors to accept funding from the insurance industry for efforts to combat insurance fraud. Undergirding the political viability of these schemes is the (perhaps wobbly) premise that the state office is not farming out influence over politically or ideologically sensitive policy matters to outside groups that may have their own agenda.
The AG offices participating in the program (Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington state, as well as the District of Columbia) might plausibly argue that the projects they’re paying the Bloomberg embeds to work on are mostly ones they’d want to pursue zealously in any case, such as suing the EPA and other federal agencies over alleged lapses. Critics point to the ideologically fraught nature of the work and say the arrangement could violate some states’ ethics rules or generate improper conflicts of interest, as through an obligation to report activities back to the Bloomberg center.
The spotlight on backstage doings at state AG offices arises from reports by Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute based on public records requests that were fought tooth and nail by various AGs. (Besides the CEI report on attorneys general, Horner’s written a companion report on governors.) CEI is anything but a disinterested party in all this, of course, having been hit with a AG subpoena (later beaten back in court) over its supposedly wrongful advocacy on climate issues. That was itself part of a subpoena campaign targeting more than 100 research and advocacy groups, scientists, and private figures on the putatively wrong side of climate debates, which we and others decried at the time as a flagrant attack on rights protected by the First Amendment.
