Global-Warming Litigation Gets Frosty Reception At The Supreme Court

It is often difficult to predict the outcome of Supreme Court cases. This is not because the individual justices are particularly fickle or inscrutable. The reason is quite simple: The cases that make it all the way to the Supreme Court are hard. The court does not usually intervene in a dispute unless at least two lower courts, each composed of smart jurists, answered the same legal question differently. Thus, almost any case that the court reviews has strong arguments on either side of the issue.

Sometimes, though, amateur soothsayers catch a break. The justices can make it pretty easy to guess the outcome of even a hard case through their questioning of the parties at oral argument. One such case this year is American Electric Power Co. Inc. v. Connecticut, a case in which the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that a common-law nuisance claim provided a mechanism by which judges could impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions. In light of the oral argument in