Judge trims back Chamber lawsuit against California climate laws

By Lesley Clark | 02/05/2025 06:05 AM EST

A claim that the state’s climate disclosure requirement violates the First Amendment is still pending before the court.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters in Washington.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters in Washington. Francis Chung/POLITICO

A federal judge in California has dismissed two claims against the state’s sweeping climate change disclosure laws, narrowing down a legal challenge against them to a question of whether they violate the First Amendment.

The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on Monday sided with the state, finding in part that the two laws that require companies to disclose climate data do not run afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause, which holds that federal law takes precedence over state law.

Business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the California Chamber of Commerce, filed suit last year, claiming that the state’s laws violate the First Amendment, the supremacy clause and limits on extraterritorial regulation.

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But Judge Otis Wright of the Central District of California struck two of the claims, writing that although the challengers said the laws exceed California’s authority to regulate emissions, he found the state law “imposes no liability for failure to reduce emissions; only for failure to disclose climate-related financial risk and the measures adopted to reduce such risk.”

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