The Clean and Healthful Environment in the Courts—Part IV: Held & the Youth Climate Cases

(first published on June 12, 2026 at https://andersnewbury.substack.com)

Montana’s most newsworthy Clean and Healthful Environment case was Held v. State, decided in 2024 and the first success story of the so-called “youth climate cases.” Building on MEIC and Park County, retiring Chief Justice Mike McGrath put a stamp on his judicial legacy by authoring the majority Opinion finding unconstitutional the Legislature’s “arbitrar[]y exclus[ion]” of climate change inducing greenhouse gas emissions from environmental review “without regard to the nature or volume of the emissions.” Held, ¶ 68.

While Held gained national coverage as a victory for the youth climate movement, its more lasting impact in Montana has been largely overlooked. Held cleared the way for future litigants wishing to challenge significant global environmental problems in Montana state courts by easing requirements of standing that must be negotiated by environmental litigants.

Standing doctrine requires a plaintiff to have sufficient skin in the game to bring a lawsuit. In Held the government argued that the plaintiffs lacked standing because the youths couldn’t show that the challenged exemption meaningfully harmed them, in light of the magnitude of the global climate change problem. While it may seem like a technical detail, standing is often what makes or breaks major environmental litigation, where the alleged harms are broad-ranging, uncertain, and diffuse. Chief Justice McGrath’s Held Opinion emphatically opened the courthouse door to plaintiffs in environmental litigation of this sort.

The Held Court concluded the plaintiffs could challenge the law even though the problem would likely persist, regardless of the law. Held, ¶¶ 49-53. Chief Justice McGrath pointed to a recent Court holding that polluting an already polluted waterbody was still polluting, and an early U.S. Supreme Court climate change case holding that courts retained jurisdiction over even a “tentative” “first step” in combatting the issue. Id. Primarily, the Held Court took an especially broad view of harm, concluding that the law’s alleged unconstitutionality, itself, was the harm—effectively reducing harm to a non-item in the standing analysis. See Held, ¶ 52 (“Plaintiffs allege that the MEPA Limitation causes a violation of their constitutional rights, which is their injury. Declaring that law unconstitutional and enjoining the State from acting in accordance with it will effectively alleviate that constitutional injury[.]” (emphasis added)). See also Held, ¶ 51 (“our focus here, as with Plaintiffs’ injuries and causation, is not on redressing climate change, but on redressing their constitutional injuries” (emphases added)). This lays a path for future environmental litigants to bring challenges to large environmental problems that are unlikely to be entirely resolved by striking down a particular state law.

Perhaps most notable in Held’s standing analysis was the absence of any showing that the harm alleged fell with any specificity on the particular plaintiffs in the case, as compared with all other Montana residents being impacted by climate change. Typically, for an alleged injury to suffice for standing purposes, it must be “distinguishable from the injury to the public generally.” See Held, ¶ 94 (Rice, J., dissenting) (citing Park Cnty. ¶ 20). That’s because courts are believed to best be reserved for disputes actually tied to particular parties, rather than a generalized nation- or state-wide policy argument better hashed out in the political sphere. (An interest in not paying more taxes, for example, does not give one standing to challenge the United States budget in court.) Held found standing was sufficient despite what a concurring Justice deemed “the complete lack of particularized causation evidence.” Held, ¶¶ 76, 78 (Sandefur, J., concurring). This ruling clears the path for environmental litigants to bring cases regarding widespread environmental harms that impact everyone.

Finally, the Held majority rejected the contention that the plaintiffs needed to have filed their constitutional challenge with respect to a particular permitted project. Held, ¶¶ 53-54. This seemingly innocuous detail is of great significance to Clean and Healthful environment litigants in Montana. Permit challenges typically require a challenger to first proceed through a long and arduous administrative process—where a statute’s constitutionality is not even up for debate—before finally getting into a courtroom. When the government tries to force environmental litigants into a permit proceeding, they are sending litigants down a time-consuming and expensive procedural dead end. The Held decision should make it harder for government attorneys to employ this dilatory tactic to drain plaintiff resources.

Held was a victory for the Youth Climate movement, but its greater legacy is likely to be its procedural holdings that opened a path for future litigants to bring major Clean and Healthful Environment challenges related climate change and other broad-ranging environmental problems. This has already begun. The Held plaintiffs filed a new lawsuit alleging that the Court’s ruling had been flaunted by subsequent amendments to MEPA and the Clean Air Act that again limited the scope of environmental analysis. See Held v. State, Petition for Original Jurisdiction, OP 25-0853, Dec. 10, 2025. The following installment of this series will examine how Held has impacted current Clean and Healthful Environment litigation in Montana, particularly as new industries seek to extract gravel, and plant data centers, in Montana.