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Joe Biden could erase much of President Donald Trump’s four-year legacy of energy and climate deregulation with the stroke of his pen, according to regulatory experts, but replacing it with something new and durable may prove trickier. Further, many of Trump’s domestic energy deregulatory policies never took full effect due to court challenges. The Trump administration has lost 84% of its energy- and environment-related lawsuits, according to New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

The Trump administration has won only 36% of court challenges to agency decisions before GOP-appointed judges, according to a study by Bethany Davis Noll, a professor at the New York University School of Law. Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush fared better before politically aligned judges in such cases, winning 68% to 84% of the time. Thomson Reuters Legal summarized the study, while Noll and Christine Pries summarized the findings in an article for the Hill. The study counts an appellate panel as Republican if a majority of the judges are appointed by GOP presidents.

President Donald Trump has won court cases challenging agency decisions by his administration 36% of the time when facing judges appointed by Republican presidents and panels of judges whose majority was made up of Republican appointees, according to a forthcoming analysis by NYU School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity. Previous studies show that four of his predecessors, when also up against politically-aligned judges, won cases 64% to 84% of the time.

Biden has already said that if he wins, he plans to roll back more than 100 Trump administration public health and environmental regulations. We asked Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director for the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, to explain how Biden will execute these rollbacks if he takes the election.

One might assume that Trump’s changes to the immigration system can be easily undone — particularly since they were put in place unilaterally through executive actions (and refusals to do the work of government). And the administration has an overwhelming record of legal failure, according to a database of major Trump regulatory actions maintained by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s School of Law. In nearly every immigration case that has had some sort of resolution, a court either ruled against the agency or the relevant agency withdrew the action after being sued. Other regulatory actions would also likely be reversed by a new administration. But such reversals would happen slowly, if at all.

Environmentalists acknowledge a Trump re-election victory would mean new threats to regulation but might not guarantee success of poorly crafted deregulatory efforts. “The Trump administration’s record in defending these rollbacks has been really atrocious thus far,” Environmental Defense Fund attorney Tomás Carbonell said during the environmental law conference, citing a statistic from New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity that the administration has lost 83 percent of its legal fights to date with respect to deregulatory efforts across multiple federal agencies.

In this episode of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State's podcast, Professor Caroline Cecot of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School discusses her new working paper, “Congress and the Stability of the Cost-Benefit Analysis Consensus,” with Executive Director Adam White and with Professor Ricky Revesz, NYU’s Lawrence King Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Policy Integrity.

Ideological leaning could make the court even more favorable toward oil and gas interests and could come into play in environmental cases as the justices resolve disputes involving climate policy and Trump administration rollbacks of environmental regulations, experts said. Trump’s administration has faced lawsuits over its regulatory rollbacks and efforts to fast-track oil and gas projects, winning 22 such cases but losing 119, according to New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity found that Trump attempts to rewrite or revoke regulations had failed in court or been yanked after a challenge 84% of the time. In the process, an arrogant administration under the sway of a man who has said of the Constitution, “I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president,” squanders political capital and breeds justifiable cynicism about every move it makes. Four years in, this is still a nation of laws.

As she did on judicial matters, such as her views on Roe v. Wade, Judge Barrett declined to state her thoughts on climate change in exchange after exchange this week. “I will not express a view on a matter of public policy, especially one that is politically controversial,” she concluded. But stating "I would not say I have firm views on climate change” in the face of so much evidence in daily life, as Judge Barrett did, is controversial. “She’s a smart and sophisticated person,” said Richard L. Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University Law School. “If she didn’t want to associate herself with the climate denial perspective, she could have used different words."