Garrett Epps: The government is trying to silence 21 kids hurt by climate change.

Philip Gregory, one of the attorneys representing the young plaintiffs in Juliana, says he hopes for an act of judicial courage such as in Brown v. Board of Education, in which segregation was proven to harm children and the high court agreed that the federal government had to protect them.

“We’re not asking the Supreme Court to find new rights,” Gregory said. “Based on the evidence that we will introduce at trial, these children are being harmed, the federal government is harming them, and it is up to the judiciary to issue orders to stop the harm.”

Civil-rights suits like this are gaining traction globally. On October 9, a Dutch appeals court upheld one such decision forcing the Netherlands to drastically cut its greenhouse-gas emissions. Similar cases are ongoing in other European countries.

The advocacy group supporting Juliana, Our Children’s Trust, has also helped young people advance similar cases in state courts across the country. Since 2011, it’s filed petitions in all 50 states to force government agencies to use the best climate science in rule making; it brings civil-rights cases when those petitions are denied. In Alaska, for example, 16 youths are suing the state, and as in Juliana, they are not asking for money. They are asking for “science-based numeric reductions in Alaska’s … emissions consistent with global emissions reduction rates necessary to stabilize the climate system.”

Read: Donald Trump is the first demagogue of the Anthropocene.

Since those reductions are not happening anytime soon, lawyers are also trying another approach to environmentalism in the courts: The “necessity defense,” or the argument that government inaction on climate change essentially compelled their clients to act unlawfully.

On October 8 and 9, I covered the Minnesota trial of Emily Johnston, 52, Annette Klapstein, 66, and Ben Joldersma, 40, who were granted the first-ever U.S. trial in which a judge planned to instruct the jury to consider a climate necessity defense. The three broke into an oil-pipeline facility owned by the Canadian multinational company Enbridge near tiny Leonard, Minnesota, in 2016, cut the locks on large shutoff valves, and stopped the flow of oil. Together with three other principle activists who carried out similar acts on the same day in North Dakota, Montana, and Washington State, the “Valve Turners,” as they became known, cut off most of the tar-sands oil coming into the U.S. from deposits in Alberta, Canada.

The necessity defense, which has been used in the past by anti-abortion and anti-nuclear-weapons protesters, is a prize long sought by climate activists. Judge Robert Tiffany’s decision to grant it shocked just about everyone. It was denied at the other three Valve Turner trials, in which judges ruled that activists had plenty of other options for legal action. In Minnesota, defendants were ready to argue that climate change was so threatening, and that the government had taken so little action despite their decades of activist work such as lobbying and protesting and voting, that shutting down the pipeline was their only recourse.