RICHMOND, Va. — Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s demand for records related to a former University of Virginia professor’s climate-change research is intended to challenge his conclusions rather than uncover fraud, the school said in court papers yesterday.

Cuccinelli, a global-warming skeptic, is investigating whether Michael Mann defrauded taxpayers by using manipulated data to obtain state grants backing his global-warming research. The university is fighting Cuccinelli’s “civil investigative demand” for documents related to Mann’s work.

“The CIDs are aimed squarely at Dr. Mann’s scientific conclusions,” the university said in its brief, adding that more than a third of the attorney general’s brief filed last week in Albemarle County Circuit Court “is devoted to challenging and criticizing the research and conclusions of Dr. Mann and his co-authors.”

Cuccinelli is seeking the records as part of an inquiry into whether Mann violated the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. The university said Cuccinelli has failed to state the nature of any violation, as required by the act, and that the demand for records is overly broad.

“Given the important interest in academic freedom that is at stake, the Court should be particularly vigilant in limiting the Attorney General’s power to that specifically granted under FATA,” the university said. “Such a potentially invasive investigative tool should not be permitted to be used to target academics merely because the Attorney General disputes the legitimacy of their research and conclusions.”

In his brief last week, the attorney general argued that academic freedom is not a legal barrier to a fraud investigation. He said the university has information relevant to his investigation and has not demonstrated a constitutional or legal basis for withholding it.

Academic freedom, Cuccinelli said, is rooted in the First Amendment, which cannot be used to shield fraud. And even if the First Amendment did apply in this case, he argued, the university cannot raise the constitutional rights of others in challenging a civil investigative demand.

The university said that Cuccinelli treated the concern about academic freedom “dismissively” and that absent any specific allegation of fraud, the attorney general “has no authority to ‘investigate’ scientific research or the expression of academic ideas.”

A hearing on Cuccinelli’s demand for the records is set for Aug. 20.

The conservative Republican attorney general is seeking documents and other information, including e-mails between Mann and other climate scientists. The materials are related to five research grants worth about $466,000 to Mann, who worked at the university from 1999 to 2005 and is now a professor at Penn State University.

Mann has been a target of global-warming deniers for his work that shows the world’s temperatures have risen exponentially since the early 1900s. He has called Cuccinelli’s investigation “highly vindictive.”

Cuccinelli says in last week’s brief that he is not investigating what Mann, “separate and apart from his use of government funds, reports as his research findings.”

“The Attorney General is only investigating whether fraudulently manipulated data was used to win government funding and/or submitted in an effort to claim payment in government funded grants,” the brief said.