Wall Street is at war with Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, and the battlefield is the federal courts.

Financial and business groups are filing a series of lawsuits against the SEC designed to thwart Gensler’s efforts to strengthen oversight of big market players and shed new light on secretive corners of finance.

The legal actions threaten to undermine the agenda of one of President Joe Biden’s most aggressive regulators and come as the agency tries to push out a number of measures before the November elections.

The Chamber of Commerce recently convinced a court to knock down a stock-buyback reporting rule — handing Gensler his first major defeat — and is targeting another regulation on shareholder advisers. Investors are looking to blockgame-changing private-fund reforms, with oral arguments set to begin Feb. 5. Hedge fund groups are challenging new disclosure rules. And business associations are threatening to go after more than a half-dozen other planned rules, including one of Gensler’s most ambitious proposals — a climate risk reporting mandate.

“It’s a minefield for the SEC,” said Kurt Gottschall, the former regional director of the agency’s Denver office who is now a partner at the law firm Haynes Boone. “The more ambitious the rulemaking, the more ambitious the pushback.”

The clashes are landing at a perilous time for regulators, with industry groups lodging arguments that have the potential to knock down decades-old powers, depending on how the courts rule. Conservative judges across the country, including at the Supreme Court, have shown a growing interest in reviewing agency authority, part of a broader attack on the so-called administrative state.

Former Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, one of the country’s premier administrative law litigators, told POLITICO that the Supreme Court is “engaged in the most probing........

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