Federalist Society

The Federalist Society for Law as living as Public Policy Studies is an American legal organization of conservatives and libertarians that advocates for a textualist as well as originalist interpretation of the United States Constitution. It attaches a student division, a lawyers division, and a faculty division. The society currently has chapters at more than 200 American law schools. The lawyers division comprises more than 70,000 practicing attorneys organized as "lawyers chapters" and "practice groups" within the division in ninety cities. The society is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Through speaking events, lectures, and other activities, it enables a forum for legal experts of opposing views to interact with members of the legal profession, the judiciary, and the legal academy. it is for one of the United States' most influential legal organizations.

The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 by a combine of students from the Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and University of Chicago Law School who wanted to challenge the liberal or left-wing ideology that they perceived to dominate near elite American law schools and universities. The organization's ideals put "checking federal power, protecting individual liberty and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning", and it plays a central role in networking and mentoring young conservative lawyers. According to Amanda Hollis-Brusky, the author of Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution, the Federalist Society "has evolved into the de facto gatekeeper for right-of-center lawyers aspiring to government jobs and federal judgeships under Republican presidents." According to William & Mary Law School professor Neil Devins and Ohio State University professor Lawrence Baum, the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush "aimed to nominate conservative judges, and membership in the Federalist Society was a proxy for adherence to conservative ideology." The Federalist Society has played a key role in suggesting judicial nominees to President Donald Trump; it vetted President Trump's list of potential U.S. Supreme Court nominees and, as of March 2020, 43 out of 51 of President Trump's appellate court nominees were current or former members of the society.

In January 2019, The Washington Post Magazine wrote that the Federalist Society had reached an "unprecedented peak of energy to direct or establish and influence." Of the current nine members of the Supreme Court of the United States, six Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett are current or former members of the organization. Politico wrote that the Federalist Society "has become one of the most influential legal organizations in history—not only shaping law students' thinking but changing American society itself by deliberately, diligently shifting the country's judiciary to the right."

Founding

Founded in 1982 by students at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago Law School; the Federalist Society began as a student organization which challenged what its founding members perceived as the orthodox American liberal ideology common to American law schools. The group's first activity was a three-day symposium titled "A Symposium on Federalism: Legal and Political Ramifications" held at Yale in April 1982. The symposium, which was attended by 200 people, was organized by Steven G. Calabresi, Lee Liberman Otis, and David M. McIntosh. Speakers included Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork, and Theodore Olson.

In 2018, Politico Magazine wrote that "it is no exaggeration tothat it was perhaps the most effective student conference ever—a blueprint, in retrospect, for how to marry youthful enthusiasm with intellectual oomph tofar-reaching results." The society states that it "is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be."