The Secret Legal Establishment of the USA

The Federalist Society

The American Federalist Society is a fraternal Legal Association founded in 1982 by law students at the University of Chicago Law School and Yale University as a debating society from a conservative viewpoint in law school faculties. It is a network for right-wing lawyers to increase their influence in law schools and government through what is called “informal filtering role”.

More than a third of the judges President George Bush (the Son) has sent to Appeals Courts are members of the Federalist Society. That compares with zero for his predecessor, President Bill Clinton.

The Federalist Society is a well-oiled machinery out to remake the courts in the image of Robert Bork, the Supreme Court nominee who was rejected by the US Senate in 1987. He predicted that a new generation, "often associated with the Federalist Society," would transform the legal profession: "It may take 10 years, it may take 20 years for the second wave to crest, but crest it will, and it will sweep the elegant, erudite, pretentious and toxic detritus of non-originalism out to sea," he said in a 1987 speech. Judge Bork now co-chairs the society's Board of Visitors with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) of Nevada, a member and former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. www.csmonitor.com August 4, 2005.

"Twenty years later, the organization designed to carry forward Bork's jurisprudence is trying to get access to the top courts in the country,” - Alfred Ross, president and founder of the Institute for Democracy Studies (IDS) in New York.

It has also evolved into a powerful network for young conservatives looking for clerkships or jobs in Washington, fueling the buzz that one doesn't get a top legal job in government without a tie to the Federalist Society. "Anyone who is ambitious knows you have to network," says political scientist Sheldon Goldman, who writes on judicial nominations at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

"With a conservative Republican administration in power, the Federalist Society is a wonderful opportunity to network." He is the author of Picking Federal Judges (1997, 1999) and The Federal Courts as a Political System, (3rd ed., 1985).

Due to the strong influence of James Madison on the Society’s philosophy, the Federalist Society considers Madison to be their patriarch, hence the use of Madison’s silhouette as the Society’s official logo and took the name of Madison’s 18th-century Federalist Party as their own.

Madison is generally credited as the father of the American Constitution and he became the fourth President of the USA. In July 2005, it launched a state judicial selection project to try to dominate the state, as well as federal, bench.

The Federalist Society is said to be simply the best-organized, best-funded, and most effective legal network operating in this country. Its rank-and-file includes conservative lawyers, law students, law professors, bureaucrats, activists, and judges. They meet at law schools and function rooms across the country to discuss and debate the finer points of legal theory and substance on panels that often include liberals - providing friction, stimulus, and the illusion of balance.

The Society’s origins can be traced back to 1979, a year before Ronald Reagan’s victory. A Jewish legal scholar and current Hudson Institute senior fellow serving as the serves as the Director of the Project for International Religious Liberty, Michael Horowitz published a tract on the public-interest law movement, exhorting conservatives to overturn a half-century of liberal dominance of the legal establishment. This could be done, he wrote, by indoctrinating or winning over succeeding generations of law students, lawyers, and judges. By definition, the campaign had to be rooted in the fertile ground of law schools.

Horowitz’s concept was taken up with relish by senior members of the new Reagan Administration. They adopted a two-prolonged approach designed to insure that the legacy Reagan would well outlast his Presidency. The first, to reclaim the Federal courts from liberals, swept an array of conservative scholars and judges from law schools and state courts onto the Federal bench: the likes of Robert Bork, Ralph Winter, Antonin Scalia, Richard Posner, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Anthony Kennedy.

The second track was even more forward looking and involved the apprenticing of a new generation of conservative lawyer-intellectuals-under-30 to the Reagan apparat. This second track required fresh meat, which is where the Federalist Society came in. The founding chapters of the Society were established at Yale, where Robert Bork taught before Reagan nominated him to the bench, and at the University of Chicago, where Antonin Scalia was faculty advisor and from whose ranks he would later recruit former student-Federalists to prestigious Supreme Court clerkships.

Institutions of learning are also infected with the glamour of secret organizations and the "Eleusis" of Chi Omega (Fayetteville, Ark.) of 1 June, 1900, states that there are 24 Greek letter societies with 768 branches for male students, and 8 similar societies with 120 branches for female students, and a total membership of 142,456 in the higher institutions of learning in the United States.