The Federalist Society- is it a secret society for judges? a secret cabal?

[housewolf]

Senator Durbin finally brought something to light in his speech this evening on the Senate floor opposing Priscilla Owens. What was it?

Senator Durbin shed light on a secret, something that NO ONE has been openly talking about. What was it?

It was this: nearly all of the administrations judicial nominees are members of a legal group knows as "The Federalist Society," a group that, when asked about what the group was, Priscilla Owen ducked the question and refused to talk about the organization, it's purpose, goals, and her involvement with it.

So what is it? Is it some sort of secret society or something? The administration has been nominating Federalist Society judges for 4 years now, why hasn't anyone talked about this before?

I don't know the answers to these questions. What I have known since 2003 is that the administration has been using the Federalist Society as the "farm" for his judges since he took office. I don't know if Senator Durbin actually wasn't aware of this or if he just chose this moment in history to make this information public.

There are a few things I do know. The Federalist Society has a website - fed-soc.org. Here's what they claim their purpose to be:
" * Law schools and the legal profession are currently strongly dominated by a form of orthodox liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society. While some members of the academic community have dissented from these views, by and large they are taught simultaneously with (and indeed as if they were) the law.
* The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. 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.
* The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities. This entails reordering priorities within the legal system to place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law. It also requires restoring the recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, and law professors.
* In working to achieve these goals, the Society has created a conservative and libertarian intellectual network that extends to all levels of the legal community."

For more information, you can visit their website.


In March of 2000, an article was written up in the Washington Monthly about the Federalist Society titled: "The Federalist Society
The Conservative Cabal That's Transforming American Law"
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/0003.landay.html

Here are some excerpts from the article:

<snip>

On friendly turf now, Starr may also be projecting feelings of gratitude. For as Joe Conason and Gene Lyons demonstrate in The Hunting of the President (see excerpts on pages 17-18), Starr and the OIC benefited enormously from the efforts of a network of well-placed lawyers who, like Starr and other Republican luminaries, are members of, or linked to, the Federalist Society. Most of the self-styled "elves" who helped Linda Tripp¹s tapes find their way into Kenneth Starr¹s hands had links to the Society. And without the elves¹ handiwork plus the leaks, coaching, and sheer brainpower contributed by the extended Federalist network, Starr¹s investigation might never have gotten out of the blocks.

<snip>

The Society¹s mission is to advance a conservative agenda by moving the country¹s legal establishment to the right, and they are succeeding. Despite eight years of a Democratic administration, the impact of the Reagan Revolution continues to reverberate in the nation¹s courts. (See "The Gipper¹s Constitution," December 1999.) And now one of the legal theories the Federalists are pushing could make regulation by federal agencies unconstitutional in some cases and--if carried to its logical extreme--be the Federalists¹ crowning achievement in their unspoken campaign to change the face of law and politics in America.

<snip>

Who are they?
With 25,000 members plus scores of close affiliates nationwide--including Supreme Court Justices Thomas and Antonin Scalia, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, and University of Chicago brain-boxes Richard Epstein and Frank Easterbrook (also a federal appellate judge)--the Federalist Society is quite simply the best-organized, best-funded, and most effective legal network operating in this country. Its rank-and-file include 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. What gets less attention, however, is that the Society is accomplishing in the courts what Republicans can¹t achieve politically. There is nothing like the Federalist Society on the left.

<snip>

They operated on two tracks--designed to insure that the Reagan Revolution would well outlast the Reagan 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 O¹Connor, 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 Bork taught before Reagan nominated him to the bench, and at the University of Chicago, where Scalia was faculty advisor and from whose ranks he would later recruit former student-Federalists to prestigious Supreme Court clerkships.

<snip>

A major factor in the Society¹s success has been the composition of the federal bench. (There are still more sitting Republican than Democrat-appointed federal judges.) One reason is that the gatekeeper to the federal judiciary is Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch--who happens to co-chair the Federalist Board of Trustees (with Robert Bork) at the same time as he chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.

<snip>

... one need only review changes that litigators linked to the Federalists have wrought upon the law. They have weakened or rolled back statutes on civil rights and affirmative action; voting rights; women¹s rights and abortion rights; workers¹ rights; prisoners¹ rights; and the rights of consumers, the handicapped, and the elderly. Add to that the consequences of non-delegation if further extended. Regulatory oversight by federal agencies would then be kicked back to Congress and the states--like the power to preserve open pipelines in telecommunications, to regulate transportation, the drugs we take, the food we eat. Would we really want elected officials directly responsible for regulating industries that are also major sources of their campaign funds? That is very much a political question--one to which the Federalist Society¹s answer is unfortunately all too clear.


Read the entire article
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/0003.landay.html


Along with that article is another article discussing the Federalist Society's activities in law schools

Provocation 101

<snip>
Former federal appellate judge Abner Mikva, an adjunct professor at the law school, expressed "amazement" over the "incredible influence" of the 140 campus Federalist chapters: "Where so many of the nation's leaders are groomed, the Federalists manipulate the landscape. It was once held that liberals ran the law schools. The liberals had the name but the Federalists own the game. For students on the go, there is no where else to go."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/0003.landay.provocation.html

[serryjw]

1. There is nothing 'secret' about The Federalist society

comes from our founding fathers who wrote the Federalist papers...the are neo conservative with a RW agenda as stated in the articles. Scalia and Thomas have 10X the college membership in the last 10 years..They will be our future Federal clerks, Federal and Scotus Jurist.

[housewolf]

2. Yes, their membership has been mushrooming

They're everywhere now