Lawyers and the Conservative Counterrevolution

Abstract

What roles have lawyers played in the conservative counterrevolution in US law and public policy? Two recent books, Jefferson Decker's The Other Rights Revolution: Conservative Lawyers and the Remaking of American Government (2016), and Amanda Hollis-Brusky's Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (2015), speak to the question. This essay explores how these books relate to a larger story of the conservative legal movement and the roles that lawyers and their organizations and networks have played in the conservative turn in American law and politics. It highlights four interrelated threads of the movement's development: creating a support structure for conservative legal advocacy; remaking the judiciary and holding judges accountable; generating, legitimizing, and disseminating ideas to support legal change; and embracing legal activism to roll back government. The essay then considers a continuing challenge for the movement: managing tensions among its several constituencies. Finally, it suggests how this story has played out in litigation to challenge campaign finance regulation.

Going Nuclear: Federalist Society Affiliated Judicial Nominees’ Prospects and a New Era of Confirmation Politics1

“…Yet, scholars do not conceptualize affiliation with the FedSoc as akin to being a card-carrying member (Hollis-Brusky, 2015; Teles, 2008). Instead, and due in part to the hands-off nature of the Federalist Society as an organization, FedSoc affiliates are better conceptualized as members of a diffuse network with pluralistic views that span the conservative legal movement (Hollis-Brusky, 2015; Southworth, 2018).…”

Environmental Groups and Legal Expertise: Shaping the Brexit Process

“…See Yong et al 2019 on the way select committees use legal advice for authority and influence. Although she is focusing on courts, Ann Southworth's discussion of 'the conservative legal movement' in the US identifies the challenge of 'developing and disseminating intellectually respectable arguments' and 'developing credibility', 'well before lawyers take their cases to court', Southworth 2018Southworth , 1705 Environmental Audit Committee 2017. The nature of the future relationship with the EU was at that point very uncertain, and membership of the European Economic Area (EEA) was still being discussed.…”

Self-Proclaimed Human Rights Heroes: The Professional Project of Israeli Military Judges

“…The concept of human rights, traditionally seen as protecting the powerless, has been used by various actors for purposes that not only do not serve the unprivileged but arguably facilitate their oppression. In recent years, legal professionals are using their skills in new ways to legitimize illiberal governments and agendas (Scheppele 2018;Southworth 2018). In the context of Israel/Palestine, authors have studied the uses of human rights law as potentially harmful for Palestinians, compared to protections under the international law of occupation (Gross 2007), the deployment of the human rights discourse to facilitate domination (Gordon and Perugini 2015), and adoption of human rights claims and strategies by right-wing civil society groups to frame their own causes (Dudai 2017a).…”