In the early 1980s, a handful of students at Yale and the University of Chicago created a small organization as a counterweight to what they saw as the monolithic left-liberal outlook of the legal academy. Today the Federalist Society has chapters at almost every American law school and counts more than 40,000 lawyers among its members. The last Republican appointee to the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito, was a member before ascending to the bench.
One tribute to the Federalist Society’s success is that it is now an object of study by the very academic culture it was designed to counter. In “Ideas With Consequences,” Amanda Hollis-Brusky, an assistant professor of politics at Pomona College, argues that the society has become a powerful transmission belt for moving conservative and libertarian ideas into the legal mainstream. Using concepts borrowed from the history of science, she presents the Federalist Society as a “political epistemic community” whose networks have created a “paradigm shift” in the way the wider world frames constitutional questions. She is not entirely happy about this shift, but her analysis, for the most part, has the neutrality of a thoroughly researched social-science study.
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