Federalist Society Grows in Members and Influence
Last week’s 25th anniversary celebration of the Federalist Society shows just how far the group has come.
When the group was formed by law students seeking an organization to promote their conservative ideas, their theories of constitutional interpretation were considered far from the mainstream.
Now the 45,000-member group is reinvigorating the national debate, with speakers such as President Bush and attendees that included at least four Supreme Court justices.
Many Federalist Society members have gone on to positions of power while the U.S. Supreme Court has turned increasingly conservative, Legal Times reports. Justice Antonin Scalia was the society’s first faculty adviser, and Justice Clarence Thomas thanked members at last week’s celebration for helping him through confirmation hearings.
Longtime member Theodore Olson, a former solicitor general now practicing with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, told Legal Times the convention is validation. “None of us would have thought anything like this would happen,” he said.
Federalist Society president Eugene Meyer says the group now wants to work harder in the states to promote a conservative judiciary.
