How The Federalist Society Formed By Three Yale Law School Alumni Shaped America’s Judiciary

Yale Daily News, How the Federalist Society Shaped America’s Judiciary:

The Federalist Society, a conservative organization founded at Yale Law School, built a pipeline between law schools and top judgeships and influenced the selection of the past three Supreme Court justices.

When former President Donald Trump began the review process for nominating a Supreme Court justice in 2017, Leonard Leo — the former vice president and current co-chairman of the Federalist Society — worked with the Trump administration and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to propose potential candidates.

Under Leo’s guidance in 2018, Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh ’87 LAW ’90, who has been connected with the Federalist Society for at least 24 years. In 2017 and 2020, Leo’s creation of a list of potential Supreme Court nominees for Trump helped to advise the appointment of two other Federalist Society affiliates, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.

By 2024, six of the nine Supreme Court justices considered themselves members or affiliates of the Federalist Society — the culmination of a longstanding pipeline connecting members of Federalist Society chapters at America’s top law schools to high-level judgeships and political offices.

But how exactly does this pipeline work, and how has it shaped conservative thought within the American judiciary?

The Federalist Society, a debating organization that hosts political events and acts as a network for conservative and libertarian students and professionals, was founded at Yale Law School in 1982 by three Yale alumni: Steven Calabresi ’80 LAW ’83, David McIntosh ’80 and Lee Liberman Otis ’79. Today, the Society is represented at all 204 ABA-accredited law schools in the country, has established communities of affiliated lawyers in 60 cities and has over 70,000 members.

​​The organization is divided into three divisions — students’ division, lawyers’ division and faculty division — allowing for collaboration between law students, practicing lawyers and judges and law school professors. 

From humble beginnings to political heights

In April 1982, the Federalist Society held its first event: a referendum entitled “A Symposium on Federalism: Legal and Political Ramifications.” Held over the course of a weekend, it featured a series of speaker events, debates and workshops.

The Federalist Society has since defined itself as a “group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order,” according to its website. According to its three founders, the Federalist Society’s original goal was to provide a space on law school campuses for debating ideas across the political spectrum.

“It’s fair to say that none of us, when we started it, had any idea how large it would eventually grow to be,” Calabresi said.

With six of the nine current Supreme Court justices serving as members or affiliates of the Federalist Society — Clarence Thomas LAW ’74, Samuel Alito LAW ’75, John Roberts, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Gorsuch — the group’s impact on the national judiciary is notably more significant than its founders anticipated. ...

The idea for the Federalist Society originated when Calabresi, McIntosh and Liberman Otis, all Yale College graduates, started their legal studies — Calabresi at Yale Law School and McIntosh and Liberman at the University of Chicago Law School. They felt that libertarian and conservative perspectives on issues were not represented on their campuses.  ...

On May 2, 1982, the event was featured in The New York Times — an instance of high-profile coverage that foreshadowed the Federalist Society’s subsequent momentum and a new era of conservative thought on law school campuses, one defined by concentrated and organized representation, events and programming.

Within two years of its first referendum, the Federalist Society had officially filed for national nonprofit status and was operating on dozens of new elite law school campuses, including Harvard, Georgetown University, the University of Virginia and Stanford University. It hosted another symposium in 1983 at Harvard Law School and a third in 1984 at the University of Chicago. By the 1990s, the Federalist Society operated a branch at every law school in the country.

A pipeline from law school to the courts

As original members began graduating from their respective law schools and entering the national court system, they maintained their ties to the Federalist Society.

The development of the Lawyers’ Division of the organization in 1986 ensured that graduates could still maintain their intellectual ties to the society through organized speaker events and annual conventions. The creation of a Faculty Division in 1999 allowed law school professors to take an invested stake in “encourag[ing] constructive academic discourse,” according to the Federalist Society’s website.

This led to a high-powered pipeline to the national court system facilitated by the Federalist Society’s vast alumni and affiliate network. ...

[Calabresi] explained that he believes that people with right-of-center political views often feel isolated and marginalized at Yale Law School. According to Calabresi, the society allows people to form friendships with “other people who agree with them.” Additionally, he explained that the society puts students in touch with judges who share similar views, whom students can then “go on to clerk for.”

This relationship, according to Calabresi, has reciprocally shaped judges’ vetting processes for potential clerks.

“Judges and thinkers who are right of center often find that they’re in a minority in the courts that they’re on, and they equally draw sustenance from being part of a group that is a national group of people who think the way that most Federalist Society members do,” Calabresi said.

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