Federalist Society Quotes

The Federalist Society is changing the culture of our nation's law schools. You are returning the values and concepts of law as our founders understood them to scholarly dialogue, and through that dialogue, to our legal institutions.

I want to commend the [Federalist] Society for bringing together the best minds from right, left, and center to debate the most pressing legal issues of the day.

I am proud to say that the Federalist Society was founded in part at the University of Chicago, and one of its best characteristics has been an attack on liberal shibboleths by looking at real consequences and specific problems and by asking what law actually does.

The Federalist Society has done more for the health of the law than any organization I have witnessed in my career.

It has been my pleasure to speak at many Federalist Society gatherings around the country, and I think one thing your organization has definitely done is to contribute to free speech, free debate, and most importantly public understanding of, awareness of, and appreciation of the Constitution. So that's a marvelous contribution, and in a way I must say I'm jealous at how the Federalist Society has thrived at law schools.

The Federalist Society has made important contributions to the nation's understanding of our constitutional heritage.

The purpose of the Federalist Society was to bring together young people who had this skepticism about what they were being taught and to let them know that there were others who shared this skepticism.

Progressives and the press corps claim that judges who speak to conservative groups or attend their seminars are guilty of conflicts of interest. They even made an effort through the Judicial Conference to bar Justices from attending meetings of the Federalist Society, a legal organization that espouses constitutional originalism. But they are mute about the easy access to judges by the Climate Judiciary Project. Progressives and their friends at ProPublica and the New York Times say Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are tainted by their social connections with conservative donors and interactions with constitutional lawyers. They demand that the Justices recuse themselves from cases, despite no evident conflict of interest. But under the left’s ethics standard, every judge who attends a Climate Judiciary Project event should have to step aside from climate-related cases. Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse and his Senate sidecar Dick Durbin are trying to use ethics as a political weapon against conservative Justices, but watch out: It’s a double-edged sword.

The Federalist Society is this conservative legal organization. And I think, for the Bush administration, being a member of the Federalist Society meant you were - a reliable, ideological, partisan Republican. It wasn't enough just to be registered as a Republican, or to be - have a generally conservative judicial philosophy, or prosecutorial philosophy. It meant that, basically, meant that you were a real movement conservative, a Party regular. That's what being a Federalist Society member means.

It is not the dignitaries who are the real cause of hope, however. What is an enormously refreshing and hopeful sign is to see the young people who make up the membership of the Federalist Society. Earnest, intelligent, and unpretentious, these are the young men and women of whom any nation and any age could be proud.