![]() “For someone like me, a lawyer, Roe was really not about abortion,” John McGinnis, a conservative law professor at Northwestern University, said. Not taking sides on any particular issue.” And yet Roe symbolized something to the Federalist Society’s founding members. “It was all about creating a forum/venue for debate. “I don’t recall Roe being an issue in any such conversations I had concerning creation of Fed Soc,” Olson wrote to me, in an e-mail. Four years later, Scalia would ascend to a seat on the Supreme Court, and Olson would eventually become one of the country’s most accomplished Supreme Court litigators. Otis could tell that the conference was the start of something. She helped organize the first Federalist Society conference its speakers included Antonin Scalia, then a law professor, and Theodore Olson, then an Assistant Attorney General in the Reagan Administration. Lee Liberman Otis-one of the Federalist Society’s founders, who was then a law student at the University of Chicago-recalled thinking, It’s funny that there are these ideas about law which Reagan seemed to have run on, in part, and nobody’s talking about them. But an ideological counter-revolution was beginning. ![]() ![]() Law-school campuses were predominantly liberal, and there was a prevailing sense among students and professors that the conclusions in Roe and other major Supreme Court decisions of the prior thirty years-on issues such as birth control, racial integration, and voting rights-were both morally good and legally correct. In 1982, when the Federalist Society was founded, the conservative legal movement was still finding its footing. A longtime member described him to me as a “brilliant, beautiful soul.” One of his mentors, Princeton’s Robert George-a heavyweight in the relatively small world of élite conservative academics-frequently hypes him on Twitter, like a coach cheering on Rocky in the ring. ![]() “At its best, it is-or ought to be-a cheerful and willing debating partner.” Girgis is a frequent speaker at chapter events. “The Federalist Society is not a ghetto within each law school,” he said. The organization prides itself on being a forum for ideas, even those which some conservatives hate, which is part of what drew Girgis to become a member when he was a student at Yale Law School, in 2011. He’s a rising star in the Federalist Society, a powerful network of conservatives and libertarians that has a chapter at many major law schools, as well as dozens of professional chapters across the country. Early in his career, Girgis clerked for Samuel Alito, the Justice who wrote the majority decision in Dobbs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Girgis, a professor who specializes in philosophy and the law, embodies a young, energized, traditionalist wing of the conservative legal movement that will likely be galvanized by Dobbs v. This method of interpretation, called originalism, would inevitably lead to the end of Roe. Unlike his jaded elders, he believed that the Court would one day follow through on the simple, powerful idea that animates the conservative legal movement: that a judge’s job is not to make value judgments or to speculate about the potential consequences of his or her decisions but, rather, to decide cases by looking solely at how the Constitution was understood at the time it was written. “I was in kindergarten when Casey was decided,” he said. But Girgis, who is thirty-six, came up in a different era. Casey-couldn’t believe that Roe would ever truly fall. He’d been gaming out the arguments for years, really.Ĭonservatives of an older generation, who suffered a Supreme Court betrayal in 1992-when a trifecta of Republican-appointed judges upheld the constitutional right to an abortion, in Planned Parenthood v. Girgis had been looking forward to this precise moment for months. Wade was overturned, Sherif Girgis sat in his office at Notre Dame Law School, desperately clicking refresh on the Supreme Court’s Web site.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |