Steven Teles (right) is an Associate Professor for the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and has served as visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, Brandeis, Harvard, Princeton, University of London, and others. In addition to his new book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton University Press), Teles has also written Whose Welfare?: AFDC and Elite Politics (Studies in Government and Public Policy) and has co-edited two others, Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy (with Tariq Modood and Glenn Loury) and Conservatism and American Political Development (with Brian Glenn).Gerald J. Russello, editor of the University Bookman and himself a lawyer, reviews Teles' new book for City Journal, and in it he nicely achieves the three basic requirements of a positive book review: 1) he describes the purpose and scope of the work; 2) he vouches for the quality of the work and its author; and 3) he deftly creates sufficient interest for the reader of the review to become a reader of the book.
As Russello points out, Alexis de Tocqueville argued that lawyers serve as a conservative force in democratic societies. In Democracy in America, the astute Frenchman describes the legal profession as "the only aristocratic element that can be amalgamated without violence with the natural elements of democracy and be advantageously and permanently combined with them. . . . Without this admixture of lawyer-like sobriety with the democratic principle, I question whether democratic institutions could long be maintained.”
A prescient warning, indeed. And certainly the image of the lawyer as a "conservator of public order" hardly seems realistic nowadays --- unless, that is, one takes stock of the engaging movement in recent decades of conservative legal minds fighting to regain that vaunted position. And Russello suggests that Teles' book will help the reader do just that -- see the dramatic progress of conservative legal influence that has largely gone uncovered by the MSM, progress that has helped give the Supreme Court such distinguished jurists as Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, John Roberts and Antonin Scalia.
Teles' book moves from the Pacific Legal Foundation and other pioneering conservative organizations of the 1970s who represented important business interests to Michael Horowitz' "shift in power from the movement’s material base to those with primarily cultural and intellectual motivations.” Horowitz and other like-minded lawyers changed the focus of the movement to Washington, D.C. and concentrated on congressional committees, public interest groups, networking associations, journalists, think tanks.Writes Russello, Horowitz "argued that conservatives should develop a critique of legal liberalism across a range of issues, moving away from their reliance on business support to reach out to clients that the first generation of conservative legal organizations had ignored. To staff this ambitious project, Horowitz sought like-minded university scholars. He worked to overturn the liberal ideological dominance of law schools, a key factor in liberal activism’s stranglehold on public-interest law."
That approach led to new, formidable organizations like the Institute for Justice, the Center for Individual Rights, and The Federalist Society while philosophical colleagues (Richard Posner's Chicago school, Heritage Foundation, Claire Booth Luce Institute, certain publications, religious-based and other special interest groups) moved in their wake. The result has been the "emergence of a conservative legal elite" with new respect, new power, and new hopes to reclaim the mantle described by de Tocqueville so long ago.
The fight, of course, is far from over. But Steven Teles' Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement reveals that there has been more happening (uneven as the playing field may yet be) than what you knew.
