Tushnet on Teles on the Conservative Legal Movement
Mark Tushnet (Harvard University – Harvard Law School) has posted What Consequences Do Ideas Have?
(Texas Law Review, Vol. 87, 2008) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Steven
Teles’s book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, is a case
study of ideological challenge. Teles, a political scientist,
emphasizes the institutional dimensions of such challenges. Relying on
interviews and internal documents produced by conservative
organizations, he examines the development of conservative litigating
groups (i.e., conservative public interest law firms), the growth of
the Federalist Society, and the embedding of law and economics within
the legal academy. There have been similar studies of liberal public
interest law firms and of the rise of liberal legalism in the academy,
but Teles’s is the first to look on the other side of the ideological
divide. And, given the dominance of liberal legal ideology, his
analysis brings out in sharp relief many new insights into the
institutions that affect the outcomes of ideological contests. In
addition, Teles connects his analysis to a broader theme in recent
studies of American political development. The rise of the conservative
legal movement was intimately connected to changes in the dominant
political order that have occurred over the past thirty years: the
decay of the New Deal-Great Society political order, and the Reagan
Revolution and its limits. In these ways Teles provides a firm
foundation for thinking (or perhaps merely speculating) about future
developments in the institutional apparatuses associated with
conservative and liberal legal thought.This Review
summarizes and critiques Teles’s analysis of the three components of
the conservative legal movement, beginning with the least important,
law and economics in the legal academy, and then turning to
conservative public interest law firms and the Federalist Society. It
concludes with some speculations about the future of that movement, in
light of the connection Teles rightly draws between that movement and
the American political regime of the late twentieth century.
Highly recommended.
Source: Lawrence Solum
