The story of how a group of Republican law students started a club that grew to become the most influential legal organization in US history. With the addition of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, six of the nine sitting Supreme Court Justices are current or former members of a conservative legal organization called the Federalist Society. In TAKEOVER: How a Conservative Student Club Captured the Supreme Court, Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman and Lidia Jean Kott explore the rise of the most influential legal organization in U.S. history. Beginning in the early 1980s, when it was not exactly ‘cool’ to be a conservative law student, a small group of students started a club, named in honor of The Federalist Papers, where they could safely discuss their right-of-center views. They asked Antonin Scalia, then a professor at University of Chicago, to be their advisor and got to work advocating for an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. Over the past 40 years, members of the organization have included Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Ted Cruz, Orrin Hatch, and Josh Hawley, among many other prominent politicians, public servants, and elected officials. Feldman and Kott, a producer on his Deep Background podcast, take listeners into the offices and chambers of the people who know the Federalist Society best, including founding member and current Senior Vice President Lee Liberman Otis, as well as judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals, Michael McConnell and Jeffrey Sutton. Using archival tape to provide historical context as well as interviews with current and former members, TAKEOVER illuminates how this student club has influenced many tenets of our country, from the war against the Affordable Care Act, to swinging the highest court in the land decidedly to the right and even swaying the most important elections in our democracy.
Author
Noah Feldman is an American author and professor of law at Harvard Law School. Feldman grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, where he attended the Maimonides School. He graduated from Harvard College in 1992, ranked first in the College, and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he earned a D.Phil in Islamic Thought in 1994. Upon his return from Oxford, he received his J.D., in 1997, from Yale Law School, where he was the book review editor of the Yale Law Journal. He later served as a law clerk for Associate Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2001, he joined the faculty of New York University Law School (NYU), leaving for Harvard in 2007. In 2008, he was appointed the Bemis Professor of International Law. He worked as an advisor in the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq following the 2003 invasion of the country. He regularly contributes features and opinion pieces to The New York Times Magazine and is a senior adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
