How Conservative Law Reform Organizations Influence US Constitutional Law

Join Professor Ann Southworth, hosted by the Legal Professions Research Group, for a talk on United States conservative cause lawyers.

Abstract 

Conservative cause lawyers in the US have notched big wins since the mid-2000s, including major Supreme Court victories on abortion, guns, affirmative action, religious rights, labor, campaign finance, voting, business regulation, federal agency power, and much more. Some of these rulings defy the will of most American voters, delivering policy outcomes that conservatives could not have achieved through the elected branches. Many of these decisions overruled major precedents. Accounts of these momentous decisions typically emphasize the Republican Party’s focus on judicial appointments, the conservative movement’s drive to confirm reliably conservative nominees, and the hardball politics surrounding the process. Less noticed are other factors that have contributed to the outcomes, including long-term investments in litigation and media strategies, legal advocacy organizations, lawyer networks, and amicus coordination. This essay highlights the roles of conservative legal advocacy organizations in campaigns to reshape constitutional law. In particular, using campaign finance as a case study, it explores how lawyers associated with these organizations have deployed strategies, organizational forms, discourse, and precedents forged in connection with campaigns for liberal and progressive causes – and repurposed them to advance very different policy goals.

About the speaker

Ann Southworth is Professor of Law and Co-director of the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. She teaches and writes on the legal profession, with an emphasis on cause lawyers and their organizations and networks. She has published numerous articles in law reviews and peer-reviewed journals and authored and co-authored several books. Her first book, Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition (U. Chicago Press, 2008), is a group portrait of influential lawyers serving causes of the American political right – their backgrounds, strategies, and conflicting ideas and aspirations – as well as the mediator organizations that seek to foster cooperation among them. Her new book, Big Money Unleashed: The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending (U. Chicago Press, 2023), explores the roles of lawyers, advocacy organizations, and their patrons in the creation of the constitutional doctrine that now makes most campaign finance regulation vulnerable to First Amendment challenge. She is also the co-author of The Legal Profession: Ethics in Contemporary Practice (3d ed. forthcoming 2024), an interdisciplinary textbook on the American legal profession.

Before joining the founding faculty at UC Irvine Law School, Southworth was a visiting professor at Harvard and UCLA, a professor at Case Western Reserve, and an affiliated scholar at the American Bar Foundation. Prior to entering academia, she clerked for a federal judge and practiced at Morrison & Foerster, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the US Department of Justice. She received her B.A. and J.D. degrees from Stanford University.

How to attend

Please sign up in advance via this form.