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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (65015)	3/25/2008 11:39:24 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 90947

LOL! Perhaps not. tej knows how to protect himself from all inconvenient facts & truths....

To: jlallen who wrote (65015)	3/25/2008 12:45:38 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

The rise of the conservative legal movement Power Line Living in a liberal enclave, I sometimes find myself at social gatherings where folks assume that everyone is a leftist and everyone hates President Bush. In fact, this happened to me quite a bit pre-Power Line. Once, very early in the Bush administration an acquaintance was working himself into a state describing some twisted and nefarious scheme Bush supposedly had concocted. Trying to conceal any trace of irony, I said that Bush must be some sort of evil genius to have thought of this. The liberal paused for a moment and then replied, "I wouldn't say he's a genius." I confess that when I heard about the new book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, I feared that author Steven Teles (who is not a conservative, as far as I can tell) had treated his subject as a tale of evil genius conservative lawyers and operatives seizing control of the legal establishment through brilliance, will power, money, and a ruthlessness liberals were too pure to match. It turns out, however, that Teles has written his book in part to explode this myth of "diabolical competence." As Teles explained today during a two-hour session at the American Enterprise Institute, the rise of the conservative legal movement was not a brilliant plot or a centralized conspiracy. Rather, it was the result of much trial and error. In fact, Teles argues, the most carefully plotted efforts to overcome the entrenched legal establishment - e.g., the conservative public interest law project of the 1970s - were the least successful. According to Teles, conservatives succeeded only once they learned to rely on networking over hierarchy, on talented people over specific projects, and on ideas over marketing. And they succeeded only after they decoupled the conservative legal movement from the interests of big business and traditional conservative groups. In other words, the movement succeeded when it became about big ideas, not about pet litigation projects. Elections also matter, of course. But Teles contends, and conservatives have come to understand, that in the legal world winning elections isn't enough. That's because presidents can only nominate judges from the existing pool of acceptable candidates. Moreover, "acceptability" is defined to a considerable degree by institutions, including the ones that train and accredit lawyers. And institutions also help determine which legal arguments are accorded respect and "mainstream" status. Nor can the president propose new legal doctrines as he would, say, a five percent tax cut. Supreme Court rulings are the product of litigation, and the president rarely has much say about the timing of litigation. Teles, then, is a "supply side" legal theorist in this sense: popular demand is not sufficient to bring about a change in the legal landscape; there must also be an adequate supply of the talent, institutions, and litigation to make the change happen. And these cannot be created overnight. The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement is the story of how conservatives engaged in the "elite mobilization" necessary to satisfy the supply side, and how, through trial and error, they ended up doing so in entrepreneurial, relatively informal, and idea-centric ways. The approach conservatives likely would have favored from the start had they not been inclined in the first instance to mimic liberals. UPDATE: I should add that I have not read Teles's book; these comments are based on his AEI presentation. I can vouch, however, for the book's appeal across ideological lines. The three panelists at the AEI event, Michael Greve of AEI, Jack Balkin of Yale Law School, and William Galston of Brookings all praised the book, as did an audience member and friend who played a significant role in the rise of the conservative legal movement. powerlineblog.com