This series documents how concentrated wealth and power have compelled government at every level to circumvent constitutionally guaranteed rights across 150 years of American history. The mechanisms are documented. The actors are named. The funding sources are in the public record. The law did not drift. It was moved, one exception at a time, by people who understood exactly what they were doing and left a paper trail that has been waiting in libraries and archives for someone to assemble it in a single place and point at it directly.
The hollowing operates on four tracks simultaneously.
You do not need to capture every judge. You need to control who becomes a judge. You need to do it a generation before the cases you care about reach the docket. You need patience, money, and a theory of the judiciary as an institution to be shaped rather than a branch of government to be respected. All three were available.
Henry Manne's judge education program solved one problem: it reshaped the analytical frameworks of judges who were already on the bench. It did not solve the upstream problem of who became a judge in the first place. A judge who attended a Manne seminar at Kiawah Island had already been appointed. His prior legal education, his clerkship, his professional network, his jurisprudential commitments had already been formed by processes that the Powell infrastructure did not yet fully control.
The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 to solve the upstream problem.
Three law students at Yale Law School, Steven Calabresi, Lee Liberman, and David McIntosh, working with a faculty advisor named Robert Bork, organized a symposium on federalism and separation of powers that became the founding event of what would become the most consequential legal organization in American history. The Society was simultaneously founded at Harvard and the University of Chicago. Seed funding came from the Institute for Educational Affairs, itself funded by the Olin Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation. Additional early funding came from the Scaife foundations.
A law student with conservative or libertarian legal commitments joins the Federalist Society chapter at his law school. He attends events, develops relationships with faculty members who are Society members or sympathizers, and builds a network of peers who share his jurisprudential commitments. He clerks for a federal judge whose jurisprudence aligns with Society commitments. He practices at a firm or in government in positions where his work is visible to the network. He is evaluated, informally, by the network's members when judicial vacancy positions arise. He is recommended, informally, through the network when nominations are being considered. He is confirmed, formally, by a Senate Judiciary Committee in which Society members among Republican senators play significant roles.
The pipeline from law school to clerkship to federal bench to Supreme Court nomination takes approximately twenty to thirty years. The Federalist Society was founded in 1982. The first Supreme Court Justice with a documented Federalist Society connection, Clarence Thomas, was confirmed in 1991. By 2020, six of the nine sitting Supreme Court Justices were either current or former Federalist Society members or had been identified with its network. The two most recent appointments at the time of this writing, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, were made from lists compiled by the Heritage Foundation and vetted through the Federalist Society network.
In 2016 Donald Trump published a list of potential Supreme Court nominees compiled by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. Every nominee had been vetted through the network. The public list was the formalization of a process that had been operating informally for thirty years.
The pipeline is not a conspiracy in any meaningful sense. The Federalist Society is a public organization with a public membership list and public funding sources. Its events are open. Its journal is published. Its members do not deny their affiliation. The organization has been profiled extensively in mainstream journalism and legal scholarship. Its influence on the federal judiciary is openly acknowledged by its members as a success story.
What makes it significant for this series is not its secrecy but its function. The pipeline converts the investment made in law school programs, funded by the Olin Foundation and related sources, into judicial appointments that apply the doctrine those programs developed, in cases that determine whether the legal protections for democratic participation and worker rights that this series has documented are enforced or hollowed.
The judges trained in this pipeline wrote the opinions in Citizens United, Shelby County, Janus, and Trump v. United States. The opinions they wrote are the most recent entries in the ledger that begins at the Wormley Hotel on February 26, 1877. The pipeline did not change the Constitution. It changed who interprets it, trained in a framework funded by the same interests the Constitution's protections were written to constrain.
The Powell Memo in 1971 identified the judiciary as the most important institution to capture. The Manne seminars beginning in 1976 shaped the frameworks of sitting judges. The Federalist Society beginning in 1982 solved the upstream problem by shaping who would become judges in the first place. The Olin Foundation funded both the scholarship that shaped the curriculum and the student organizations that identified the people who would be trained in it.
Forty years. Named organizations. Public funding records. Documented outcomes in the judicial appointments, the confirmed Justices, and the opinions those Justices have written. The chain from the Powell Memo to the current Supreme Court is documented, step by step, in the public record. The room changes. The lawyers stay. The pipeline runs.
The Federalist Society's founding, funding, and influence on federal judicial appointments is documented in its own public records, in published scholarship, and in investigative journalism. The connection between the Society's vetting process and specific judicial nominations is documented in contemporaneous reporting on the 2016 and 2020 Trump nominee lists.