| Law schools and the legal profession
are currently strongly dominated by a form of orthodox liberal ideology
which advocates a centralized and uniform society. While some members of
the academic community have dissented from these views, by and large they
are taught simultaneously with (and indeed as if they were) the law.
The Federalist Society for Law and
Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested
in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles
that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental
powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the
province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it
should be. The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles
and to further their application through its activities. This entails reordering
priorities with the legal system to place a premium on individual liberty,
traditional values, and the rule of law. It also requires restoring the
recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, law
students and professors. |
