Saturday, May 11, 2013

"Enumerating Heresies and Defining Orthodoxies"

"'There is much that citizens from all points on the ideological spectrum can learn from the story of the Federalist Society,' Avery and McLaughlin conclude. And indeed there is. Although they don’t spell out the lessons for liberals, at least two emerge from the data they present. First, the various strands of legal liberalism—civil libertarians, Great Society liberals, neoprogressive technocrats, economic populists and advocates of equal rights on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation—would do well to set aside their ideological differences and converge around a common approach to constitutional interpretation that citizens can understand. And second, if liberals want to take the courts back from conservatives, they have to recognize that ideas—and judicial appointments—matter."

Jeffrey Rosen in The New York Times reviews Michael Avery and Danielle McLaughlin's The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back From Liberals.

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