In our recent recommendation report on People’s Parity Project, Blue Tent advises progressive donors to support the upstart legal organization. The young group has been responsible for a number of law firms dropping the mandatory arbitration agreements in their employment contracts, and is now setting out to push back on the conservative dominion over federal courts and the law. PPP is in early stages, but it’s already building a network of like-minded lawyers, forming chapters at dozens of law schools and advocating for court reform at the federal level.
If that last sentence sounds familiar, it’s because that’s essentially the mirror image mission of the conservative and highly successful Federalist Society, which has grown as both a bogeyman and aspiration for many on the left. For years now, especially after President Donald Trump was able to stack the federal bench and Supreme Court with rightwing judges, liberals have been asking: Where is our Federalist Society?
Such a question is great news for a group like PPP, but should sound alarm bells for the American Constitution Society, the group founded in 2001 to fill exactly that role.
Following the partisan Bush v. Gore Supreme Court ruling that effectively decided the 2000 election, law professor Peter Rubin founded ACS as a liberal counterweight to FedSoc. But nearly 20 years later, the conservative legal movement has only grown its power; hence, the common assumption on the left that an equivalent organization simply doesn’t exist. So even though the ACS now has a seven-figure annual budget, dozens of staffers, and student and lawyer chapters spread throughout the country, the question persists: “Why is there no FedSoc for the left?”
Increasingly, what many progressives hunger for is a more aggressive approach to the courts and to judges. They want Democrats to recognize the power of the judiciary and its indisputably political nature, and to stop being outplayed by Republicans at seemingly every turn. Doing this will require building a pipeline for progressive lawyers to become judges; advancing new ideas instead of simply trying to dispel conservative ones; and using all the tools of political leverage and advocacy to make the courts a bigger issue for progressive lawmakers and their voters.
Both PPP and ACS are active in all three of these strategies, with the two groups especially focused on ideas and pipeline-building. Yet PPP has still found a base of support and energy for its vision, despite ACS being much larger, better-funded and significantly older. Demand Justice, another progressive newcomer to legal battles with a hard-hitting approach, has also grown quickly since its founding in 2018.
What PPP lacks in experience and money, it makes up for in purpose and ideology. PPP members share a status as outsiders to both the liberal and conservative legal establishments, questioning not only the conservative doctrines of originalism and textualism that are applied selectively to support right-wing ideas, but liberal jurisprudence and lawyering that serves corporate interests and cedes power to the right. ACS has been slippery about defining its ideological vision outside of “not conservative,” and continues to take large donations from corporate law firms and massive tech companies.
With progressives trending more in favor of an aggressive posture toward the courts, ACS has shown some signs of improvement under former Senator Russ Feingold as its president, who has made the organization more active and engaged. But PPP and Demand Justice have emerged and thrived for a reason: They are filling a void that ACS was meant to occupy and donors are responding.