Legal conservatives face a conundrum: A second presidential term for Donald Trump would offer great promise yet also would threaten grave peril for the causes and principles that the conservative legal movement espouses.
What we call “the conservative legal movement” is the loose coalition of lawyers, judges, and thinkers that organized around the nascent Federalist Society in the early 1980s. In the decades since, this coalition has vastly expanded and soared in influence. It has challenged liberal orthodoxy, established originalism as the predominant method of interpreting legal texts, developed generations of law students, and driven Republican presidents and senators to select and support outstanding conservative judicial candidates.
