The original ambition was not so grand. A handful of conservative law students at the University of Chicago, Yale and Harvard in the early 1980s wanted an outlet for their maverick notions of the law amid the liberal domination of the legal academy. “When we started the Federalist Society, we didn’t know we were starting the Federalist Society,” Lee Liberman Otis, one of the Chicago co-founders, told me. “We thought we were starting groups at each of our law schools. … ‘Let’s start something where we could talk about those ideas.’ ”
The students announced a national symposium to be held at Yale in the spring of 1982. Word spread ahead of the conference, and so many letters came from students at other schools asking how to start a chapter that Otis says she and another co-founder quickly drafted a guide. Daniel Kelly was a senior at the College of the Holy Cross and applying to law school when he heard about it. Thrilled at the prospect, he and some friends drove 100 miles from Worcester, Mass., to New Haven, Conn., and slept on the floor of a friend’s Yale dorm. “They were saying something that seemed completely plain sense and true to us,” Kelly recalls, “which is when you look at the Constitution, you should look at the way the framers wrote it and interpret it as best you can based upon the intention of the framers.” Kelly is now head of the Federalist Society lawyers chapter in Boston, where, in late October, Sessions gave one of his last speeches as attorney general.
Speakers at that first symposium included future justice Antonin Scalia, who was then a law professor at the University of Chicago and a mentor to the campus Federalist Society chapter. Choosing as his topic “The Two Faces of Federalism,” Scalia presumed that his audience was on a mission to influence national policy, and so he told the gathering: “I urge you, then — as Hamilton would have urged you — to keep in mind that the federal government is not bad but good. The trick is to use it wisely.”
Another speaker was future solicitor general Ted Olson, who was then an assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel. “I didn’t have any idea how far it would go or what it would become,” Olson told me, “but I did feel at the time … this is something interesting happening here.” In his address to that first symposium, he said: “I sense that we are at one of those points in history where the pendulum may be beginning to swing in another direction. Of course, we do not know now, and no one will really know until many years from now, whether the 1980 elections have wrought a significant and long-lasting change. But I think that there is an opportunity here; and the organization of this society and this symposium is a cause for optimism and a sign that perhaps something is happening.”
From there, the story of the Federalist Society’s influence became the story of approximately 70,000 random epiphanies. That’s roughly the number of active participants in the society today, according to its leadership. My admittedly unscientific sample of a dozen Federalists’ personal stories — backed up by political scientists’ more systematic research into the question — suggests that each individual Federalist is akin to an excited synapse in a sprawling hive mind with no one actually in charge.