A judicial think tank - or a plot?

Suspicion that hidden groups sway the powerful and subvert democracy routinely surfaces in American life, especially at times when the country is deeply divided. In early decades of the Republic, the whispers were about Freemasons. Later, they ranged from bankers and communists to the Trilateral Commission.

Now, it's the Federalist Society. In the run-up to the first Supreme Court confirmation in more than a decade, the group is drawing fire, especially as Democrats sharpen their line of questioning about court nominee John Roberts and his links to the society.

On its face, the Federalist Society is just another think tank in a town awash with them. But critics see something more - a well-oiled juggernaut out to remake the courts in the image of Robert Bork, the Supreme Court nominee rejected by the Senate in 1987, who predicted that a new generation, "often associated with the Federalist Society," would transform the legal profession:

"It may take 10 years, it may take 20 years for the second wave to crest, but crest it will, and it will sweep the elegant, erudite, pretentious and toxic detritus of nonoriginalism out to sea," he said in a 1987 speech. Judge Bork now cochairs the society's Board of Visitors with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) of Utah, a member and former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. [Editor's note: The original version had Hatch representing Nevada instead of Utah.]

"Twenty years later, the organization designed to carry forward Bork's jurisprudence is trying to get access to the top courts in the country," says Alfred Ross, president and founder of the Institute for Democracy Studies (IDS) in New York. "It's extremely dangerous."

More than a third of the judges President Bush has sent to appeals courts are members of the Federalist Society, say Democratic staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee. (That compares with zero for his predecessor, President Clinton.) It's a talking point the Bush White House takes so seriously that it asked news organizations to retract reports that Judge Roberts has ever been a member.

But what is so insidious - or even surprising - about a conservative president appointing lawyers who belong to a conservative legal club?

Not much, say some legal experts. "I wasn't surprised or shocked that most of these folks have at least one degree of connection with the Federalist Society, because they're conservative lawyers and the Federalist Society is a conservative organization," says Akhil Reed Amar, a Yale University law professor.

Founded in 1982 by three law students to counter what they saw as a "liberal hegemony" in their law school faculties, the Federalist Society has grown to 35,000 members. Since recent press coverage of the group's clout after the Roberts nomination, membership has spiked. "It's something you don't expect in the middle of the summer," says Eugene Meyer, the society's president.

Its founding principles include promotion of limited government, separation of powers, the rule of law, individual freedom, and "the idea that the courts should say what the law is, not what it ought to be."

The group's founders describe the climate in law schools at the time as hostile to conservatives. "We thought of ourselves as wanting to rescue the Constitution from the Supreme Court," says cofounder Steven Calabresi, now professor of law at Northwestern University. "The Federalist Society has become a kind of law school without walls."

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