About Us

At the 250th anniversary of our Nation's founding, The Federalist Society’s mission to promote and defend the enduring values that animated the Founders is more important than ever.

The Federalist Society is marking America's 250th anniversary with a celebration of the ideas, people, and documents that built the freest nation in history.

Please click here to learn more about how The Federalist Society is commemorating America250.

Our Purpose

“The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be. The Society seeks to promote awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.”

— The Federalist Society’s Mission Statement, 1982

Our Founding

The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies was founded in 1982 by and for students committed to ensuring that the principles embodied in our Constitution would receive a fair hearing inside law schools.

Three of the Society’s founders — Steven Calabresi, Lee Liberman Otis, and David McIntosh — met as undergrads at Yale University. As law students at Yale (Calabresi) and University of Chicago (Otis and McIntosh), they partnered with Spencer Abraham (Harvard) to launch the first student conference at Yale in 1982.

Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776, by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris

The National Review published the first known reference to The Federalist Society in April 1982, inviting readers to learn more about the Society’s first convening, which would feature, among others, “Antonin Scalia, editor of Regulation Magazine.”

National Review, April 2, 1982, p. 336 (click to view the full page)

“It is not these dignitaries [deans, judges, and the U.S. attorney general in attendance at the first National Lawyers Convention] who are the real cause for hope, however. What is an enormously refreshing and hopeful sign is to see the young people who make up the membership of the Federalist Society. Earnest, intelligent and unpretentious, these are young men and women of whom any nation and any age could be proud. You need only talk to them for a few minutes to know that they are for real in their efforts to grapple with the problems and dangers facing American society. ... The overriding purpose of the Federalist Society, like that of the original Federalists of two hundred years ago, is to fight for the Constitution of the United States.”

— Thomas Sowell on attending The Federalist Society’s first National Lawyers Convention, 1987

From its humble beginning among a handful of law students scattered across three law schools, more than 40 years later The Federalist Society is now the Nation’s largest and most influential network of conservative and libertarian law students, lawyers, academics, and judges.

As Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito said at a Federalist Society conference in 2020, The Federalist Society is an essential institution for fostering the tolerance of opposing viewpoints at a time when such tolerance is in “short supply.”