Sait Serkan Gurbuz/AP Photo
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch speaks at the Federalist Society’s 2017 National Lawyers Convention in Washington, D.C., November 16, 2017.
At the conspicuously located 1776 I Street in Washington D.C., a dark spire rises from the Federalist Society’s headquarters, surveying the nation’s capital. From the tower’s peak, the White House, K Street, and the Supreme Court mark the landscape below, institutions that bear a lasting impression from four decades of unrelenting conservative takeover. A mile or so west, at Georgetown University, law students mingle at Federalist Society cocktail parties, readying themselves to join the 60,000 attorneys, judges, and legal theorists who make up the organization’s sprawling network, and who have been the primary drivers of this assault.
Since its founding in 1982, the Federalist Society has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in the name of furthering archconservative legal doctrine. Claiming five current Supreme Court justices, the deciding votes in the 2000 presidential election, and the minds of countless future attorneys, the Federalist Society has never faced a challenge to its judicial supremacy. Until now.
The People’s Parity Project (PPP), founded in 2018 by four Harvard Law students, was initially conceived as an activist group to reform the legal profession. In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the #MeToo movement, the organization kicked off by advocating against the forced-arbitration contracts used by corporate law firms to silence young attorneys, while also calling attention to the gender and racial discrimination running rampant in highly competitive clerkships.
At the end of a political era that saw the appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh—a member of the Federalist Society whose track record exemplifies everything the People’s Parity Project stands to oppose—the upstart legal group has grown into a sprawling and multifaceted organization, equipped to challenge not only the Federalist Society, but the economic and social formations that enabled and sustained its rise. With support from Demand Justice and the Center for Popular Democracy, the People’s Parity Project has lobbied President Joe Biden to appoint a vetted suite of progressives for circuit court judgeships, successfully ended forced arbitration at massive firms like Kirkland & Ellis (for both attorney and non-attorney staff), and launched chapters at over a dozen high-profile law schools, including Harvard, NYU, and the University of Michigan. On these campuses, a new, progressive legal dogma is starting to take shape.
“Law school plays a huge role in creating a series of blinders that elevate prestige and competition and which can turn law students into high-achieving drones who won’t question their role in a fundamentally corrupt environment,” Anne Tewksbury, a PPP chapter organizer at NYU, told the Prospect. “But our rigged legal system isn’t actually fixed in place: It’s made up of lawyers like us. And we do have power here when we bring a labor organizing approach to this work and remind ourselves and our classmates that we’re not just fighting the system from the outside, but that after graduating, we’re going to be the system.”
The core tenets of organized labor play a recurring role in both the structure and philosophy of the PPP, from an organizing model that seeks to recruit new members by advocating for their rights on campus, to the chapters’ growing ranks of students pressuring politicians on radical labor reforms like the PRO Act. PPP’s campaign against forced arbitration also situates the rights of lawyers alongside minimum-wage workers, arguing that nobody should be forced to sign coercive contracts, given their staggering impact on the workforce. According to the PPP, $12.6 billion was stolen from low-wage workers in 2019 due to forced arbitration, 98 percent of workers abandon employment claims when the only option is arbitration, and 60 million U.S. workers are now blocked by forced arbitration from suing for their rights.
Molly Coleman, executive director of PPP, told the Prospect that to fix America’s legal system, the first step is removing the barriers for progressive lawyers to enter into the federal courts and the executive branch. “There’s no other profession where you’re told that what you do with 50 percent of your working hours says nothing about you,” Coleman said. “From day one, you are taught that questions of law are divorced from political and moral questions, and that’s what we’re working to change. For so long, the Democratic Party has been fine with corporate lawyers, so we’re not only fighting against the conservative dogma of the Federalist Society, but also the corporate dogma that exists on the left.”
The corporate catechism that Coleman describes has long thrived within the American Constitution Society (ACS), a legal group founded on the false belief that a coterie of powerful lawyers and Democratic insiders could create an equal and opposing force to rival the Federalist Society. But since its establishment after the 2000 presidential election decision, the ACS has only evinced the same corporate fealty as the Democratic Party that first spawned it, recently drawing public ire after The Intercept reported that Amazon’s VP of labor relations, Andrew DeVore, sat on its board.
Even with DeVore’s recent resignation, the ACS board and advisers still boast corporate lawyers like Mark Califano, who previously served as the senior vice president and managing counsel for litigation at American Express, and as the senior vice president and head of litigation and legal policy at GE Capital.
“Our rigged legal system isn’t actually fixed in place: It’s made up of lawyers like us.”
As The New York Times increasingly likens Biden to FDR after the successful passage of the sweeping American Rescue Plan, PPP is simultaneously attempting to cultivate a progressive legal doctrine to accompany the increasingly populist realignment of the Democratic Party. Part of that realignment will mean reclaiming the federal judiciary from the dozens of Trump appointees, and fighting to create a progressive pipeline that funnels like-minded lawyers into the halls of American legal and political power. The asymmetry in both funding and raw political might between a progressive organization that rejects corporate cash and the Koch-backed Federalist Society signals an uphill battle. But PPP members believe the same model of issue-focused, activist-driven organizing that has carried progressive firebrands to Washington also holds the power to overcome the obstacles barring the path to an equitable and progressive legal ecosystem.
“At the end of January, we decided to start alerting students about the big firms recruiting on campus that had forced-arbitration clauses and firms that worked for Trump in his efforts to overturn the election to try to give students an out from enlisting,” Alexis Pozonsky, PPP’s George Washington University chapter co-president, told the Prospect. “The great thing about PPP is that the national group is so organized and they have so many different campaigns running at the same time that there is always a campaign or project that is going to speak to the specific interests of a range of activists on campus.”
One such campaign revolves around attempting to install high-profile progressive judicial nominees, like Tiffany Cabán, the former Working Families Party candidate for Queens district attorney; Veena Dubal, law professor at UC Hastings and vocal workers’ rights advocate; and Marbre Stahly-Butts, executive director of Law for Black Lives. While the PPP anticipates pushback from the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, its members also believe that the drastic reforms necessitated by the Trump presidency means now is not the time to make concessions.
“You’re always taught that collegiality matters more than anything else, so it becomes a culture where you can’t question anything or anyone,” Coleman said. “We’re not trying to be collegial. We’re trying to take on the legal establishment.”
