[tptacek]

Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait. FedSoc and ACLU have entirely different missions. FedSoc's liberal competitor is, as you know, the ACS. You didn't cite them because they're smaller than FedSoc, and you wanted the comparison more convenient to your argument.

I'm also not alarmed by FedSoc (or ALEC or any of this stuff), but come on, make serious arguments.

[rayiner]

Yes and no. ACS is similar to FedSoc in that it just does thought leadership and not impact litigation. But you can’t discount that organizations like ACLU also do thought leadership in addition to impact litigation. ACS is so small in part because people who champion e.g. liberal views of immigration law can go into immigration specific organizations. In practice the entity opposite FedSoc on particular issues isn’t ACS, but those other organizations. If you go to a typical law school campus, there will be student chapters of dozens of liberal (or de facto liberal) organizations, while on the other side there will be Fed Soc, CLS, and maybe the St. Thomas Moore Society. There will also be numerous legal clinics, which are de facto liberal impact litigation shops.

[tptacek]

But there are dozens of conservative public interest law non-profits, too, many with tens of millions of dollars in funding. We pay attention to FedSoc not because of its advocacy, but because it's a pipeline for conservative judges, like the ACS is for liberal judges. You've narrowed one side of the field but kept the other broad to set up a bogus comparison.

Again: I think the hyperventilation over FedSoc is silly, and FedSoc is doing a thing that "should" be done (I'm not a conservative).