Liberman, Lee

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Olin Foundation president William Simon, a former Treasury Secretary, has been a major player in these efforts. He is quoted in Justice For Sale: "Funds generated by business . . . must rush by multimillions to the aid of liberty . . . to funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists, writers and journalists who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty."

Simon and many others have orchestrated and coordinated "sophisticated media offensives, academic research, and advocacy efforts" with lavish funding from Aetna Life And Casualty Corporation, Exxon Corporation, Pfizer Corporation, RJR Nabisco Corporation, General Electric Corporation, Dow Corporation, Monsanto Corporation and other legal fictions chartered in our names in our several states.

Corporate money has also been rushed by multimillions to corporate fronts such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the Insurance Information Institute, the Product Liability Coordinating Committee, and the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA). (The ATRA is made up of corporation trade groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association -- thus giving corporations a decoy and accomplice group two full steps removed from their board rooms.) Judge Robert Bork, Irving Kristol, and law schools at Stanford, Yale, Columbia, George Mason, Chicago and Virginia universities have also been beneficiaries of this corporate largess.

Corporate money created the Federalist Society in 1982, helping it to gather 10,000 members at 120 law schools. "Dedicated to purging law schools and the legal system of the `orthodox liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society,'" declares Justice For Sale,

the Society is now the principal organization for recruiting, educating and mobilizing conservative students on law school campuses and showcasing conservative legal scholarship. . . . The group's influence is perhaps best exemplified by the success of its three co-founders. As a member of the White House Office of Legal Counsel, Lee Liberman was considered the "ideological gatekeeper for the Bush Administration's process for selecting judges." David McIntosh served as Executive Director of Vice President Quayle's Council on Competitiveness, and Steven Calabresi, now a professor at Northwestern University School of Law, was a special assistant to Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese.

In sum, paying for and orchestrating law and economics professors and curricula at the nation's elite schools, sponsoring conferences, Continuing Legal Education workshops, legal research and theoretical writing, as well as for massive advertising and strategic litigation, these corporation initiatives "to make conservative economic theory the cornerstone of legal decision making," documents Justice For Sale, have set up an "institutional network that will advance and sustain their cause well into the future. Integrated and intergenerational, this infrastructure includes representatives from all segments of the legal establishment -- judges, scholars, practitioners, and young apprentices hailing from the Federalist Society."

Justice For Sale is a frightening report, meticulously documented with references to the professors, theorists, and foundations behind this campaign. "Intended to provoke debate" and "instigate true reform of the legal system," it should be a catalyst for public debate and strategizing. Read it.