The Federalist Society Remains Rife With Insurrectionists. Its Leaders Don't Care.

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Nicholas Wallace
@n1n2w3
I should be studying for the bar, but instead I wrote this piece calling on the legal community to boycott @FedSoc until it takes meaningful steps to disavow the insurrectionist movement many of its leaders and members have supported.

The Federalist Society Remains Rife With Insurrectionists. Its Leaders Don’t Care.
A group so complicit in the Jan. 6 insurrection should not occupy a place of respect in the legal community.
slate.com
10:00 AM · Jul 16, 2021

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/07/federalist-society-insurrection-cowards.html

Two months ago, on the eve of my graduation from Stanford Law School, I learned that the Stanford chapter of the Federalist Society had filed a complaint against me over a satirical flyer I sent to a law school listserv in January. The flyer advertised an event at which Senator Joshua Hawley and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, both long-time Federalist Society members, would make “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection.”

The flyer was a joke, but the officers of the Stanford Federalist Society weren’t laughing. Instead, in a letter of complaint filed with Stanford’s Office of Community Standards, these third-year law students alleged that I had defamed Hawley, Paxton, and the Federalist Society itself. The immediate implications of this allegation were serious: Stanford put a hold on my diploma pending the outcome of their investigation, jeopardizing my graduation and admission to the bar.

In one sense, the Federalist Society students who filed the complaint against me had a point. Defamation is a false statement of fact that causes harm to the reputation of the person or organization targeted. And I cannot deny that I hoped “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection” would do just that. Where the complaint’s authors went off course, however, was in contending that “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection” presented a statement of fact—that the advertised event was actually going to occur. In reality, I trusted that the audience for my flyer, a group of law students, would deploy their well-honed critical reading skills and spot the clues that this event was not for real. (The flyer explained, for example, that violent insurrection is also known as “doing a coup,” and advertised an event that would have occurred weeks earlier, on Jan. 6.)

In other words, rather than impairing the Federalist Society’s reputation by spreading a lie, a necessary element of defamation, I hoped to do so by drawing attention to the organization’s all-too-real connections to the Jan. 6 insurrection. In the six months since the attack, the Federalist Society leaders who sought to overturn the results of a free and fair election have faced virtually no consequences, and the organization itself has refused to condemn the insurrectionists in its ranks. An organization that tolerates efforts to undermine democracy should not be permitted to remain in good standing in the legal community. At minimum, attorneys, law scholars, and law students should refuse to participate in the organization’s events until it takes meaningful steps to disavow the anti-democratic movement so many of its members have supported.

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