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Statement of Principles
The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group
of over 5,000 lawyers, judges, and academics interested in the state of the
legal order. Headquartered in Washington, DC, and comprising over 130 student
chapters and 40 lawyer chapters, we believe that principles and legal rules
strongly influence the direction of societal development and in so doing can
secure or destroy individual rights and liberties. The Society's purpose is to
investigate the role of law as one of the great organizing forces of our
society, and to participate in that shaping process, by fostering debate and
discussion of current legal, political, and social issues.
We start from the following principles;
- That the state exists to preserve individual freedom;
- That economic and political liberties are inextricably intertwined;
- That the separattion of governmental powers is central to our Constitution;
- That it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.
- That this task of objective interpretation is not so far beyond man's grasp that we
should despair, and, in the name of "realism," fall back on prejudice in
making judicial interpretations;
- That the constitutional scheme did not
contemplate the imposition by fiat of the legislative preferences of members
of the judiciary, under the banner of "societal evolution;"
- That this type
of judicial legislating, being insulated from the check of popular support,
has been a key instrument in the expansion of federal govermental
power;
- That this expansion has been at the expense of individual's
abilities to control their own destinies , and of intermediate institutions
such as families, churches, personal property, and the states, which helped to
shield people from the government's full force;
- And that the true purpoose
of the legal order is to ensure that the power conferred upon the state is
used to secure people's lives and goods, the true purpose of an independant
judiciary is to prevent the rigging of the legal order into an extension of
the sovereign's will, and that neither legal order nor judiciary is presently
serving these puposes.
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