With the Bush Administration continuing to fill the federal courts with right-wing judges, liberals have turned with renewed vigor to a strategy that not only allows them to defeat individual nominees but also to raise awareness and activism, particularly among the next generation of lawyers. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will step into the debate this summer, when she addresses the first-ever national convention of the American Constitution Society, an organization founded, as the group's executive director David Halperin explains, to "encourage students and others to care about and influence a progressive vision of the law."

The coup of getting Ginsburg to speak at their gathering was no small accomplishment, but ACS already has the support of a number of other well-known liberals, including Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, former solicitor generals Walter Dellinger and Drew Days, and former Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge, White House counsel and Congressman Abner Mikva. As a result, in little more than a year, the group has more than seventy chapters, designed to provide a nucleus of support and activity for progressives on law school campuses and help them better engage in intellectual battles over legal and public policy. (One group of Georgetown law students affiliated with ACS submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of the University of Michigan's affirmative-action policy in the recently argued case.)

While the group's focus is unabashedly liberal, it's not the first public-interest organization to appreciate that recruitment on campuses can have dramatic consequences in the political arena, including in judicial selection. Indeed, in building its fledgling network of law students, ACS has unapologetically taken a page from the conservative playbook, specifically the ultraconservative group of lawyers and law students known as the Federalist Society.

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