The American Constitution Society

The ACS often seems like the Second Sex of law school political groups, defined in opposition to the enormously (monstrously?) influential Federalist Society. "It's like FedSoc," the student staffing their table during admit weekend told me, "only liberal." So I went to their regional conference last weekend to see what they were really all about. It helped that it was all of ninety yards from my room, and they promised free breakfast and lunch.

One of the ways I describe myself politically is to say that I'm a "cynical liberal." A son of self-described yellow-dog Democrats, I agree with the general values and principles. But i don't agree with all of the left's specific policy prescriptions and certainly not all of its methods. I usually can't talk to passionate partisans for all that long at a stretch, because picking a side first leads too easily to sloppy and dishonest thinking. And in general while I'd like for government to help to make people's lives better, I'm as suspicious of its actual ability to do so as anyone who's suffered through the DMV. I've read my Burke. I was even a libertarian for a while, but I got over it. All of this horrifies NeoTokyo, who put up an impassioned defense of picking a side, even if only by hairstyle.

So my favorite part of the conference was an informal Big Ideas hash session over breakfast, where the attendees argued about what being a "Progressive" really means, beyond a list of policy positions. Someone suggested liberals needed their own version of the Contract with America, laying out a core set of beliefs, with strong intuitive appeal. Half-jokingly, I had to point out that as liberals we don't do contracts; we do entitlements. "We don't talk about Contracts with America," I argued, "we talk about The America You Deserve."

My favorite take was from a 1L here who said that it's about making formally enumerated rights substantive. "Wow," I thought, "there you've got your political and jurisprudential theories all rolled up into one! I like it!" Of course I didn't think all those big words, but writing them out sure illustrates the problem of boiling progressivism down to a snappy slogan.

In the afternoon I went to a strategy session on mission statements, where I was exposed for the first time to the general ACS mission statement:

(ACS) is one of the nation's leading progressive legal organizations. Founded in 2001, ACS is comprised of law students, lawyers, scholars, judges, policymakers, activists and other concerned individuals who are working to ensure that the fundamental principles of human dignity, individual rights and liberties, genuine equality, and access to justice are in their rightful, central place in American law.

There's some good stuff in there, and I'd probably never heard it before only because it's buried at the bottom of that paragraph. I like the emphasis on putting the principles in their "rightful" place, embracing the idealism of America's founding instead of cynically focusing on our shortcomings. If that's what it means to be a progressive, sign me up.