Federalist Society Hosts 17th Annual Convention
The Federalist Society will host its 17th annual national convention, Thurs.-Sat., November 13-15 at the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, D.C.
The convention will feature more than 100 distinguished and influential movers and shakers in the academic, legal, business, and public policy worlds, talking about some of the most controversial issues that will be before the courts, Congress and the Bush Administration.
The following commentators will address this year's convention:
- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
- Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft.
- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
- Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao.
- United Nations Ambassador John D. Negroponte.
- Solicitor Gen. Theodore Olson.
- Former Solicitors Gen. Robert Bork and Kenneth Starr.
- Alabama Atty. Gen. Bill Pryor.
- Deputy White House Counsel David Leitch.
- Sen. Jon Kyl (R.-Ariz.).
- Rep. Howard Berman (D.-Calif.).
Panelists will explore many controversial and cutting-edge legal and public policy issues, including several sessions that will examine:
- International law and American sovereignty.
- Political ideology in the legal academy.
- Immigration and the war on terrorism.
- Civil liberties and the war on terrorism.
- Campaign finance reform.
- Affirmative action in the wake of Grutter and Gratz.
- Ups and downs on Wall Street.
In addition, attorney Barbara Olson (1955-2001), author of Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton and The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House (published by Regnery, a sister company of HUMAN EVENTS) will be remembered in the Third Annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture, delivered by Judge Robert Bork. The speech will honor Mrs. Olson's memory by reflecting on the ideas of limited government and the spirit of freedom, values she was deeply committed to in her lifetime.
The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, and that the separation of government powers is central to our Constitution.
For more details on registration or additional information on the Federalist Society, contact Lisa Budzynski (202) 822-8138, email: [email protected] or visit their website www.fed-soc.org.
ISI Commemorates 50th Anniversary
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) celebrated its 50th anniversary with a gala celebration and black-tie dinner on October 23 at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. Some 27 separate conservative organizations and foundations sponsored the gala.
In attendance was a "Who's Who of American Conservatism" as the celebration hosted some 900 conservative dignitaries-guests and friends of ISI. William F. Buckley, Jr., founding editor of National Review, received the Charles H. Hoeflich Lifetime Achievement Award for 50 years of distinguished service to ISI and its mission to "educate for liberty."
ISI President T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr., was master of ceremonies and featured speakers for the evening included: Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., Chairman, ISI Board of Trustees, Richard M. DeVos and William F. Buckley, Jr., Honorary Co-Chairmen of ISI's 50th anniversary celebration, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who delighted the audience by describing how he had seen ISI's valuable work firsthand on several campuses and by decrying the Supreme Court's lack of attention to original intention and its failure sometimes to even differentiate between the Bill of Rights and the Constitution upon which the Bill of Rights depends.
The event launched a landmark ISI objective: the 50th anniversary campaign "Educating for Liberty . . . in Each New Generation."
This national campaign aims "to renew the American tradition of teaching each generation of college students the principles that sustain a free and humane society."
The campaign's landmark objectives include:
- Provide students and teachers the resources necessary for college-age Americans to understand and articulate basic economic thinking, the moral and political tradition of the West, and the U.S. constitutional system as designed by America's Founders.
- Employ the latest technologies in communicating the case for the free society to greater numbers of students, parents and teachers.
- Improve America's civic literacy.
- Conduct an aggressive marketing campaign to articulate the case for ISI's campaign and to make ISI's program resources available to students and faculty on virtually every college and university campus in America.
- Endow critical elements of ISI's educational program whose performance will be indispensable to nurturing in each generation an appreciation of fundamental American values.
Attendees received a copy of Lee Edward's recently published history of ISI, Educating for Liberty: The First Half-Century of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The 343-page book covers the early period of ISI, from its initial founding as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists in April 1952 shortly after the publication of Frank Chodorov's article "For Our Children's Children" in HUMAN EVENTS.
(Attendees of the ISI gala also received a four-page reprint of Chodorov's HUMAN EVENTS article as it originally appeared in the issue of Sept. 6, 1950.)
The name of ISI was changed to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 1966 when a number of the board members and trustees believed that the "Individualists" part of ISI's name failed to define the organization's traditional conservative orientation.
Over the years, ISI has sponsored a number of influential conservative journals, including the Intercollegiate Review and Modern Age, and it currently serves as the distributor of Roger Scruton's Salisbury Review.
ISI has also sponsored Weaver Fellowships, named after the influential University of Chicago English professor Richard M. Weaver, who died suddenly at age 53 of a heart attack in April 1963. Weaver's book Ideas Have Consequences has remained in print since it first appeared in 1948. ISI Books also publishes a number of new and classic conservative titles, including a new edition of Russell Kirk's The Roots of American Order (November 2003).
The latest ISI initiative is the Center For the Study of American Civic Literacy, which is designed to assemble concrete evidence on the extent to which college students learn about U.S. history and institutions.
For more information on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute visit the ISI website: www.isi.org.
