STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES

The Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the state of the legal order. 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. From a position of shared values, 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.

We start from the following principles:

. That the state exists to preserve individual freedom;

. That economic and political liberties are inextricably intertwined;

. That the separation 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 determinations;

.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 governmental power;

.That this expansion has been at the expense of individuals' 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 purpose 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 independent 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 purposes.

.The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.