Hello and welcome to another very special episode of the City Journal podcast.

My name is Rafael Menguant.

I am your host and I am so excited to be joined by two of my favorite people.

We've got Jim Copeland, Ilya Shapiro, and what you may not know is that Jim

Copeland actually hired me when I first started the Manhattan Institute in 2015. So anything

that you're upset with me about, you can blame him for. It's also responsible for me being here

as well. I mean, it wasn't necessarily. Wreting all kinds of havoc. Absolutely. I call them at the tail end of my Georgetown troubles, as it were. I'm like, Jim, I... Which we're going to talk about.

I think we need to deepen our relationship here rather quickly, and he made that happen. So we're going to have a really fantastic conversation today. And what I really want to talk to you both about is where does the Manhattan Institute sit within the broader conservative legal movement?

And I think the best place to start is just to talk about what that even is.

I think a lot of people use that term sometimes pejoratively.

I don't think everyone has a good idea of what that is in their own head.

So when you hear conservative legal

movement, or is that a label that you accept? And what does it mean to you? Jim, we'll start with you.

I think it is a label, I accept. It had seeds that were before anything formal, right? So, you know,

the Federalist Society was founded as late as 1982, right? So after Ronald Reagan's election, there were

intellectual precursors before this. And of course, some of this was a reaction against

trends in the law in Hilia's world of constitutional law. That was sort of the vast expansion

of judicial authority, sometimes without clear textual rudders in the Constitution.

I put 1968 as a pivot point, kind of the birth of the modern concertive legal movement.

Forget about arguing over, you know, Lochner and things in the, you know, in the past,

whatever, but the modern movement when Nixon ran against the war in court in 68.

Talk to us a little bit about that because I do think that that's a proper pivot point, right? So, 1960, why does that matter? What is the war in court? What did they do? I talk a lot about this in my last book, Supreme Disorder, about the role of politics in on sale on Amazon. On sale, wherever you buy books. I'm sure it's like lots of percent off on Amazon, but whatever.

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