The U.S. Right-wing Group Behind a Conservative Legal Revolution in Israel
The Israel Law and Liberty Forum, which Knesset justice committee chairman Simcha Rothman helped establish, aspires to create a new generation of conservative judges
When Israel’s Judicial Appointments Committee met in November 2021, a conservative Israeli think tank – the Kohelet Policy Forum – provided the right-wing representatives on it with a report concerning potential candidates for the Supreme Court.
It ultimately expressed disappointment with the candidates. “In a deeper analysis, and with a historical view, it is not a coincidence that it is not possible to find change-makers who grew up inside the system,” the Forum wrote. “So, in our opinion, there is an unambiguous preference for candidates with vision from the outside. The system needs out-of-the-box thinking to create the needed conservative change,” it added.
“Enclosed please find an opinion we have formed after having painstakingly gone over dozens of verdicts. We analyzed these verdicts, searched for prominently good and bad verdicts by the candidates and noted them,” reads the explanatory text to one opinion from Kohelet (first revealed by Haaretz in 2021).
“The court system’s mainstream trends toward activism, so a conservative personality would go with the existing activism,” read one of the opinions. “Therefore, we actually seek a bold personality with conservative beliefs. Conservative toward elected officials, but bold toward judicial precedent. The system requires out-of-the-box thinking to effect the required conservative change,” it stated.
The opinion did not mention the intensive activities of another right-wing organization that aspires to create a conservative legal revolution in Israel, similar to the one in the United States, by molding a new generation of lawyers who can then conquer the legal system – with the Supreme Court being the jewel in the crown. The method is long-term investment through recruiting, training and nurturing the careers of young right-wing lawyers.
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This organization is called the Israel Law and Liberty Forum, founded in 2019 by conservative U.S. nonprofit the Tikvah Fund. The Liberty Forum website states that it was “inspired by the Federalist Society” – which is one of the most influential right-wing organizations in Washington today and supported the candidacies of most current U.S. Supreme Court justices.
Israel’s Liberty Forum is not only inspired by the Federalist Society, but also operates using similar-sounding methods.
The Tikvah Fund’s chairman is Elliott Abrams, who served in a number of official positions for the Reagan administration and later under President George W. Bush. Abrams has been a contributor to the Federalist Society and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, according to its website.
The Federalist Society celebrated its 40th anniversary last April. It looked like any other student organization in its early days – but the group that brings together right-wing lawyers understood from the start that dramatic change would come only after a generation. It enjoys generous funding and works systematically, year after year, to recruit conservative lawyers and law students, starting at age 18.
It is safe to say that its efforts have paid off: six of the nine justices on the current U.S. Supreme Court are (or were) members of the Federalist Society. Five of them – who all controversially ruled last year that there is no constitutional right to abortion in the United States – are products of the Federalist project after being recruited as students and nurtured throughout their careers, until eventually being picked to serve on the highest court.
Leonard Leo, the society’s former vice president and now co-chairman of its board of directors, is the person who chose these justices and recommended them to then-presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Leo recognized a long time ago that whoever drafts the shortlist of judicial candidates presented to the president is in practice able to shape the court in his or her own image.
In Israel, the effort to create a conservative “judicial reserve” is still in its infancy, but it seems that the head of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, MK Simcha Rothman (Religious Zionism), is the critical link in the chain.
Rothman is currently playing a starring role in the government’s efforts to weaken the judicial system by helping to introduce new legislation that would allow a simple majority of 61 lawmakers to override a Supreme Court ruling. He is set to release a short book in Hebrew soon entitled “Why Shouldn’t the People Choose the Judges?,” where he will present his case for the changes he is working so hard to implement (along with Justice Minister Yariv Levin from the Likud party).
While his work in the Knesset would change the system for selecting judges (among many other things), it turns out that Rothman was also involved in the establishment of the Israel Law and Liberty Forum.
In an interview with Haaretz, he explains how – similar to the United States before the establishment of the Federalist Society – it is hard to find “true conservative lawyers” in Israel. Or, in his words, those who did not “grow in the fields of” former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak.
Even though the Liberty Forum refuses to say whether it considers the appointment of conservative judges its ultimate goal, Rothman openly admits that his aspiration is to ensure that the right can appoint those “true conservative judges” in the future.
The American model
In about 2017, when he was active in the Movement for Governability and Democracy (which he had founded at the beginning of the 2010s), Rothman met with the head of the international department of the Federalist Society while he was visiting Israel.
“He heard what I was doing and said, ‘It’s similar to what we’re doing there, so come to our annual conference and see what it is.’ That’s how I met the members of the organization and I learned how they worked in the past,” Rothman recounts. “I went to the conference, attended lectures. I heard the people and got to know a little more. Really interesting. I also got the idea of how to build something similar in Israel.”
The Tikvah Fund and the Federalist Society were already in contact, but there was nothing concrete at that stage. “When they saw there was someone to work with, I told them what there was and what there wasn’t,” Rothman says. Soon afterward, the Tikvah Fund founded the Israel Law and Liberty Forum and Rothman joined its delegation to the United States. He was accompanied by Liberty Forum Chairwoman Aylana Meisel – who is also the deputy director general of the Tikvah Fund in Israel – and its executive director, Yonatan (Johnny) Green.
Rothman has never held an official position with the forum, but often participates in its events. Last year, as a lawmaker from the Religious Zionism party, for instance, he took part in a discussion on “the politics behind the process of appointing judges,” together with Ilya Shapiro – a former vice president of the Cato Institute, which is regarded as the world’s leading libertarian think tank.
When the Federalist Society was founded in 1982, even its founders couldn’t imagine how much power they would accumulate some 40 years later. As opposed to its Israeli arm, the U.S. initiative was born almost by accident: Three law students at Yale and the University of Chicago were upset over the liberal biases of their law professors and decided to found a group to promote a more conservative legal discourse on campus. They very quickly discovered they were not alone as a large number of other students who had hitherto opted to remain quiet heard about them – and suddenly found themselves a home.
Two conservative law professors – Antonin Scalia, later one of the leading conservative justices on the Supreme Court, and Richard Epstein, a libertarian law professor at the University of Chicago – became patrons of the group and put the founders in touch with well-connected donors. These were only too happy to fund their activities and encourage right-wing education. Thus, the Federalist Society was able to grow in just a few short years and establish branches at hundreds of universities all over the united States, and even outside the country.
The power of a community
Over the years, the Federalist Society went from being a student club to a network of tens of thousands of active legal professionals, including lawyers, professors and judges. The events and conferences the society held enabled members to create an informal network of connections – and this in turn forged a community.
That is the secret to the society’s power and is responsible for its status as the heart of the rightist legal community in the United States. This is also its greatest power when attempting to attract conservative students on campus – which its Israeli cousin wisely chose to import.
“In Israel, there are a lot – an awful lot – of right-wing and conservative [legal professionals] who are very, very afraid today,” Rothman says. “When I went to conferences of the [Israel] Bar Association, people would come up to me quietly, afraid to be seen with me, and tell me with sort of a secret handshake: ‘Listen, we’re totally with you, but if we say it they’ll fire us or not promote us.’ The Liberty Forum gives them a feeling that they’re not alone; that they don’t need to be ashamed of what they are. We are, to a certain extent, like the conversos,” he adds, referring to Jews who were forced to appear to convert to Christianity – and then hid their Judaism.
The Liberty Forum, which recently celebrated its third anniversary, takes pride in setting up active branches for students in the law schools at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ramat Gan’s Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv University and Reichman University (formerly the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya).
It also offers seminars to outstanding students, including a scholarship, as well as a preparation course for new law students after they have been accepted – which is meant to provide them with a firm rightist foundation they can use in the discussions on liberal rights during their studies.
Based on the American model, the Liberty Forum holds many events, including conferences and panel discussions with senior legal figures. Over the past year, Supreme Court Justice Alex Stein has appeared at the forum’s conference – after he asked for and received special permission to speak. Liberal law professors are also regularly invited to participate on the panels, with the goal of enabling young lawyers to practice and sharpen their arguments.
An examination of the forum’s activities shows a complex and overlapping network of connections between it, the Tikvah Fund, the Kohelet Policy Forum and the Federalist Society – from Jerusalem to New York and Washington. Most of those involved in the Liberty Forum have broad experience in the right-wing legal community, in Israel and the United States.
Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked has participated in past programs, as has the person who was responsible for finding judicial candidates on her behalf, Gil Bringer. Another is Ran Baratz, a former media consultant in the Prime Minister’s Office under Benjamin Netanyahu and founder of the Mida website, which was also established with funding from the Tikvah Fund.
The creation of such a community offers real support for right-wing students, who are still a minority at law schools in both Israel and the United States. But the community is not everything. In fact, it is probably not even the most important thing about the Federalist Society and its Israeli equivalent. Because behind the scenes of the flashy events, the Federalist Society has accrued great strength within the U.S. legal system, which has translated into a monopoly in certain work spheres.
In practice, the society operates as a gatekeeper for right-wing lawyers who aspire to key posts in Washington. It began back in the early days of the Reagan administration under then-Attorney General Edwin Meese. Similar to Rothman, Meese was frustrated by the supply of judicial candidates and did not know how to find “true” conservatives. The Federalist Society membership list was a treasure trove for him.
Danielle McLaughlin and Michael Avery, a law professor and lawyer respectively, detailed this in their 2013 book “The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals.” They found that by the end of the 1980s, the heads of the society realized the power they had in their hands and began to make plans for the following decade.
A document written for the society in 1988, only six years after the founding of the organization, attempted to forecast what issues would reach the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 – abortion, LGBTQ rights, affirmative action, privatizing education – and reached conclusions as to the type of lawyers who should be recruited, nurtured and championed for a judicial career.
Today, when you follow the career paths of U.S. Supreme Court justices, it is possible to see how the Federalist Society steered them from their studies to clerkships at the Supreme Court – and later on in their careers too.
For instance, after the 2000 presidential election, when a pivotal legal dispute arose over the election results in Florida, both campaigns sent legal teams. The Federalist Society provided Republican candidate George W. Bush with a handpicked team on his behalf, the crème de la crème. This is how (now-Chief Justice) John Roberts and (now-Associate Justices) Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett came to work together for the first time as then-unknown lawyers
The Israel Law and Liberty Forum may only be three years old, but, thanks to its U.S. parent organization, it already understands the potential power. “The forum was meant to complete a very important link in developing conservative thinking in law schools and Israeli [public awareness] – thinking that is very much lacking,” Rothman says. “To tell you that after three years we have candidates for the judiciary who are graduates of the forum? I have no way for this to happen. Even in order to submit candidacy to be a Magistrate’s Court judge, you need five years’ experience as a lawyer.”
The Federalist Society also knew it could not appoint judges immediately. It thought ahead, though, and knew it would start to see the results of its efforts in the 2000s. Does the Israeli forum have the same horizon? Is it working to create a community and also the next generation of judges that can be relied upon to be conservative?
“As far as I’m concerned, in Israel the forum is not intended to advance them and build them over a timeline,” Rothman responds. “It’s not meant just to create lawyers, but to provide them with the sense that they’re not alone. I think that as the forum gathers more momentum, there will be more. It will also be possible to identify who really does have conservative views … those who really understand the role of justice in society, the way I understand it – as a lawyer who thinks his role is to say what the law is and not what he wants the law to be.
“It’s clear that as the forum accumulates experience, impact and numbers, it will be easier for those who come after me. Ultimately, we will have a more balanced court, committed to principles of the rule of law. It’s really not a matter of right or left; it’s simply about the court.”
Why is there such an organization only on the right?
“There are endless ‘Federalist Societies’ on the left! There isn’t the Federalist Society itself, but there are many organizations that spread their progressive views, or international societies that call for a more involved court, for activism.”
But the Federalist Society is identified, certainly during Trump’s term, with the appointment of Supreme Court justices.
“In Israel, that is exactly – exactly – what [Aharon] Barak and his colleagues did for years on the [Supreme] Court. They created this process from within the court and from academia. For years, it was very clear that if you didn’t study at the Hebrew University, with professors who were acceptable to Barak, and if you weren’t part of the family, you wouldn’t be a clerk. And if you were a clerk, you wouldn’t be a legal assistant and you wouldn’t advance to the judiciary. You couldn’t get into the entire process. The entire mechanism worked to advance the people who held the same agenda. Look at Ruth Gavison [who was reportedly denied a place on the Supreme Court in 2005 due to her views]. In Israel, that was how Barak’s legal system was built – so to come and ask why the left doesn’t need it?!
“In my view, this is a very, very important ecosystem that for years was missing for the Israeli right and the Israeli conservative viewpoint. So I’m saying the left had it the entire time, and what’s amazing is that they’re now complaining about Kohelet, complaining about the Tikvah Fund, complaining about everything. Friends, you’re spoiled, you’ve had it all the time with this enormous scope. And I’m not even talking about the financial extent – that’s very big.”
Last November, Rothman delivered a lecture called “Why Does Israel Need a Federalist Society Anyway?” at the Federalist Society’s annual conference in the United States. In an interview with the American Orthodox Jewish weekly magazine Mishpacha at the time, he explained: “In the U.S., the Federalist Society has been active for a long time to promote conservative judges, most successfully with the Supreme Court turning conservative under Trump. I just spoke at their recent gathering, and we’re trying to start an Israeli equivalent with branches on university campuses to achieve long-term change.”
While Rothman was happy to talk with Haaretz, the heads of the Israel Law and Liberty Forum preferred not to be interviewed for this article. Still, when executive director Green was asked two years ago about the possibility of appointing judges, he may have said “that’s not the goal,” but did note that “it could be a by-product.”
Green also drew a comparison with the Federalist Society: “It’s acquired the reputation of being a manipulator of judgeship appointments. That is certainly not what we want to do, and I am also very sure that it’s not what the Federalists are doing. But when you become, de facto, the house organization of conservative jurists, one outcome is that, in the search for conservatives in the judicial system – let’s say a senior appointment – they will turn to you first. That’s all it means.”
Chairwoman Meisel, meanwhile, told Haaretz in a statement: “The Law and Liberty Forum was founded in 2019, after a continued process of consultation and an accumulation of different initiatives, with the goal of building a legal community with a broad common denominator and to provide a stage to the legal viewpoint that espouses the principles of separation of powers, judicial restraint, individual freedoms and limited rule. With a commitment to diversity and enrichment of the legal discourse in a deep, to the point and respectful manner, the Forum aspires to develop the future generation of legal excellence – in academia, the public sector, judiciary, the third [civic] sector, government and private practice – and everywhere the graduates and members of the forum turn.”