"'I don’t recall Roe being an issue in any such conversations I had concerning [the] creation of Fed Soc,' [Theodore] Olson wrote to me...."

"'It was all about creating a forum/venue for debate. Not taking sides on any particular issue.' And yet Roe symbolized something to the Federalist Society’s founding members. 'For someone like me, a lawyer, Roe was really not about abortion,' John McGinnis, a conservative law professor at Northwestern University, said... '[It]was the culmination of the Court diverging from the text of the Constitution and essentially—this is not too strong of a word—fabricating the law.'...  During the next four decades, the conservative legal movement set about radically changing the way that the law was talked about. They promoted a mode of legal interpretation that was purportedly value-neutral, based on their understanding of what the Founders wrote....  Some people in the conservative legal movement are more philosophical about the consequences of overturning Roe. In their view, the error of the original ruling—a 'constitutional deformity,' as one Federalist Society insider put it—has been corrected. Now the democratic process begins...."

From "How the Federalist Society Won/The conservative legal movement was pivotal in getting Roe v. Wade overturned. But does it have any control over what happens next?" by Emma Green (The New Yorker).

Professor John McGinnis on originalism.

Here's the audio from yesterday's event at the UW Law School, which was sponsored by The Federalist Society. McGinnis speaks for about 20 minutes, then I do a 10 minute commentary, and the rest is questions and answers. McGinnis contends that judges should interpret the Constitution according to its original meaning because this kind of interpretation will produce better consequences than other approaches to interpretation. He depends heavily on a belief in the superiority of a text produced by a supermajority — i.e., the Constitution — as understood by that supermajority. He chooses an interpretive methodology based on what is most likely to work out for the best even as he would exclude judges from thinking in normative or pragmatic terms as they decide particular cases.