Pipeline to Power: The 40-Year Plan to Capture the Supreme Court

Pipeline to Power: The 40-Year Plan to Capture the Supreme Court explores the origins of what has become arguably the most powerful purveyor of political and judicial influence in the United States today.

Forty years ago, following the appointment of their professors to the federal bench, a tiny group of conservative law students at Yale Law School worried that their ideas might disappear from intellectual discourse in this bastion of liberal thought. They set out to fill that void. But they ended up achieving way more than that.

Over the next few decades, the Federalist Society became an integral tool in the larger conservative movement, with political, judicial, and social repercussions ending in the conservative capture of the Supreme Court and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. To tell this story, top New York Times best-selling author and investigative journalist Vicky Ward (CNN, Vanity Fair) follows four current YLS students–two conservatives, two not–who take us into a world filled with secret clubs, secret retreats, secret parties, and secret channels to clerkships to the top courts. It’s the world of the Federalist Society and its fractious 40-year relationship with Yale Law School, showing us that what happens at YLS affects all of us, and we don’t even know it.