Constitutional Law

Continuing Media Focus On ACS

More national media outlets are taking note of ACS leaders who have been tapped for top positions in the forthcoming administration or are advising its transition teams.

NPR’s Ari Shapiro reported on “Weekend Edition” that “a different legal group is on the rise in Washington: the American Constitution Society.” According to the NPR piece, during the Bush years, the conservative Federalist Society was influential and that now ACS appears to have a receptive audience forming in the capitol. University of California Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu, the new chairman of the ACS Board of Directors, told NPR that, “Whereas I think the last seven or eight years we had mostly been playing defense, in the sense of trying to prevent as many – in our view – bad things from happening, now we have the opportunity to actually get our ideas and the progressive vision of the Constitution and of law and policy into practice.” NPR’s piece noted that President-elect Barack Obama has nominated ACS Board Member Eric Holder as attorney general and tapped former ACS Executive Director Lisa Brown to be the White House Staff Secretary.

The Politico also reported on ACS, noting that, “Sixteen appointees and advisers” of the president-elect’s Justice Department transition team have served on the ACS Board. Dawn Johnsen, whose term on the ACS Board of Directors recently ended, told Politico that, “ACS has functioned as a place and organization to keep some of us together, both physically at convention and conferences and also intellectually by developing issues, papers, and talking about legal theory.”

President-elect Obama today announced he was nominating Johnsen, a law professor at Indiana University, as the next Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel.

Full post as published by ACS Blog on January 05, 2009 (boomark / email).