One of the most important speeches of the Reagan presidency was not delivered by the Great Communicator himself. In the summer of 1985, Edwin Meese III—confirmed a few months earlier as the Reagan administration’s second attorney general—appeared at the American Bar Association’s annual meeting. There he declared that under his leadership, the Department of Justice would “resurrect the original meaning of constitutional provisions and statutes as the only reliable guide for judgment.” As Steven Gow Calabresi and Gary Lawson argue in The Meese Revolution: The Making of a Constitutional Moment, this address proved to be the clarion call for a movement that reformed the federal judiciary, an accomplishment that rates among the most significant conservative victories of the past half century. Calabresi and Lawson show that Meese served many important roles in his long career, but his influence in bringing what we now know as originalism into the legal mainstream was his greatest accomplishment.
Born in Oakland in 1932, Meese joined Governor Ronald Reagan’s staff in the late 1960s and then helped Reagan with both his 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns. In President Reagan’s first term, Meese was counselor to the president and part of the so-called White House power troika (alongside Chief of Staff James Baker and Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver). Calabresi and Lawson credit Meese with playing a major role in the successes of Reagan’s first term, but they’re most interested in, and know the most about, what Meese accomplished as attorney general during Reagan’s encore.
When Meese was sworn in as AG in 1985, the academy and courts had long before relegated major elements of the Constitution to dead letters. Judges showed little interest in the Constitution’s structural provisions of federalism and the separation of powers, and even most of the conservative justices on the Court were what Calabresi and Lawson call “conservative legal realists” who “thought of themselves as sensible, conservative policymakers.” Their conservative jurisprudence emphasized judicial restraint.
Meese believed that returning to the founding document’s core principles sometimes required an active judiciary. Picking up ideas articulated by Robert H. Bork and Raoul Berger in the 1970s, and that the Federalist Society was helping disseminate in law schools, Meese proposed a jurisprudence of original intent, under which the Constitution should be interpreted according to what it meant to its framers. Meese’s approach to originalism was modified the following year by Judge Antonin Scalia (my father) in a speech he delivered 10 days before being nominated to the Supreme Court. Scalia adjusted the focus from original intent to original meaning—that is, from an investigation of private will to an inquiry about public understanding. This tweak, the authors suggest, “recast, and perhaps rescued, the whole originalist project.” Meese also fostered the development of originalist thought by building within the DOJ “an academy in exile,” a vibrant community of intellectuals (like Meese’s right-hand man, Ken Cribb) discussing ideas that received scant attention in law schools.
Most important, though, was Meese’s work on judicial appointments. Calabresi and Lawson devote ample space to the successful efforts to elevate WilliamRehnquist to chief justice and Scalia to associate justice, as well as the losing battle to seat Robert Bork and the eventual choice of Anthony Kennedy. They make provocative, if not entirely convincing, arguments about Kennedy—for example, that conservatives would have been as disappointed with Bork, because he would not have been as determined as they would have liked in restoring federalism. Reagan’s appointments to lower courts were also extraordinary, and the book introduces readers to some of the most significant judges who never made it to the high court: Laurence Silberman, Edith Jones, Frank Easterbrook, and others. Even after the Reagan administration, Meese wielded either direct or indirect influence in the appointments of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts (about whom the authors have mixed feelings) and David Souter (you can’t win them all).
My father liked to joke that early in his career, you “could fire a cannon loaded with grapeshot in the faculty lounge of any major law school in the country and not strike an originalist.” Now originalists compose the majority on the Supreme Court. That would never have happened without the vocal and institutional support that Meese, with Reagan’s encouragement, provided four decades ago. Originalist jurisprudence has confirmed an individual’s right to bear arms, resuscitated religious liberty, returned abortion policy to the democratic arena, and strengthened both federalism and the separation of powers. The book understates this last point only because it went to print before the Court’s ruling in Loper Bright v. Raimondo, which overturned 40-year precedent dictating that courts should defer to administrative agencies when interpreting ambiguous regulations.
Because of his high profile, Meese was a figure of controversy. Poetic progressives put a pithy phrase on posters: Meese Is a Pig. He was the subject of two independent counsel investigations but neither led to an indictment, though both chided him for unethical and possibly illegal behavior. Calabresi and Lawson point to these investigations as evidence of the lawlessness of the original independent-counsel statute, the lapse of which in 1999 was a victory for the separation of powers. (Last spring, Lawson and Calabresi joined Meese in filing an amicus brief with the Court in Trump v. United States, arguing that special counsel Jack Smith lacks the authority to prosecute his case against Donald Trump.) Their account of Meese’s role in the Iran-Contra affair is more sympathetic than Laurence Walsh’s Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, as they praise Meese for “fir[ing] those responsible for” Iran-Contra and recognizing the need to call for an independent counsel at all. But they elide a controversy when they claim that Meese’s spokesman, Terry Eastland, “left Justice in 1988 for the Weekly Standard magazine.” Never mind that the Standard wasn’t founded until 1995—Meese actually fired Eastland, sparking a minor controversy.
Calabresi and Lawson have long been a part of the conservative legal movement. Both were founding members of the Federalist Society and currently sit on its board of directors, along with Meese. Lawson clerked for Scalia both on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, while Calabresi clerked for Scalia on the high court and for Bork in the D.C. Circuit and worked for Meese at Justice. Both hold Meese in high esteem for his accomplishments and personal virtues alike. This combination of knowledge and affection may be why they occasionally slip into hagiography, and the book would have benefitted from pruning.
Nonetheless, The Meese Revolution is a treasure trove for anyone interested in constitutional law or the inner workings of the Reagan administration. Edwin Meese III is an enormously consequential man who made invaluable contributions to Reagan’s presidency and our legal system. Calabresi and Lawson do a great service by introducing him to more Americans.
Photo: AP Photo/Alex Brandon
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