Adler on Conservative/Libertarian Public Interest Groups:

My friend Jonathan Adler has a very interesting piece in Legal Affairs on conservative and libertarian public interest legal organizations such as the Institute for Justice and the American Center for Law and Justice. An excerpt:

  There is no right-wing legal monolith, no cohesive, unified “freedom-based public interest law movement” . . . . The groups collected under this moniker lack a single, overarching agenda. For every I.J. advancing libertarian notions about government power, there is a more traditional conservative group seeking to protect Judeo-Christian moral values and preserve or expand religion’s place in the public square. Although such groups may see a common enemy in the liberal elites that they believe still dominate the nation’s legal culture, the organizations have different goals, different funding sources, and different constituencies—and sometimes they even go toe-to-toe against one another.