
‘The conservative legal movement in America was initiated to change the status quo, which eventually took roughly 30 years to move from the Horowitz Report to a Supreme Court majority shaped by Federalist Society alumni. Starting and sustaining a legal movement is not a cakewalk; it is a herculean task. In the US, it was a long march through the institutions, one characterised by patience, strategic discipline, and intellectual seriousness, and eventually sustained across cycles of both political defeat and political success. The Left in India built its ecosystem gradually over decades and currently has a significant edge, at least in terms of an ecosystem spanning across legal and social institutions, which are interconnected and function with interoperability. The Indic cause is not starting from nothing. It has electoral power, financial resources, a large network of practising lawyers, and a growing cohort of young people sympathetic to its broad aims. But there is no legal movement, and we are far from initiating any.’ In our first, Abhimanyu Singh, Deepesh Gulgulia, and Shubham Srivastav review ‘The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law’ by Steven Teles. The full copy will be out by the end of the month. Painting by Arthur (Art) Lien



















