Last week I wrote of the deep injustice perpetrated by liberal Democrats against the just-deceased Judge Robert Bork during his 1987 Supreme Court candidacy. But the travesty of that episode is even greater in light of something that Jeffrey Rosen legal affairs editor for the liberal New Republic notes.

In 1987 Rosen was a young intern for Senator Joseph Biden whose Judiciary Committee voted to disapprove Bork’s nomination. He recalls “feeling that the nominee was being treated unfairly.… [his] record was distorted beyond recognition…. The Borking of Bork was the beginning of the polarization of the confirmation process that has turned our courts into partisan war zones.” Rosen continues:

Robert Bork had been renowned at Yale Law School where he taught for nearly two decades not only for his influence on antitrust and constitutional law but for his ideological open-mindedness: many students of his era fondly remember the seminar he co-taught with his closest friend on the faculty the liberal constitutional scholar … Alexander Bickel which featured affectionate bipartisan debates.… The New Republic was said to be Bork’s favorite journal at the time.…

Then came the Borking of Clarence Thomas with a similarly sad result: The transformation of another convivial conservative appellate judge who had a record of friendly interactions with liberal colleagues on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit into an angry partisan determined to seek ideological revenge for decades to come.

Whether Mr. Rosen is correct that these experiences transformed Thomas and Bork into embittered ideologues is a matter for separate discussion. But it is extremely telling that it was these ostensibly rock-ribbed conservatives who were open to bipartisan debate and their liberal foes who chose defamation over dialogue.

But none of this is news to anyone familiar with the Federalist Society. Founded in 1982 by a handful of politically conservative law students to provide an alternative to the liberal orthodoxy that pervaded law schools and the legal profession it now has chapters at virtually every American law school and numbers tens of thousands of lawyers and law students as members. Many outstanding judges — from the Supreme Court on down — and Republican administration lawyers have come from within its ranks.

The Society does not lobby litigate or even take positions on legal issues; it simply hosts conferences debates and speeches. And those debates wrote libertarian law professor Eugene Volokh in the Washington Post

invariably include liberal speakers.… I know of no other law-school-based group that consistently sets up panels as balanced as the ones we Federalists put together. We think that a fair debate between us and our liberal adversaries will win more converts for our positions than for the other side’s. You can call this view cocky but the result is a real addition to civil discussion and the diversity of ideas in law schools and the legal profession.

Liberals who’ve spoken at Society events agree. Professor William Marshall counsel to President Clinton said “I’ve done a lot of academic conferences in my career and I always find the Federalist Society the most enjoyable because [it] is the organization that is least afraid of inviting people whom they know seriously disagree with them.” And ACLU president Nadine Strossen told the group: “It has been my pleasure to speak at many Federalist Society gatherings around the country and I think one thing your organization has definitely done is to contribute to free speech free debate….”

Seeing the Society’s success liberals eventually started a counterpart group called the American Constitution Society (ACS) which runs conferences of its own to which it too invites speakers from across the ideological divide. But here’s what law professor Jonathan Adler noticed in comparing his experiences with the two groups:

Another obvious difference between Federalist Society and ACS gatherings is the former’s emphasis on debate. The Federalist Society’s leadership hopes to see a clash of views on every panel at every conference and selects topics and speakers accordingly. Intra-movement disagreement in particular is encouraged as between libertarians and conservatives.… Cross-ideological discussion and disagreement is encouraged as well. Even where a panel is “lopsided” and features only a token liberal voice it is unlikely that the remaining panelists will agree on the matter at hand.

ACS conferences on the other hand have not emphasized debate to the same extent at least not in my experience. ACS panels increasingly include a dissenting conservative or libertarian voice but the conversation is not structured to emphasize disagreement and foster debate. A typical panel lineup may feature several people who approach a given issue from different standpoints (e.g. federal agency interest group trial attorney etc.) but from a unified ideological perspective (save for the token right-winger).… It is almost as if at an ACS panel the correct answer to the question at hand is presumed whereas at the Federalist Society it is something to be debated and defended.

Yet in recent decades when a Society member is nominated for a judgeship or government legal post Democratic senators and the media invariably create a stir about his membership in what they intimate is some sort of secretive agenda-driven cabal. As Society cofounder Professor Steven Calabresi puts it “there’s been an element of ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Federalist Society?’$$$SEPARATE QUOTES$$$” — referring to the infamous McCarthy era line.

In a passage that ought to resonate with Orthodox Jews who regularly find themselves the focus of what we might coin a media “prefixation” Professor Volokh writes:

[I]t’s also natural that in this hotly partisan era some who want to block [Republican] nominations would try to tar Federalists with terms like “far-right” “ultra-conservative” or “right-wing reactionary”.… I wonder if these critics would call the ACLU — which unlike the Federalists does litigate and does take official positions on legislation — “far-left” or “ultra-liberal” or “left-wing subversive.”

Probably not. To many such critics liberal groups are “moderate” but conservative and libertarian groups no matter how inclusive or mainstream are “extremist”…. Such pejorative epithets generally tell us more about the temperament and ideology of the critics than about the people being criticized.

The idea that liberals on the whole tolerate difference and embrace debate like the notion that only they care deeply about the “little people ” the poor and minorities has been deeply imbedded in many Americans’ consciousness by an incessant propagandistic soundtrack. So much so that even countless striking counterexamples like the ones above can’t seem to dislodge it.