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This essay reviews two recent works in political science on the American conservative legal movement: Steven M. Teles's The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (2008) and Ann Southworth's Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition (2008). It examines these books in the context of a larger debate over the variables that best explain constitutional change in general and the recent “conservative counterrevolution” in Supreme Court jurisprudence in particular. It shows how these studies build on the scholarship of Charles Epp, who argued in The Rights Revolution (1998) that serious constitutional change requires not only the right cast of characters on the court, but also a strong “support structure” in the legal profession and civil society. Finally, it draws on the author's own research on the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy to illustrate some important avenues for further inquiry.

This chapter addresses larger political contexts, conditions, actors, and institutions that gave rise to the modern Christian Right and the Christian Conservative Legal Movement. In relaying this history, the chapter discusses how and why the Christian Right first invested in traditional politics and then later moved to develop Christian conservative public interest legal organizations. This history is then used to explain the deficiencies in the Christian Right’s initial legal support structures, and why they moved to found Christian conservative law schools and legal training programs. Central to the decision to create new institutions was Christian conservatives’ long-standing mistrust of lawyers, the legal profession, and the nation’s colleges and universities. Baylor University and University of Notre Dame are used as brief case studies to better explain the decision of Christian Right patrons to avoid investing in existing law schools and, instead, create their own.

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Drawing on movement framing, collective identity, and mobilization scholarship, this article examines the emergence and potential effects of framing “law as a calling” for the Christian Lawyering community. The article finds that the term should have strong resonance and salience in the broader Christian community. It also finds that because of its interpretive malleability, “law as a calling” has been discussed and actualized in three related, but distinct, ways. That is, “law as a calling” has been conceptualized as requiring Christian Lawyers to turn inward, turn outward by pursuing social justice, and turn outward as a culture warrior. The article argues that while the different interpretations of “law as a calling” address a range of needs required to mobilize potential and existing Christian L/lawyers, the different ideological factions of self‐identifying Christian Lawyers emphasize different understandings of “law as a calling.”