The 40-year-old partner at Sidley, Austin, Brown and Wood in Washington, D.C., who served in the White House Counsel’s office under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003 and has chaired committees for the Federalist Society, the conservative and libertarian lawyers’ group, entered the program in 1988, in the immediate aftermath of the Reagan-era culture wars.

Back then, he said, it was not unheard of for a student pressing a conservative line in a class discussion to get hisses and boos from classmates. He said that a single professor among the 60 or so full-time faculty actively propounded conservative jurisprudence and politics from the lectern.

“It wasn’t that uncommon or unusual to hear the word ‘fascist’ associated with a mainstream conservative,” Mr. Berenson said.

Then, last year, the law school surprised him with a barrage of additions to the faculty—among them prominent conservative scholars. This year, Mr. Berenson is “significantly increasing” the amount he is giving to the law school (though he, like most others interviewed by The Observer, declined to specify by how much).

“It’s hard to say whether I’m trying to send a message, whether I’m applauding what I see as a worthwhile effort by the law school, or whether it’s just the more straightforward feeling that as a place that seems to welcome and value the contributions of people with different points of view, that the law school deserves more support,” he said.

He, like others, had little difficulty offering much of the credit for the phenomenon to Elena Kagan, the 45-year-old dean of Harvard Law.

“In Dean Kagan, Harvard has found somebody who genuinely values intellectual and viewpoint diversity,” said Mr. Berenson. “[Conservatives have] gone from feeling excluded to included.”

Ms. Kagan herself is reluctant to characterize her deanship as a break from Harvard’s past.

“My view of Harvard is that because we are a place that is larger in scale than a lot of other schools, we’ve never been a niche place,” Ms. Kagan told The Observer. “We sort of have everything, and that continues to be true in our current hiring. Our current hiring is all across the board from a political-slash-ideological perspective, and that’s exactly what it should be.”

But among current students, alumni and faculty, the difference between Harvard Law School today and in 1988 is palpable, even if among the school’s officials, the change is unspoken.

“Once you start hiring a lot of people, you can no longer allow any group or faction to put in a political veto, and you’ve just got to hire the best people,” said professor Charles Fried, the law school’s most outspoken conservative. “That’s what happened …. People aren’t stupid: All she said was that we have to do some hiring. That means we’ve got to stop blocking …. She did not mention politics; she’s too smart.”

“It’s news that we’re normal,” Mr. Fried also said. “It’s the opposite of strange. What was happening before is strange.”

President Bush’s two Supreme Court nominees have brought a lot attention to the Harvard and the Yale law schools, the equivalent of the spotlight placed on Miami and U.S.C. around the time of the N.F.L. draft.

According to professors and students, Harvard Law alum Chief Justice John Roberts’ nomination found little visible opposition at his law school. He had the perfect Harvard résumé: graduating summa as an undergrad, then serving as managing editor of the Law Review and clerking with Henry Friendly, the né plus ultra of Appeals Court judges. Minutes after the President announced his selection of Mr. Roberts, the Harvard Law School Web site crowed about the accomplished alum, complete with a beatific A.P. photo.

Yale Law graduate Samuel Alito received similar treatment on the Yale Law School Web site, but the tenor of his support has been overshadowed by the widespread dissemination of a recent New York Times article describing the active opposition to his nomination among students and faculty.

There have always been substantial differences, both real and perceived, between Yale (the perennially top-ranked law school) and Harvard (No. 2). Yale is known as an intellectual seminary, where the professors are the priests. Yale has about a third of the number of students in each class, and they receive no grades. Harvard has one of the largest student bodies of any law school in the country, is credited with pioneering the “Socratic method,” and historically has prepared its students for establishment corporate and private-sector careers as well as government and academic ones.

But as the Bush administration succeeds in dramatically changing the political configuration of the Supreme Court, and as the conservative legal network grooms impeccably qualified scholars, both Harvard and Yale are seeing increased pressure to admit conservatives into the academic fold. But it’s at the larger school, Harvard ,that conservatives are taking notice of the shift.

There’s a small but highly visible coterie of conservative Harvard Law School alums currently serving in the Bush administration: including Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, deputy White House counsel William Kelly, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff and Solicitor General Paul Clement.

According to Mr. Berenson, the Harvard Law Review has invited Mr. Clement to speak at its spring banquet. What’s more, nowadays it’s hard to see him refusing. But Law Review president Brian Fletcher declined to comment, and Mr. Clement didn’t return calls.

Culture Wars

For a seemingly interminable stretch from the 1970’s to the 1990’s, Harvard Law was emblematic of academic ideological warfare, its infighting aired like dirty laundry in Eleanor Kerlow’s 1994 book, Poisoned Ivy, its campus derided in a 1993 article in GQ as “Beirut on the Charles.”

Members of Harvard’s Critical Legal Studies school attacked the traditionalists, arguing that their approach perpetuated a ruling class in America. The traditionalists struck back, led by Ms. Kagan’s predecessor, Robert Clark. In 1985, at a debate before alumni in New York, Mr. Clark charged that the C.L.S. adherents were engaging in “a ritual slaying of the elders.” (Every alumnus in the country reportedly received a transcript of his talk, courtesy of the Federalist Society.)

Among faculty members, lateral hiring and tenure decisions became more charged—and less conclusive—than confirmation hearings. Mr. Clark was ultimately compelled to bring in a retired law professor, Roger Fisher, to keep the peace among the warring factions.

His previous work included negotiating between rebels and the government in El Salvador and South Africa.

In the early 1990s, the school’s most senior black professor, Derrick Bell Jr., took a leave of absence to protest the fact that no minority women had been given tenure. He ultimately quit. In 1998, Lani Guinier was the first African-American woman to be given tenure.

As John Sedgwick wrote in the GQ article, “politics are like a too-heavy oil that, instead of lubricating, has gummed up the works at the school—slowing everything down and heating everything up.”

Students eagerly joined the front lines. There were sit-ins to protest faculty diversity and an investigation into charges of racism at the Harvard Law Review.

Tensions exploded when students released a parody of feminist law professor Mary Joe Frug’s writings—on the anniversary of her still-unsolved murder. Ms. Frug, who taught at the New England School of Law, was married to C.L.S. advocate Gerald Frug, a Harvard Law professor, and had founded a spin-off of the movement, “the FemCrits.”

Finally, in the late 1990’s, McKinsey and Company was retained to study why students at Harvard Law were so unhappy. In December of 2000, the faculty adopted a strategic plan based on the results of that research, which had been expanded to review faculty concerns as well. It called for reducing first-year class size, expanding the loan-forgiveness programs and beefing up the international-studies curriculum, among other objectives.

The following year, Harvard got a new president in Larry Summers. In 2003, shortly after appointing Ms. Kagan as dean of the law school, Mr. Summers gave The New York Times Magazine a sense of his view of Harvard Law’s recent history.

He said that the law school had made a series of “idiosyncratic choices” in the awarding of tenure. He further criticized the school, citing “some of the concerns about inbredness, political correctness, lack of intellectual energy that were seen on the outside.”

To show how serious he was about reform, he announced that he would be extending his presidential powers to include the right to veto proposed tenure offers. (He has not exercised that option.)

The year that Ms. Kagan started, the law school officially kicked off its $400 million fund-raising campaign (with its oddly conservative-sounding moniker, “Setting the Standard”) in order to fund some of the initiatives outlined in the strategic plan, including adding 15 professors to help lower student-faculty ratios.

“In its search for new professors, the Law School will maintain its commitment to scholarship at the highest levels, and the need to offer an increasingly diverse student body the opportunity to be taught by an increasingly diverse faculty,” notes a thumbnail description of the plan on the law school’s Web site.

While no overt reference to the school’s notoriety in the 80’s and 90’s was made, one line—which could have been borrowed from the liberal agitators’ phrasebook but appeared to have a very different political valence—described the plan’s loftiest goal.

“Above all, the School must continue to be a metropolis, rather than a village,” reads the brochure describing the campaign.

Mr. Summers—recent controversy notwithstanding—is himself seen as a liberal, and so is Ms. Kagan. Mr. Summers had worked with her on occasion when they were both officials in the Clinton administration. So conservatives saw little to be enthusiastic about in the appointment. Ms. Kagan was a former domestic-policy and legal advisor to the President, and served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

President Clinton even nominated her to serve on the influential D.C. Circuit bench, only to see the Republicans in the Senate dawdle over bringing her candidacy to a committee vote. (Ms. Kagan is the first woman to serve as dean in the school’s 188 years.)

She inherited the law school from Mr. Clark, a philosopher and scholar of corporate law who was also a prolific fund-raiser.

What has followed is a hiring spree: 20 offers to full-time professors have been extended—with nine acceptances so far, according to Michael Armini, the school’s director of communications. There are currently 81 full-time professors at the school, the same number as when Ms. Kagan joined, mostly because of retirements.

According to John Coates, a corporate-law professor, the hiring logjam has been lifted because the “false sense of scarcity has been eliminated.”

“I think, in the past, there was this dynamic where people were sometimes supporting and sometimes opposing for reasons that didn’t have as much to do with the merits, but had to do with the sense of limited budget,” said Mr. Coates, who joined the faculty in 1997.

Of the nine new professors, six have been appointed with tenure. To the left of center are environmental-law expert Jody Freeman, from UCLA, and Daryl Levinson, a constitutional-law theorist.

But recent hires have also added to the conservatives’ ranks. There is John Manning, 44, an expert on the separation of powers and the structure of government, who advocates for a strict reading of the U.S. Constitution, and 43-year-old Jack Goldsmith, an international-law expert known for questioning the efficacy of the International Criminal Court.

Both are highly regarded scholars and former Republican administration officials (Bush I for Manning, Bush II for Goldsmith). They declined to comment.

In addition to Messrs. Manning and Goldsmith, joining next year is Adrian Vermeule, a constitutional, statutory-interpretation and administrative-law specialist who takes a social-science approach, reading empirical research and looking for counterintuitive solutions. Mr. Vermeule is currently at the University of Chicago, where he has won various teaching awards. He has written about constitutional issues in the context of national security, arguing that restricting some liberties isn’t at odds with the freedoms Americans enjoy, that people overreact in what he calls “libertarian panics.” He has also argued for the death penalty on “pro-life grounds,” citing studies that show it deters would-be killers. Yet he has also criticized some of what others see as the court’s conservative activism.

To be sure, new appointments have gone to scholars with approaches and fields of study all over the map, and about half of the 20 recent offers have been to people on the liberal-to-left spectrum. Like Mr. Vermeule, the rest are hard to classify.

Four junior professors—election-law expert Heather Gerken and local-democracy specialist David Barron, who worked in the Clinton administration, as well as corporate-law scholars Guhan Subramanian and Allen Ferrell—have also received tenure since Ms. Kagan took over.

But even this ratio is newsworthy. A much-talked-about study in The Georgetown Law Journal analyzed 11 years of federal-election campaign contributions and found that of those faculty members who gave more than $200, 91 percent and 92 percent at Harvard and Yale, respectively, gave to Democrats. The average for 21 top law schools was 81 percent for Democrats.

What might have once been seen as an assault on the school’s values has been turned into a point of pride, according one Harvard Law School source, with professors heralding their willingness to make the recent hires—especially Messrs. Manning and Goldsmith—as proof of their liberal, tolerant mindset.

Which is precisely the point on which Ms. Kagan has successfully lobbied: It would be anti-intellectual to shut down the candidacy of a qualified conservative.

“We don’t look at politics,” Ms. Kagan insisted. “We figure that if we really go for the people who are doing the most interesting scholarship and who are the best teachers, we’ll get a pretty wide political cross-section—and indeed we have. We’re just looking for the best people, the best scholars, the best teachers.”

The effort has not been without its small struggles. There was a political flare-up when Mr. Goldsmith joined the faculty last fall, with faculty members airing their concerns about his alleged involvement with the infamous “torture memos” in The Boston Globe.

And when it later emerged that Ms. Goldsmith had, in fact, resigned because he objected to the administration’s permissive lines on torture, not all of his critics were placated. They saw echoes of the administration’s position in his scholarship, which argues that that the United States isn’t always bound by international law.

It was Ms. Kagan’s public support of Mr. Goldsmith that effectively quelled the outcry.

In Mr. Manning’s case, it emerged that the changes at Harvard Law are hardly happening fast enough for some students.

When Mr. Manning joined the campus, the student-run Harvard Law School Record ran an editorial in support of his hiring: “At HLS, you can count the number of actively, politically conservatives [sic] on one hand and still have enough fingers left to flash a peace sign. On a campus filled by hundreds of instructors, is this really sufficient diversity?”

Sufficient or no, Harvard Law has changed since the days when, as Mr. Berenson put it, “[Reagan Solicitor General] Charles Fried was the only game in town.”

Students and faculty point to professors who have tipped their hats to conservative causes: Mary Ann Glendon, an anti-abortion feminist; law and economics scholars like Steven Shavell and J. Mark Ramseyer, on the basis that they’re believers in free-market economic concepts. Einer Elhauge, an antitrust expert who litigated on behalf of the Republican-dominated Florida legislature alongside Mr. Fried in Bush v. Gore.

‘We Don’t Recruit’

When the Harvard Law chapter of the Federalist Society hosted the organization’s annual student symposium in February, hundreds of law students, academics and lawyers filled the chandeliered Grand Ballroom of the Marriott Hotel in Cambridge, Mass., to hear a talk by Judge David Sentelle, a conservative member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Dean Kagan introduced the judge.

“I love the Federalist Society,” she announced, “but you are not my people.”

The crowd laughed. It came as no surprise that Ms. Kagan wouldn’t feel kinship with the Feddies. (Moreover, Judge Sentelle headed the panel that appointed Ken Starr as independent counsel.)

And yet there she was, supporting the society. It was a powerful symbolic gesture, one that conservative students still cite when they gush about the dean.

“I just thought it would be funny to a little bit note what everybody knew, which is that”—and here Ms. Kagan allowed herself a chortle— “this was not the student group I was involved in. But at the same time, to express my appreciation for what they do— for what they do in the law-school community and otherwise. These are highly committed, intelligent, hard-working, active students who make the Harvard community better, just like the American Constitution Society makes the Harvard community better. I don’t have to share your politics to understand that Harvard Law School is a better place because you do the things you do here.”

Ms. Kagan’s quip may have been a backhanded compliment. But it says a lot about the political temperature of the campus that, later, the Federalists were so heartened by her one-liner that they emblazoned the quip on the back of their chapter’s T-shirts. Her jokey but eminently cool embrace felt like a big bear hug. Or at least they wanted to spread that impression. (Said Jeffrey Jamison, president of the American Constitution Society, the Federalist Society’s liberal counterpart: “They celebrate their victories every time they can get them, because they feel that they’re oppressed.”)

“She’s been very, very friendly to our chapter—a great friend,” explained Matt Cooper, a third-year student and Federalist Society chapter president. “What I would say is that Harvard Law School has traditionally been an unfriendly place for conservatives. It’s changed. I wouldn’t say it’s friendly and welcoming, but it’s certainly not hostile to the extent that it once was.”

Yet Mr. Cooper added that, as part of the admissions office’s outreach to most of the student groups, he was asked if conservatives had an accurate picture of the community at Harvard before they enrolled. He answered no, that most conservatives had an impression they would be in a very small minority, and that most were surprised to discover such an active conservative student movement. Mr. Cooper sensed that the official wanted to pass that information along to applicants.

That wrong impression is “something they want to remedy,” he said.

In a promotional brochure that Harvard distributed to accepted students this past spring, one of six students featured in a full-page spread was Lawrence VanDyke, class of 2005. A quote accompanied his picture: “The size of this place means that you’re going to find your niche, and you’re not going to be the only person in that niche. I’m involved with the Federalist Society here and while it may be considered a minority group on campus, it’s a minority group of 200-plus people.”

(In fact, according to Mr. Cooper, the Federalists are 350 strong, the largest branch in the country.)

The pamphlet was written by Mr. Armini, the law school’s director of communications. He interviewed a bunch of Law Review members who were around in the summer of 2003. “I remember that his quote worked because it stressed the ‘bigger is better’ theme,” Mr. Armini wrote in an e-mail.

The dean disputed the notion that they were trying to recruit conservatives. “We pay zero attention to this in the admissions process. Zero. There’s just nothing going on like that,” she said.

Indeed, Ms. Kagan and other faculty members, at Harvard and elsewhere, said they doubted that students used ideological litmus tests to determine where they should attend law school.

But the perceived liberal bent at Harvard does get raised as a concern for entering students, conservatives said. “As a student here talking with admitted students, that is a question I’m asked a lot: ‘How will we feel as conservatives?’” said Soraya Freed, an officer with the Federalist Society.

Ms. Freed said she was encouraging. “I don’t think there’s a better school for conservatives right now,” she asserted.

As with the hires, Ms. Kagan said there has been no favoritism to any particular group of applicants—that, if anything, what students have responded to is her effort to make the campus more collegial and student-friendly.

This year, her office is sponsoring a debate between the Federalists and the A.C.S. (in the past, the groups held separate events). She’s improved amenities to make the austere campus more like an upscale office complex. The gym and other student spaces were renovated; there’s free coffee in one of the main buildings and complimentary tampons in the bathrooms; and she even established an outdoor ice-skating rink on one of the main quads.

There are practical effects to having more conservatives on campus. They serve as mentors, helping to shuttle students into jobs; they also serve as public intellectuals, emissaries and recruiting directors.

They also help to attract continued interest from the increasing number of the school’s prominent conservative alumni.

Finn M.W. Caspersen, class of 1966 and a fund-raiser éminence grise for Harvard Law, is the chair of the school’s current $400 million fund-raising campaign.

That Mr. Caspersen, the former head of one of the largest consumer-lending companies, has endowed two professorships at the law school and considers himself a small-government conservative would seem to be evidence enough of the school’s interest in its relationship with conservative alumni.

But Mr. Caspersen said he hadn’t found that politics was a factor in alumni giving.

“That’s not a decisive reason in most people’s minds about whether they want to give,” he said. “Of course I’ve talked to the people who give money—people don’t volunteer funds.”

Still, he acknowledged that changes at the school—especially the hires led by Ms. Kagan—broadened the school’s appeal as a charity to its alumni.

“I think it’s a healthy thing. Whether it’s going to open a nirvana for fund-raisers—that’s a whole different thing,” he said. “It can’t hurt, let me put it that way.”

Off the record and outside of the school’s official development circles, things are put a little more bluntly.

“I’ve had zillions of conservatives alums saying to me how great they think Elena is for doing this,” said one professor.

“There has been a lot of talk about it, because it’s such a dramatic break,” said Douglas Cox, H.L.S. class of 1980, a partner at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher in D.C. who worked in the Justice Department during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

“I think Dean Kagan’s hiring positions … are a little bit like the ‘Nixon in China’ phenomenon,” said Mr. Berenson. “The reaction has really been electric.”

The 40-year-old partner at Sidley, Austin, Brown and Wood in Washington, D.C., who served in the White House Counsel’s office under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003 and has chaired committees for the Federalist Society, the conservative and libertarian lawyers’ group, entered the program in 1988, in the immediate aftermath of the Reagan-era culture wars.

Back then, he said, it was not unheard of for a student pressing a conservative line in a class discussion to get hisses and boos from classmates. He said that a single professor among the 60 or so full-time faculty actively propounded conservative jurisprudence and politics from the lectern.

“It wasn’t that uncommon or unusual to hear the word ‘fascist’ associated with a mainstream conservative,” Mr. Berenson said.

Then, last year, the law school surprised him with a barrage of additions to the faculty—among them prominent conservative scholars. This year, Mr. Berenson is “significantly increasing” the amount he is giving to the law school (though he, like most others interviewed by The Observer, declined to specify by how much).

“It’s hard to say whether I’m trying to send a message, whether I’m applauding what I see as a worthwhile effort by the law school, or whether it’s just the more straightforward feeling that as a place that seems to welcome and value the contributions of people with different points of view, that the law school deserves more support,” he said.

He, like others, had little difficulty offering much of the credit for the phenomenon to Elena Kagan, the 45-year-old dean of Harvard Law.

“In Dean Kagan, Harvard has found somebody who genuinely values intellectual and viewpoint diversity,” said Mr. Berenson. “[Conservatives have] gone from feeling excluded to included.”

Ms. Kagan herself is reluctant to characterize her deanship as a break from Harvard’s past.

“My view of Harvard is that because we are a place that is larger in scale than a lot of other schools, we’ve never been a niche place,” Ms. Kagan told The Observer. “We sort of have everything, and that continues to be true in our current hiring. Our current hiring is all across the board from a political-slash-ideological perspective, and that’s exactly what it should be.”

But among current students, alumni and faculty, the difference between Harvard Law School today and in 1988 is palpable, even if among the school’s officials, the change is unspoken.

“Once you start hiring a lot of people, you can no longer allow any group or faction to put in a political veto, and you’ve just got to hire the best people,” said professor Charles Fried, the law school’s most outspoken conservative. “That’s what happened …. People aren’t stupid: All she said was that we have to do some hiring. That means we’ve got to stop blocking …. She did not mention politics; she’s too smart.”

“It’s news that we’re normal,” Mr. Fried also said. “It’s the opposite of strange. What was happening before is strange.”

President Bush’s two Supreme Court nominees have brought a lot attention to the Harvard and the Yale law schools, the equivalent of the spotlight placed on Miami and U.S.C. around the time of the N.F.L. draft.

According to professors and students, Harvard Law alum Chief Justice John Roberts’ nomination found little visible opposition at his law school. He had the perfect Harvard résumé: graduating summa as an undergrad, then serving as managing editor of the Law Review and clerking with Henry Friendly, the né plus ultra of Appeals Court judges. Minutes after the President announced his selection of Mr. Roberts, the Harvard Law School Web site crowed about the accomplished alum, complete with a beatific A.P. photo.

Yale Law graduate Samuel Alito received similar treatment on the Yale Law School Web site, but the tenor of his support has been overshadowed by the widespread dissemination of a recent New York Times article describing the active opposition to his nomination among students and faculty.

There have always been substantial differences, both real and perceived, between Yale (the perennially top-ranked law school) and Harvard (No. 2). Yale is known as an intellectual seminary, where the professors are the priests. Yale has about a third of the number of students in each class, and they receive grades of honors, pass, low pass, and fail. Harvard has one of the largest student bodies of any law school in the country, is credited with pioneering the “Socratic method,” and historically has prepared its students for establishment corporate and private-sector careers as well as government and academic ones.

But as the Bush administration succeeds in dramatically changing the political configuration of the Supreme Court, and as the conservative legal network grooms impeccably qualified scholars, both Harvard and Yale are seeing increased pressure to admit conservatives into the academic fold. But it’s at the larger school, Harvard ,that conservatives are taking notice of the shift.

There’s a small but highly visible coterie of conservative Harvard Law School alums currently serving in the Bush administration: including Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, deputy White House counsel William Kelly, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff and Solicitor General Paul Clement.

According to Mr. Berenson, the Harvard Law Review has invited Mr. Clement to speak at its spring banquet. What’s more, nowadays it’s hard to see him refusing. But Law Review president Brian Fletcher declined to comment, and Mr. Clement didn’t return calls.

Culture Wars

For a seemingly interminable stretch from the 1970’s to the 1990’s, Harvard Law was emblematic of academic ideological warfare, its infighting aired like dirty laundry in Eleanor Kerlow’s 1994 book, Poisoned Ivy, its campus derided in a 1993 article in GQ as “Beirut on the Charles.”

Members of Harvard’s Critical Legal Studies school attacked the traditionalists, arguing that their approach perpetuated a ruling class in America. The traditionalists struck back, led by Ms. Kagan’s predecessor, Robert Clark. In 1985, at a debate before alumni in New York, Mr. Clark charged that the C.L.S. adherents were engaging in “a ritual slaying of the elders.” (Every alumnus in the country reportedly received a transcript of his talk, courtesy of the Federalist Society.)

Among faculty members, lateral hiring and tenure decisions became more charged—and less conclusive—than confirmation hearings. Mr. Clark was ultimately compelled to bring in a retired law professor, Roger Fisher, to keep the peace among the warring factions.

His previous work included negotiating between rebels and the government in El Salvador and South Africa.

In the early 1990s, the school’s most senior black professor, Derrick Bell Jr., took a leave of absence to protest the fact that no minority women had been given tenure. He ultimately quit. In 1998, Lani Guinier was the first African-American woman to be given tenure.

As John Sedgwick wrote in the GQ article, “politics are like a too-heavy oil that, instead of lubricating, has gummed up the works at the school—slowing everything down and heating everything up.”

Students eagerly joined the front lines. There were sit-ins to protest faculty diversity and an investigation into charges of racism at the Harvard Law Review.

Tensions exploded when students released a parody of feminist law professor Mary Joe Frug’s writings—on the anniversary of her still-unsolved murder. Ms. Frug, who taught at the New England School of Law, was married to C.L.S. advocate Gerald Frug, a Harvard Law professor, and had founded a spin-off of the movement, “the FemCrits.”

Finally, in the late 1990’s, McKinsey and Company was retained to study why students at Harvard Law were so unhappy. In December of 2000, the faculty adopted a strategic plan based on the results of that research, which had been expanded to review faculty concerns as well. It called for reducing first-year class size, expanding the loan-forgiveness programs and beefing up the international-studies curriculum, among other objectives.

The following year, Harvard got a new president in Larry Summers. In 2003, shortly after appointing Ms. Kagan as dean of the law school, Mr. Summers gave The New York Times Magazine a sense of his view of Harvard Law’s recent history.

He said that the law school had made a series of “idiosyncratic choices” in the awarding of tenure. He further criticized the school, citing “some of the concerns about inbredness, political correctness, lack of intellectual energy that were seen on the outside.”

To show how serious he was about reform, he announced that he would be extending his presidential powers to include the right to veto proposed tenure offers. (He has not exercised that option.)

The year that Ms. Kagan started, the law school officially kicked off its $400 million fund-raising campaign (with its oddly conservative-sounding moniker, “Setting the Standard”) in order to fund some of the initiatives outlined in the strategic plan, including adding 15 professors to help lower student-faculty ratios.

“In its search for new professors, the Law School will maintain its commitment to scholarship at the highest levels, and the need to offer an increasingly diverse student body the opportunity to be taught by an increasingly diverse faculty,” notes a thumbnail description of the plan on the law school’s Web site.

While no overt reference to the school’s notoriety in the 80’s and 90’s was made, one line—which could have been borrowed from the liberal agitators’ phrasebook but appeared to have a very different political valence—described the plan’s loftiest goal.

“Above all, the School must continue to be a metropolis, rather than a village,” reads the brochure describing the campaign.

Mr. Summers—recent controversy notwithstanding—is himself seen as a liberal, and so is Ms. Kagan. Mr. Summers had worked with her on occasion when they were both officials in the Clinton administration. So conservatives saw little to be enthusiastic about in the appointment. Ms. Kagan was a former domestic-policy and legal advisor to the President, and served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

President Clinton even nominated her to serve on the influential D.C. Circuit bench, only to see the Republicans in the Senate dawdle over bringing her candidacy to a committee vote. (Ms. Kagan is the first woman to serve as dean in the school’s 188 years.)

She inherited the law school from Mr. Clark, a philosopher and scholar of corporate law who was also a prolific fund-raiser.

What has followed is a hiring spree: 20 offers to full-time professors have been extended—with nine acceptances so far, according to Michael Armini, the school’s director of communications. There are currently 81 full-time professors at the school, the same number as when Ms. Kagan joined, mostly because of retirements.

According to John Coates, a corporate-law professor, the hiring logjam has been lifted because the “false sense of scarcity has been eliminated.”

“I think, in the past, there was this dynamic where people were sometimes supporting and sometimes opposing for reasons that didn’t have as much to do with the merits, but had to do with the sense of limited budget,” said Mr. Coates, who joined the faculty in 1997.

Of the nine new professors, six have been appointed with tenure. To the left of center are environmental-law expert Jody Freeman, from UCLA, and Daryl Levinson, a constitutional-law theorist.

But recent hires have also added to the conservatives’ ranks. There is John Manning, 44, an expert on the separation of powers and the structure of government, who advocates for a strict reading of the U.S. Constitution, and 43-year-old Jack Goldsmith, an international-law expert known for questioning the efficacy of the International Criminal Court.

Both are highly regarded scholars and former Republican administration officials (Bush I for Manning, Bush II for Goldsmith). They declined to comment.

In addition to Messrs. Manning and Goldsmith, joining next year is Adrian Vermeule, a constitutional, statutory-interpretation and administrative-law specialist who takes a social-science approach, reading empirical research and looking for counterintuitive solutions. Mr. Vermeule is currently at the University of Chicago, where he has won various teaching awards. He has written about constitutional issues in the context of national security, arguing that restricting some liberties isn’t at odds with the freedoms Americans enjoy, that people overreact in what he calls “libertarian panics.” He has also argued for the death penalty on “pro-life grounds,” citing studies that show it deters would-be killers. Yet he has also criticized some of what others see as the court’s conservative activism.

To be sure, new appointments have gone to scholars with approaches and fields of study all over the map, and about half of the 20 recent offers have been to people on the liberal-to-left spectrum. Like Mr. Vermeule, the rest are hard to classify.

Four junior professors—election-law expert Heather Gerken and local-democracy specialist David Barron, who worked in the Clinton administration, as well as corporate-law scholars Guhan Subramanian and Allen Ferrell—have also received tenure since Ms. Kagan took over.

But even this ratio is newsworthy. A much-talked-about study in The Georgetown Law Journal analyzed 11 years of federal-election campaign contributions and found that of those faculty members who gave more than $200, 91 percent and 92 percent at Harvard and Yale, respectively, gave to Democrats. The average for 21 top law schools was 81 percent for Democrats.

What might have once been seen as an assault on the school’s values has been turned into a point of pride, according one Harvard Law School source, with professors heralding their willingness to make the recent hires—especially Messrs. Manning and Goldsmith—as proof of their liberal, tolerant mindset.

Which is precisely the point on which Ms. Kagan has successfully lobbied: It would be anti-intellectual to shut down the candidacy of a qualified conservative.

“We don’t look at politics,” Ms. Kagan insisted. “We figure that if we really go for the people who are doing the most interesting scholarship and who are the best teachers, we’ll get a pretty wide political cross-section—and indeed we have. We’re just looking for the best people, the best scholars, the best teachers.”

The effort has not been without its small struggles. There was a political flare-up when Mr. Goldsmith joined the faculty last fall, with faculty members airing their concerns about his alleged involvement with the infamous “torture memos” in The Boston Globe.

And when it later emerged that Ms. Goldsmith had, in fact, resigned because he objected to the administration’s permissive lines on torture, not all of his critics were placated. They saw echoes of the administration’s position in his scholarship, which argues that that the United States isn’t always bound by international law.

It was Ms. Kagan’s public support of Mr. Goldsmith that effectively quelled the outcry.

In Mr. Manning’s case, it emerged that the changes at Harvard Law are hardly happening fast enough for some students.

When Mr. Manning joined the campus, the student-run Harvard Law School Record ran an editorial in support of his hiring: “At HLS, you can count the number of actively, politically conservatives [sic] on one hand and still have enough fingers left to flash a peace sign. On a campus filled by hundreds of instructors, is this really sufficient diversity?”

Sufficient or no, Harvard Law has changed since the days when, as Mr. Berenson put it, “[Reagan Solicitor General] Charles Fried was the only game in town.”

Students and faculty point to professors who have tipped their hats to conservative causes: Mary Ann Glendon, an anti-abortion feminist; law and economics scholars like Steven Shavell and J. Mark Ramseyer, on the basis that they’re believers in free-market economic concepts. Einer Elhauge, an antitrust expert who litigated on behalf of the Republican-dominated Florida legislature alongside Mr. Fried in Bush v. Gore.

‘We Don’t Recruit’

When the Harvard Law chapter of the Federalist Society hosted the organization’s annual student symposium in February, hundreds of law students, academics and lawyers filled the chandeliered Grand Ballroom of the Marriott Hotel in Cambridge, Mass., to hear a talk by Judge David Sentelle, a conservative member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Dean Kagan introduced the judge.

“I love the Federalist Society,” she announced, “but you are not my people.”

The crowd laughed. It came as no surprise that Ms. Kagan wouldn’t feel kinship with the Feddies. (Moreover, Judge Sentelle headed the panel that appointed Ken Starr as independent counsel.)

And yet there she was, supporting the society. It was a powerful symbolic gesture, one that conservative students still cite when they gush about the dean.

“I just thought it would be funny to a little bit note what everybody knew, which is that”—and here Ms. Kagan allowed herself a chortle— “this was not the student group I was involved in. But at the same time, to express my appreciation for what they do— for what they do in the law-school community and otherwise. These are highly committed, intelligent, hard-working, active students who make the Harvard community better, just like the American Constitution Society makes the Harvard community better. I don’t have to share your politics to understand that Harvard Law School is a better place because you do the things you do here.”

Ms. Kagan’s quip may have been a backhanded compliment. But it says a lot about the political temperature of the campus that, later, the Federalists were so heartened by her one-liner that they emblazoned the quip on the back of their chapter’s T-shirts. Her jokey but eminently cool embrace felt like a big bear hug. Or at least they wanted to spread that impression. (Said Jeffrey Jamison, president of the American Constitution Society, the Federalist Society’s liberal counterpart: “They celebrate their victories every time they can get them, because they feel that they’re oppressed.”)

“She’s been very, very friendly to our chapter—a great friend,” explained Matt Cooper, a third-year student and Federalist Society chapter president. “What I would say is that Harvard Law School has traditionally been an unfriendly place for conservatives. It’s changed. I wouldn’t say it’s friendly and welcoming, but it’s certainly not hostile to the extent that it once was.”

Yet Mr. Cooper added that, as part of the admissions office’s outreach to most of the student groups, he was asked if conservatives had an accurate picture of the community at Harvard before they enrolled. He answered no, that most conservatives had an impression they would be in a very small minority, and that most were surprised to discover such an active conservative student movement. Mr. Cooper sensed that the official wanted to pass that information along to applicants.

That wrong impression is “something they want to remedy,” he said.

In a promotional brochure that Harvard distributed to accepted students this past spring, one of six students featured in a full-page spread was Lawrence VanDyke, class of 2005. A quote accompanied his picture: “The size of this place means that you’re going to find your niche, and you’re not going to be the only person in that niche. I’m involved with the Federalist Society here and while it may be considered a minority group on campus, it’s a minority group of 200-plus people.”

(In fact, according to Mr. Cooper, the Federalists are 350 strong, the largest branch in the country.)

The pamphlet was written by Mr. Armini, the law school’s director of communications. He interviewed a bunch of Law Review members who were around in the summer of 2003. “I remember that his quote worked because it stressed the ‘bigger is better’ theme,” Mr. Armini wrote in an e-mail.

The dean disputed the notion that they were trying to recruit conservatives. “We pay zero attention to this in the admissions process. Zero. There’s just nothing going on like that,” she said.

Indeed, Ms. Kagan and other faculty members, at Harvard and elsewhere, said they doubted that students used ideological litmus tests to determine where they should attend law school.

But the perceived liberal bent at Harvard does get raised as a concern for entering students, conservatives said. “As a student here talking with admitted students, that is a question I’m asked a lot: ‘How will we feel as conservatives?’” said Soraya Freed, an officer with the Federalist Society.

Ms. Freed said she was encouraging. “I don’t think there’s a better school for conservatives right now,” she asserted.

As with the hires, Ms. Kagan said there has been no favoritism to any particular group of applicants—that, if anything, what students have responded to is her effort to make the campus more collegial and student-friendly.

This year, her office is sponsoring a debate between the Federalists and the A.C.S. (in the past, the groups held separate events). She’s improved amenities to make the austere campus more like an upscale office complex. The gym and other student spaces were renovated; there’s free coffee in one of the main buildings and complimentary tampons in the bathrooms; and she even established an outdoor ice-skating rink on one of the main quads.

There are practical effects to having more conservatives on campus. They serve as mentors, helping to shuttle students into jobs; they also serve as public intellectuals, emissaries and recruiting directors.

They also help to attract continued interest from the increasing number of the school’s prominent conservative alumni.

Finn M.W. Caspersen, class of 1966 and a fund-raiser éminence grise for Harvard Law, is the chair of the school’s current $400 million fund-raising campaign.

That Mr. Caspersen, the former head of one of the largest consumer-lending companies, has endowed two professorships at the law school and considers himself a small-government conservative would seem to be evidence enough of the school’s interest in its relationship with conservative alumni.

But Mr. Caspersen said he hadn’t found that politics was a factor in alumni giving.

“That’s not a decisive reason in most people’s minds about whether they want to give,” he said. “Of course I’ve talked to the people who give money—people don’t volunteer funds.”

Still, he acknowledged that changes at the school—especially the hires led by Ms. Kagan—broadened the school’s appeal as a charity to its alumni.

“I think it’s a healthy thing. Whether it’s going to open a nirvana for fund-raisers—that’s a whole different thing,” he said. “It can’t hurt, let me put it that way.”

Off the record and outside of the school’s official development circles, things are put a little more bluntly.

“I’ve had zillions of conservatives alums saying to me how great they think Elena is for doing this,” said one professor.

“There has been a lot of talk about it, because it’s such a dramatic break,” said Douglas Cox, H.L.S. class of 1980, a partner at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher in D.C. who worked in the Justice Department during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

“I think Dean Kagan’s hiring positions … are a little bit like the ‘Nixon in China’ phenomenon,” said Mr. Berenson. “The reaction has really been electric.”

Before the uproar over President George W. Bush’s latest Supreme Court pick, Harriet Miers, the conservative elite’s most memorable recent breach came when Mr. Bush’s father broke his 1988 campaign pledge to oppose any new taxes. But the Miers rebellion reminded some older conservatives of another moment: July 26, 1971, when a dozen leaders of the small, marginal conservative movement met in William F. Buckley’s East Side apartment (where else?) to craft a public response to President Richard Nixon’s trip to Communist China.

The group—which would become known as the “Manhattan 12”—denounced “excessive taxation and inordinate welfarism” before moving on to the final straw: “overtures to Red China.” They declared that they would “suspend their support” for Mr. Nixon, and went on to campaign for an obscure primary rival (John Ashbrook, for those keeping score at home) in 1972. The break with Nixon marked an important, albeit lesser-known, milestone of the conservatives’ rise to power.

Now, more than three decades later, the descendants of the Manhattan 12 are in open mutiny against a President they helped elect. In fact, they are openly comparing Mr. Bush to Nixon. The question is whether the conservative intelligentsia can convert its status and access into influence on an administration they’d thought was their own.

“We had fewer resources, less power,” recalled one of the original Manhattan 12, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he didn’t want to anger the White House. “But we had more leverage because Nixon hadn’t been reelected and he was insecure.”

After years of small disappointments, from swelling spending to trade tariffs to expanding Medicaid, the Miers nomination came as a gut punch to the mostly secular conservative thinkers.

Their dissent began just hours after Ms. Miers’ nomination was announced, with Mr. Bush insisting, “I picked the best person I could find.” By 10:25 a.m that morning, conservative pundit William Kristol was up on the Web site of his Weekly Standard magazine, declaring himself “Disappointed, Depressed and Demoralized.” George Will weighed in the next day, dominating the buzz with his observation, “it is not important that she be confirmed.” Two days later, Charles Krauthammer did him one better: “If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the president of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her.” By the next week, Mr. Kristol was back in front of the pack, calling for Ms. Miers to withdraw.

This is far more blustery than the stiff 1971 statement from the Manhattan 12, which stated that the group had decided to “suspend our support” for Nixon. Today’s conservative network of columns, broadcast and cable outlets provides a bullhorn unimaginable in 1971, when the declaration was published in two small journals. But while the conservative elite of the early 1970’s drew attention, and concessions, from the first-term Nixon White House, today’s conservative intellectuals are unexpectedly impotent in the face of the repeated slights of George W. Bush’s second term. The intellectual class still has access to the West Wing—or at least the high-ceilinged event rooms—and the President hosted a gathering in honor of National Review’s 50th-anniversary party even as the Miers furor was unfolding. But Mr. Bush seemed unconcerned by the resentment simmering beneath the polite applause and requisite smiles, at one point winking at Mr. Will.

“They are leading an army of none, the conservative intelligentsia, in revolting against Bush,” said Kieran Mahoney, the Republican political consultant whose father, J. Daniel Mahoney, was a founder of the state Conservative Party and one of the Manhattan 12. “Bush’s support among the grassroots rank-and-file conservatives in the United States of America is as wide and deep as it could conceivably be. He is rock-solid with those people.”

As Ms. Miers’ confirmation hearing approaches, a split between the secular intellectuals and evangelical leaders is becoming clearer. The intellectuals are sharpening their denunciations and calling for Ms. Miers to step aside, while religious conservatives are standing beside the President and the nominee.

In the days since Ms. Miers’ nomination was announced, the nation’s most important evangelical leaders have hit the pundit circuit in order to vouch for the nominee’s good character and conservative credentials. James Dobson, the influential chairman of the evangelical advocacy group Focus on the Family, has been the loudest—and most controversial—cheerleader, but other influential figures like the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land and Watergate felon-turned-minister Charles Colson have also been reading from the White House talking points about Ms. Miers (which include attacks on “elitist” conservative intellectuals). And while some leaders, including onetime Presidential candidate Gary Bauer, have attacked Mr. Bush’s pick, their doubts have been nothing compared to the shrieks from the right’s comparatively secular intelligentsia, whose newfound outrage appears to know no bounds.

But the backlash is promoting its own backlash. Lucianne Goldberg, the conservative literary agent who was among the guests at the National Review gala, remarked that condemning the Miers nomination became the evening’s favorite parlor game.

“Each one tried to outdo the other with the heaviest vocabulary in criticism of Bush. They were strangling on their vocabularies,” she said.

Ms. Goldberg’s Web site has been home to the backlash backlash. Here, as on sites run by radio commentator Hugh Hewitt and other White House loyalists, self-styled rank-and-file conservatives have picked up on the White House charges of elitism and begun lobbing the kind of accusations at “pointy-headed” East Coast intellectuals that they usually reserve for liberals. “Elitist bunk!” wrote “Joe Friday” in response to Mr. Kristol’s column calling on Ms. Miers to withdraw.”

This kind of division between coastal elite and heartland volk, secular scholars and religious rank-and-file, has been simmering quietly beneath the surface of the conservative alliance since its birth. It is the movement’s unspoken compromise, the wrinkle in the marriage bed, and it is a measure of the Miers controversy that it has managed to unleash these tensions within the right.

Some intellectuals haven’t taken kindly to the accusations of elitism.

“I’m sorry, but I’m getting so much b.s. email from holier-than-thou ‘real Americans,’ ‘real conservatives’ and outside-the-beltway free thinkers I have to get this off my chest,” wrote a Miers critic, Jonah Goldberg, on the National Review Online message board. “I was rejected from every college I applied to.” Well, almost—he added that he eventually was “accepted at a fairly good liberal arts college (Goucher College in Baltimore) largely because I had pretty good SATs and I was a male at a time when my school was going from all-female to coed.”

(Mr. Goldberg did note that the Miers appointment not only is dividing the movement, but families as well. His mother is the aforementioned Lucianne Goldberg, who supports the nomination.)

But at the end of the day, the scholar class’ criticisms are primarily intellectual rather than ideological in nature. They may have doubts about the depth of Ms. Miers’ conservatism and her commitment to core Republican values like overturning Roe v. Wade and ending affirmative action. But it’s her lack of scholarly heft—or, as Mr. Krauthammer wrote with acid scorn, the “nonexistence” of her “constitutional scholarship, experience and engagement”—that strikes them not merely as an affront, but a betrayal.

“I’m beginning to think that this appointment was an expression of the president’s contempt for the conservative intelligentsia,” wrote pundit Andrew Sullivan.

Added Robert Bork, the godfather of right-wing jurisprudence, whose own Supreme Court nomination imploded in controversy in 1987: “It’s a slap in the face to the conservatives who’ve been building a conservative legal movement for 20 years.”

Revenge for Bork

For those still smarting from the borking of Judge Bork, the hearings to replace Justices William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor were supposed to symbolically repair that defeat. These hearings would be the culmination of decades of meticulous effort to move the court back toward the framers’ “original intent.” True to their hawkish reputations, they wanted a fight. They wanted to go toe-to-toe with the weakened, minority-party Democrats and then vanquish them in a blaze of rhetoric and “yea” votes. Mr. Bush’s nomination of John Roberts as chief justice was a promising start, many conservatives agreed, an apt leader for this epic moment. But the fact that the President “folded” on his second nomination—that the person he chose to consummate the conservative revolution seems to be, in their view, a little-known cipher—has been almost as distressing as the fact that he ignored their advice.

“The reason this is a disappointment is that this was the fight,” said James Higgins, one of the organizers of New York’s conservative Monday Meeting. “You always hear, ‘You have to give in on this one, because the fight’s down the road.’ This was the fight.”

Taken on its own, Mr. Bush’s attempt to call a truce in the ideological wars might have been a grave enough offense in conservative circles, punishable by several days’ worth of public griping. But coupled with what many right-wing intellectuals see as a long list of White House sins—from relatively relaxed immigration policies to expanding government spending—Mr. Bush’s Supreme Court pick began an unexpected civil war. Never mind the string of Federalist Society members he nominated to the appellate bench, the high-stakes invasion of Iraq, the supply-side tax cuts or the litany of lesser-known policies he took straight from the conservative handbook. To some conservative thinkers, all those victories seem to have evaporated in the political equivalent of the three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule.

“He’s disappointed conservatives at almost every turn …. So I think you can see why [we] regard this as the last straw,” said Judge Bork during a phone conversation with The Observer. “I think a lot of conservatives are going to say, ‘To hell with him.’”

For many of today’s staunchest conservative thinkers, this is their Manhattan 12 moment, the hour of reckoning with Mr. Bush’s Presidency. They have tallied their disappointments and, as the 12 wrote in their manifesto, they have concluded that the time has come to “break with the administration.”

But the smaller, milder-mannered Manhattan 12 had real leverage over their wayward President; Nixon was facing re-election, after all. In meetings with White House officials, including Pat Buchanan and Henry Kissinger, the Manhattan 12 got concrete promises: Nixon would abandon his foundering Family Assistance Plan (authored by the administration’s house Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan), increase defense spending and stick with then–Vice President Spiro Agnew as his running mate. (Agnew did in fact remain on the ticket, only to resign in 1973 after pleading no contest to corruption charges dating to his time as governor of Maryland.)

“For a small window, we really had some leverage,” said Allan Ryskind, an editor at the conservative periodical Human Events, who was one of the signers.

This time around, Mr. Bush is blithely pressing ahead, secure, so far, in the support of the evangelical base and paying little attention to the intellectuals who have congratulated themselves for years on shaping the conservative movement.

Now, all the editorial writers, columnists and critics can do is scold the President in public and vow that they won’t be fooled this way again.

“Some of us will have an influence on how history is written,” said Thomas Winter, a key author of the Manhattan 12 declaration. “But [Mr. Bush is] not running again, so in that narrow sense, he’s free to do what ever he wants.”

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said that “90 percent of judicial decisions are based on bias, prejudices, and personal and political motivation, and the other 10 percent is based on the law.” We have a personal and paper trail that tells us with a great deal of certainty how he will arrive at 90 percent of his decisions.

His background as a successful private practitioner is given more emphasis in the press than the substantial years he spent in government service. After clerking for two years, one year for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, he became not just another lawyer working for the Reagan and Bush I administrations—he was the political deputy in the Solicitor General’s office. Selected primarily for his ideology, he argued in the Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade, to permit prayer in schools and to punish dissidents. Of course the briefs express his personal views; he wouldn’t have been there if they didn’t. It insults him to claim otherwise.

During his two years as a judge, he consistently voted in support of authority—for governments, corporations, the military and the police. His brief in Rust v. Sullivan called for Roe v. Wade to be overturned, even though the constitutionality of Roe was not at issue in that case. The argument was unnecessary. One legal scholar called it “grandstanding.”

Amicus briefs are often more reflective of a lawyer’s view than briefs authored on behalf of a litigant. In Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, Judge Roberts co-authored an amicus brief on behalf of various radical anti-choice groups arguing that blocking abortion-clinic access was not an act of discrimination against women, even though it targeted women exclusively based on a condition unique to women: pregnancy.

Judge Roberts talks about his respect for precedent and stare decisis. But he co-authored a government brief urging the court to disregard long-established law and to find it constitutional for a public school to sponsor a prayer at graduation ceremonies. That issue will soon again be before the court. If he’s confirmed, Judge Roberts will disregard Lee v. Weismann, the 1973 precedent that found public prayer unconstitutional.

Judge Roberts co-authored the government’s brief in United States v. Eichman, defending the constitutionality of the federal law criminalizing flag burning, even though the Supreme Court one year earlier, in Texas v. Johnson, had ruled a similar state statute unconstitutional. The Supreme Court rejected his argument. Judge Roberts, who claims a commitment to stare decisis and precedent, was willing to urge a virtually instantaneous overruling of Texas v. Johnson.

We do know how Judge Roberts will likely vote on the important cases facing the court this fall. In the court’s first week in October, it will hear the Bush administration’s challenge to Oregon’s “right to die” law. An appeals court noted that Oregon voters have twice passed state laws permitting assisted suicide. Pro-life/anti-abortion groups, including groups supported by Judge Roberts’ wife, have filed briefs in support of the administration. Judge Roberts’ appreciation for states’ rights will not overrule his commitment to find the law unconstitutional.

Two abortion cases, including a partial-birth abortion case, very likely will go against abortion advocates. Sandra Day O’Connor rejected, and Judge Roberts accepts, requirements for parental notification, even if there is a medical emergency. That issue is to be decided in Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood, a New Hampshire case that will be argued on Nov. 29, 2005.

Judge Roberts’ Circuit Court decisions make clear that he is against federal regulation—whether it be in the environmental, administrative or economic areas. The Federalist Society, of which he is a prominent and active member, had a program entitled “Rolling Back the New Deal: A Review of Economic Regulation.” More economically sophisticated than either Justice Scalia or Justice Thomas, he can emerge as the conservatives’ point man on economic matters, leading the already-started rejection of the New Deal court’s “commerce clause” decisions.

Very troublesome is his view of a President with expanded powers—a position embraced by the Bush White House. In the Hamdan decision, issued the week before he received the Supreme Court nomination, Judge Roberts permitted Mr. Bush to use military rather than civil commissions to try those enemy combatants. The President’s view that the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply at these trials, Judge Roberts said, is to be given “great weight.” Judge Roberts thus agreed that the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply, asserting the power of the President in wartime more strongly than any recent court anywhere. If confirmed, Judge Roberts will have many other chances to make decisions that will anger civil libertarians.

The reach of federal anti-discrimination laws and the Americans with Disabilities Act will again be challenged—Justice O’Connor was recently the fifth vote to expand those rights. Judge Roberts will reject Congress’ decisions and go the other way.

There are three death-penalty cases already accepted for the next term. While Justice O’Connor didn’t reject capital punishment outright, she found enough individual circumstances that narrowed the application of the law. This term, in a capital-punishment case where the court is being asked to reject a DNA argument and affirm a doubtful old conviction, Judge Roberts will vote to affirm where most likely Justice O’Connor would have voted to reverse.

Justices Scalia, Thomas and Rehnquist—and Judge Roberts in his Circuit Court decisions—use words and terms like “textualists,” “judicial restraint” and “stare decisis” when it suits them; when it doesn’t they assert the Supreme Court’s and the President’s rights over the rights of Congress. The claim that he favors judicial caution is inaccurate. Judge Roberts favors judicial restraint when it comes to interfering with state-court criminal convictions. He doesn’t favor judicial restraint when Congress has passed laws he disagrees with—and he doesn’t favor judicial restraint when it comes to giving the President the broadest of powers.

Although Judge Roberts gave speeches to the Federalist Society and is listed as a member of the Federalist Steering Committee, put together by Robert Bork, he claims he doesn’t remember joining the Federalists.

We know how Judge Roberts will vote on the issues of today, and perhaps for the next three decades. Congress should explore his views so the American people will know the consequences of his nomination.