In The Meese Revolution: The Making of a Constitutional Moment, Steven Calabresi and Gary Lawson describe how Ed Meese was the most consequential attorney general in United States history. Mr. Meese’s accomplishments and influence extend far beyond the law; he has been an integral part of virtually everything important that has happened in American conservatism in the past half century. But he has had outsized, and largely unappreciated, influence on law and legal culture. He turned the Reagan Justice Department into an “academy in exile” where ideas like originalism could incubate and develop, and he helped make those ideas reality through speeches, litigation strategy, and judicial appointments. Legal culture has changed dramatically since Mr. Meese’s time in government, and court decisions that would have been unimaginable four decades ago are now routine. Those changes in law and legal culture, however one evaluates them, are a direct result of the Meese Revolution.

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In urging the Supreme Court to change its approach to deciding cases, while announcing that the executive through the Department of Justice was changing its own way of looking at the law, the new at­torney general called the Supreme Court’s 1985 case law “incoherent” and “adrift.” Worse yet, said Meese, “In considering these areas of ad­judication—Federalism, Criminal Law, and Religion—it seems fair to conclude that far too many of the Court’s opinions were, on the whole, more policy choices than articulations of constitutional principle. The voting blocs, the arguments, all reveal a greater allegiance to what the court thinks constitutes sound public policy than a deference to what the Constitution—its text and intention—may demand.”

What was needed to get the Supreme Court back on track, Meese maintained, was nothing less than a new “Jurisprudence of Original Intention”: a jurisprudence based on the original meaning of the text of the Constitution and not on the policy views of the judges interpreting it. As Meese explained, “The permanence of the Constitution has been weakened. A constitution that is viewed as only what the judges say it is, is no longer a constitution in the true sense.”

United States Supreme Court courtroom - Library of Congress

Meese then added, in two of the most important sentences ever spo­ken by an attorney general, “It has been and will continue to be the policy of this administration to press for a Jurisprudence of Original Intention. In the cases we file and those we join as amicus, we will en­deavor to resurrect the original meaning of constitutional provisions and statutes as the only reliable guide for judgment.”

In other words, Attorney General Meese’s July 9, 1985, ABA speech was not just a speech about abstract legal ideas. It was a public an­nouncement of a sea change in the litigating and brief-writing policies of the Department of Justice (DOJ), as well as in the method by which the executive branch would interpret the Constitution and laws when the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) gave legal advice to the presi­dent or other executive actors. And henceforth all Reagan administra­tion judicial nominees would ideally be originalists.

Attorney General Ed Meese would go on to give more than thirty speeches laying out the original meaning of various parts of the Consti­tution, and the DOJ would produce thirty monographs on the original meaning of parts of the Constitution and hold three academic confer­ences on that subject. The Meese Justice Department would be a giant law school that would teach the courts and the bar “originalism”—the doctrine of constitutional interpretation that is held to some degree by six justices of the Supreme Court in 2024: Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Sam Alito, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Jus­tice Brett Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

The Supreme Court as composed June 30, 2022. Front row, left to right: Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and Associate Justice Elena Kagan. Back row, left to right: Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Associate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson - Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States

It may be hard today to appreciate the truly revolutionary nature of Attorney General Meese’s speech. At the time Ed Meese gave this speech on July 9, 1985, there was no member of the Supreme Court who was remotely an “originalist.” Supreme Court constitutional decisions fre­quently did not even quote or acknowledge, much less follow, the text of the Constitution. Perhaps a tiny handful of first-term, Reagan-ap­pointed lower federal court judges, such as Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, would describe themselves as “originalists,” but you could prob­ably count them on both hands. Not a single tenure-track member of any law school faculty anywhere in the United States was publishing serious work developing an originalist theory in 1985. Originalist law professor Robert H. Bork of the Yale Law School had by then resigned from the Yale Law School faculty in disgust. The most significant orig­inalist in 1985 was Raoul Berger, who in 1977 wrote a book called Gov­ernment by Judiciary that foreshadowed some of Meese’s criticisms of the court a decade later. Mr. Berger was briefly a law professor from 1962 to 1965, but when he did his famous work on constitutional law in the late 1960s and 1970s, he did not hold a tenure-track appointment at a law school. And while future Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Sam Alito were active in the law during that time, none had by 1985 written any significant works on originalism.

Ed Meese put originalism on the map in high-stakes national politics. His speeches were often covered on the front pages of newspapers, in a pre-internet world in which getting on the front page was crucial. Ed Meese’s speeches sparked a national conversation, which drew public responses from liberal Supreme Court justices William J. Brennan and John Paul Stevens, as well as from prominent liberal legal academics—or at least those committed enough to the academic enterprise to take him seriously and respond.

Today, the Supreme Court has at least six justices who treat the Constitution’s original meaning as important to at least some of their decisions—and a few who treat it as the single most important consid­eration in their decisions. Even Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom no one would call originalists, take originalism more seriously than anyone on the Supreme Court—and almost anyone in the legal academy or the bar—would have taken it in 1985. The lower federal courts, and the state courts as well, are filled with self-described originalists. The legal academy remains largely hostile, often openly so, to originalists, but roughly one hundred law professors, including tenured faculty members at institutions such as Yale, Har­vard, Chicago, Stanford, and Columbia, self-identify as originalist. Any lawyer today who does not know how to make a persuasive originalist argument has no business arguing constitutional law cases, and any law school that does not train its students to make persuasive originalist arguments, alongside other kinds of constitutional arguments, is com­mitting a form of educational malpractice.

As this book will explain, none of this would have happened with­out Ed Meese. Every development over the last four decades that has led to the modern successes of originalism can be traced to Ed Meese. Never before or since in American history has any one attorney general so thoroughly transformed the legal culture. By contrast, four decades after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s most powerful attorney general, Homer S. Cummings (1933–1939), had left office, nobody in the Jimmy Carter administration probably even remembered his name, much less what principles of law he had stood for.

U.S. constitutional law has been transformed since Ed Meese gave his ABA speech, and the man who is the most responsible for that transfor­mation does not get the public credit and recognition that he deserves. When people think of originalism in constitutional law today, they usu­ally associate the idea with former justice Antonin Scalia or with such brilliant contemporary Supreme Court justices as Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. But Attorney General Meese argued for originalism before Justices Scalia, Thomas, or Gorsuch did. In fact, it was Ed Meese who deliberately gave Justice Antonin Scalia the bully pulpit of the Su­preme Court from which to expound on originalism, a topic Scalia had not publicly addressed prior to becoming a Supreme Court justice.

Most importantly, as we describe in detail in chapters 6 and 8, Ed Meese created the opportunities for two generations of originalist schol­ars, judges, and government officials to develop their own originalist ideas. Ed Meese promoted originalism before any of the hundred or so law professors who are now developing and debating it had done so, and he seeded the ground that made subsequent work on originalism possi­ble. Ed Meese put the full political weight of the transformative Ronald Reagan presidency behind the idea that the original public meaning of all written legal texts is the only legitimate meaning of those texts.

Ed Meese’s influence did not end with his resignation as attorney general in 1988. Over the past three and a half decades, Meese used his perch at the Heritage Foundation and on the board of directors of the Federalist Society to help promote debate and discussion of originalism and the rule of law in general. He has both inspired and facilitated younger generations of scholars, as well as younger generations of activ­ists in and out of government, such as Lee Liberman Otis, Leonard Leo, and David McIntosh, who worked post-Reagan to put originalists on the Supreme Court, inferior federal courts, and even state courts. The fruits of those tireless and selfless efforts are evident. The 2021–2022 Su­preme Court term saw Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Association (which overruled Roe v. Wade); New York State Rifle & Pistol Associa­tion, Inc. v. Bruen (which reaffirmed the Second Amendment right to carry a gun outside your home subject to reasonable regulation, which had first been recognized in 2008 in an opinion written by President Reagan’s finest Supreme Court appointee, Antonin Scalia); West Vir­ginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (which places policymaking authority primarily with Congress rather than with executive agencies); and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (holding that a high school coach can pray by himself on a public school playing field). The Oc­tober 2022 term yielded Students for Fair Admission, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, which limits the ability of colleges and universities to discriminate on the basis of race in admissions. These results were unthinkable in 1985. However one evaluates these decisions (depending on one’s point of view), they are enormously consequential, and they are the direct result of the Meesian constitutional revolution.

It remains to be seen how long-lasting and profound this revolu­tion will be. Will it outlast the 2024 presidential election and threats of court-packing or will it endure for twenty or forty years or more? Whatever the future brings, the modern Supreme Court case law demonstrates that a constitutional revolution has happened. This book aims to show how it happened—and that all roads lead to Ed Meese.

1984 Cabinet Class Photo. First Row: Donald Regan, George Bush, President Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger. Second Row: Terrel Bell, Jeane Kirkpatrick, David Stockman, William French Smith, Elizabeth Dole, Donald Hode,l Margaret Heckler. Third Row: John Block, Raymond Donovan, Malcolm Baldrige, Samuel Pierce, William Clark, William Casey, Edwin Meese III, William Brock - U.S. National Archives

At this point, Ed Meese would immediately say that all of his accom­plishments were really the work of his boss President Ronald Reagan, his predecessor William French Smith, and the capable people who populated his Department of Justice divisions and staff. Ed Meese is such a modest and devout person that when the meek inherit the earth, he will own all of the land west of the Mississippi River. Notwithstand­ing his protestations, however, Ed Meese’s transformational tenure as the most influential attorney general in American history is his own accomplishment. While he, of course, had invaluable help from Presi­dent Reagan, more than a bit of help from his predecessor, and a good measure of help from his Justice Department loyalists and judicial nom­inees, Ed Meese was the indispensable man in promoting, publicizing, and legitimating both originalism and the Reagan Revolution. No other attorney general has ever, in 235 years of American history, played such a leading intellectual role in transforming the theory of American con­stitutional law as did Ed Meese, while at the same time serving as the chief aide and counsellor to President Ronald Reagan. That is why we have called this book The Meese Revolution.

Read more in The Meese Revolution: The Making of a Constitutional Moment