How the conservative Federalist Society will affect the Supreme Court for decades to come

Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas look on during the 60th presidential inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, in the U.S. Capitol in Washington. Chip Somodevilla/Pool Photo via AP

During the 2016 presidential election campaign, candidate Donald Trump took the unprecedented move of releasing a list of his potential Supreme Court nominees.

But Trump didn’t assemble this list himself. Instead, he outsourced the selection of his judicial appointments to leaders of the Federalist Society, an organization in the conservative legal movement.