Part 1: In 1998, a legal revolution was quietly born in Texas. It would pull America’s courts rightward.

(Credit: Emily Albracht/The Texas Tribune)

In March, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sat before the next generation of conservative legal warriors and shared with them the gospel of Texas.

The story began several decades earlier, when conservative lawyers like himself looked out over the nation’s legal landscape and saw “opinion after opinion after opinion that seemed to rewrite the Constitution,” Abbott told this gathering of law students put on by the Federalist Society.