(p 132)
The Olin Foundation's route into the country's best law schools was circuitous...In 1985, however, the foundation's golden opportunity to establish a beachhead at the pinnacle of legal prestige. That year, Harvard Law School was riven by controversy. Leftist professors were urging students to "sabotage" corporate law firms from within. Conservative professors and alumni were scandalized....
Among the many outraged Harvard Law School alumni was one of the Olin Foundation's trustees, George Gillespie. Sensing an opening, he contacted a conservative Harvard Law School professor, Phil Areeda, whom he had been in school with, and offered the foundation's help. The Olin Foundation took the initiative and Harvard took the cash. Out of this ideological pact came the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business at Harvard Law School, on which the foundation ultimately spent $18 million...
(p 133)
After Harvard approved Law and Economics, other schools soon followed. By 1990, nearly eighty law schools taught the subject...
As Law and Economics spread, underwritten at each step by the Olin Foundation and other conservative backers including the Kochs and Scaife, liberal critics grew alarmed. The Alliance for Justice, a liberal nonprofit in Washington, published a critical report in 1993 warning that "a small wealthy group" was trying to "fundamentally alter the way that justice is dispensed in our society." It revealed that the Olin Foundation was paying students thousands of dollars to take classes in Law and Economics at Georgetown Law School and to attend workshops on the subject at Columbia Law School. Despite this ethically dubious situation, only one law school, at the University of California in Los Angeles, turned the Olin funds away, arguing that by plying students with grant money, the foundation was "taking advantage of students' financial need to indoctrinate them with a particular ideology."
More controversial still were Law and Economics seminars that the Olin Foundation funded for judges...
(p 134)
The seminars treated judges to two-week-long, all-expenses-paid immersion training in Law and Economics usually in luxurious settings like the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Florida. They soon became popular free vacations for the judges, a cross between Maoist cultural reeducation camps and Club Med....Within a few years, 660 judges had gone on these junkets, some, like the U.S. Court of Appeals judge and unconfirmed Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsberg, many times. By one count, 40 percent of the federal judiciary participated, including the future Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Clarence Thomas.
A variety of major corporations eagerly joined Olin and other conservative foundations in footing the bills. A study by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity found that between 2008 and 2012 close to 185 federal judges attended judicial seminars sponsored by conservative interests, several of which had cases before the courts. The lead underwriters were the Charles Koch Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, Exxon-Mobil, Shell Oil, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and State Farm...
Simultaneously, the Olin Foundation provided crucial start-up funds for the Federalist Society, a powerful organization for conservative law students founded in 1982. With $5.5 million from the Olin Foundation, as well as large donations from foundations tied to Scaife, the Kochs, and other conservative legacies, the Federalist Society grew from a pipe dream shared by three ragtag law students into a powerful professional network of forty-two thousand right-leaning lawyers, with 150 law school campus chapters and about seventy-five lawyers groups nationally. All of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court are members, as are the former vice president Dick Cheney, the former attorneys general Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft, and numerous members of the federal bench. ...Looking back, the Olin Foundation's staff described it as "one of the best investments" the foundation ever made.