CERLP | Amanda Hollis-Brusky: Making Fusionism Great Again

The UCI Law Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession (CERLP), jointly hosted with the Intellectual Life workshop series, welcomes Amanda Hollis-Brusky to discuss her article, “Making Fusionism Great Again: Authoritarian Means to Christian Nationalist Ends.”

Abstract

This article examines how Donald Trump and Trumpism have transformed the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, two institutions at the heart of the conservative legal movement. It uses the conservative philosophy of fusionism as a lens for understanding the causes and consequences of these changes. It shows Trump and Trumpism have transmogrified the original fusionism of William F. Buckley and Frank S. Meyer - a philosophy that brought disparate factions of conservatives together under the mantle of libertarian means to conservative ends – into a “new fusionism” - authoritarian means to Christian nationalist ends. The article investigates the extent to which this “new fusionism” has been embraced or endorsed by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society and what the consequences might be for the respectability and efficacy of the conservative legal movement after Trump.
 

About Amanda Hollis-Brusky

Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky is a Professor of Politics at Pomona College, where she teaches American politics, constitutional law, and legal institutions. A widely cited expert on Supreme Court politics and the conservative legal movement, she has appeared in outlets such as NPR, BBC World News, the New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and the Showtime docuseries Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court. From 2020–2022, she served as an editor at The Monkey Cage blog at The Washington Post, helping translate academic research for a public audience.

Her research focuses on constitutional change and the “support structures” — networks of lawyers, academics, institutions, and ideas — that shape it. Her first book, Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Oxford, 2015; 2019), won the APSA’s C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book on law and courts. In 2020, she testified before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on maintaining judicial independence and the rule of law.

To request reasonable accommodations for a disability, please email centers@law.uci.edu.

School of Law | Website | View More Events

Contact the organizers