The Atlantic - What I Most Regret About My Decades of Legal Activism

Open Markets strategic counselor Caroline Fredrickson writes a piece on her own personal experience with involvement in legal activism, and what she has recognized along the way.

Like many women activists of my generation, I came of age politically by joining in the fight over reproductive rights. In 1986, I boarded a bus packed with other college students and rode from New Haven to Washington, clutching a handwritten cardboard sign that urged the Supreme Court to preserve Roe v. Wade. Later, in law school, I came to believe two things about the American legal system. First, its crowning achievement was the expansion of constitutional rights during the postwar New Deal era. In the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s, the Supreme Court found school segregation unconstitutional, protected the rights of criminal defendants, and put teeth on the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, among other landmark decisions. And, of course, there was Roe.

The second thing my classmates and I learned was that this achievement was under assault by a conservative backlash. The same forces that powered Ronald Reagan into office in 1980 were seeking to curtail many of the constitutional rights secured by the courts in the postwar era. That’s why, early in my career, I took a job as the legal director of NARAL Pro-Choice America. Later, I spent 11 years running the American Constitution Society—the liberal counterpart to the Federalist Society—where I helped vet and promote judges. In 2021, President Joe Biden appointed me to his Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. All along, I was focused on preserving and enlarging civil rights.

Given my background, the reversal of Roe last year felt like a crushing blow. But as I reflect on my career in the law, my greatest regrets lie elsewhere. The progressive advances of mid-20th-century America weren’t, after all, only about civil rights and social justice. Equally important was the political-economic arrangement established during and after the World War II era. It featured a powerful regulatory state, aggressive antitrust enforcement, and strong labor unions. These policies kept corporate power in check and helped drive the fastest, most widely shared advance in living standards in American history.

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