American Constitution Society

Overview

The American Constitution Society is at the lowest point of its 25-year life — and it knows it. Revenue fell to $5.5 million in 2024, the least since 2018; staff were cut; last year’s convention was demoted to a virtual gathering (Bloomberg Law). So in January 2026 the nation’s leading progressive legal organization handed the presidency to Phil Brest, a 38-year-old who had just finished confirming 235 federal judges for President Biden — one more than Donald Trump seated in his first term — and who openly concedes he has no finished blueprint for the revival (Bloomberg Law). His first move was a yearlong listening tour of 100 of the group’s 250 chapters, undertaken while, as Bloomberg Law put it, “concern — if not panic — builds over President Donald Trump’s boundary-breaking and frequently challenged maneuvers” (Bloomberg Law). No general profile of ACS covers this rebuild moment; they still describe the Feingold era as the present.

The 2026 reset

Brest arrived with unusual credentials for a nonprofit presidency. After leading Biden’s judicial confirmation operation, he had also worked for top Senate Democrats Dick Durbin and Dianne Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee — oversight, investigations, and judicial nominations (Bloomberg Law). Cardozo constitutional law professor Wilfred Codrington, an ACS faculty adviser, called it a good pick: “He adds things that they haven’t had and probably need right now” (Bloomberg Law). Even former staffers who had been critical of the organization said they hoped Brest could deliver “a needed reset of an organization at times unwilling to address its deficiencies” — though they spoke anonymously to avoid professional blowback (Bloomberg Law).

The reset was not the plan Brest had for himself. After nearly a decade at major law firms and the highest levels of government, he told a January ACS audience he had wanted out: “My mentality was: ‘I’m tired. I think I need a little time out.’” But, he said, he couldn’t stay on the sidelines while America’s democratic system underwent “unprecedented stress-tests” — “I’m so glad I couldn’t escape” (Bloomberg Law). His predecessor, former Wisconsin Democratic senator Russ Feingold, had stepped down in April 2025 after five years in the role (Bloomberg Law).

Brest’s diagnosis is blunt. He doesn’t dispute that corporate America’s financial support has dwindled, that factions have splintered the left, or that the Federalist Society has decisively out-executed ACS in stocking the bench — including the Supreme Court (Bloomberg Law). One former staffer told Bloomberg Law the fundraising case had collapsed: “Continuing to put money into organizations that don’t have that kind of compelling vision of where they’re headed is a hard case to make” (Bloomberg Law). From the right, South Texas College’s Josh Blackman — a prominent Federalist Society member — argues the problem isn’t money or power but ideas: “ACS can never rival FedSoc… It is not because of lack of funds or lack of power, but due to a lack of ideas” (Bloomberg Law). Brest rejects that, but he doesn’t wave the criticism away — and he concedes the progressive movement’s deeper weakness: the legal left is seen as results-oriented rather than doctrine-driven, while the Federalist Society’s north star has been originalism, evangelized since the 1980s (Bloomberg Law). Brest’s own read is that originalism’s genius isn’t intellectual heft but packaging: “It’s in its framing and messaging and simplicity… Part of what we haven’t done, part of why we have fallen short, is that we haven’t thought about public resonance” (Bloomberg Law).

The turnaround plan has two tracks. Institutionally: the convention returns in person in the summer of 2026, ACS is hiring a director of policy and program to lead its legal work plus a major gifts officer for fundraising, and Brest has pledged deeper outreach to law firms, foundations, and corporate and in-house legal departments — “For corporations that care about the rule of law, about due process,” he said, “there’s no reason those companies shouldn’t embrace an organization like ACS” (Bloomberg Law). Strategically: a sharper focus on state courts, aiming ACS’s judicial and attorneys-general pipeline programs there as a “bulwark against ‘threats of overreach by the Trump administration and the Roberts Court’” — the same pipeline Brest says he consulted when weighing Biden nominees (Bloomberg Law). And rhetorically: a lane for ordinary Americans. NYU constitutional law professor Melissa Murray, a former ACS advisory board member, said demystifying the stakes for non-lawyers is exactly where ACS can matter — “If you’re someone who’s not a lawyer, and you’re just living your life, it’s like: Wait a minute, I just registered for the next election. What do you mean democracy is falling apart?” (Bloomberg Law). Brest’s stated mission for the moment is unvarnished: “There is so much coming at us on any given day that I do want ACS to continue being in a position to respond, to shine a light on the illegal and unconstitutional actions that are unfolding across the country” (Bloomberg Law).

What ACS is

Strip away the 2026 crisis and ACS is what it has been since 2001: the nation’s leading progressive law and policy organization, with over 200 student and lawyer chapters in almost every state and on most law school campuses, originally formed as the progressive response after the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision, and founded on the principle that the law should be a force to improve the lives of all people (Fordham Law). Through more than 1,400 debates, conferences, and press briefings across America each year, plus publications and an active online presence, it generates what Fordham Law’s chapter page calls “intellectual capital for ready use by progressive allies,” shaping debates on access to courts, voting, equality, immigration, workers’ rights, and more (Fordham Law).

It was created as a counterweight to, and modeled after, the Federalist Society — “often described as its progressive counterpart” — but arrived a generation late to the fight it wanted (Bloomberg Law). The Federalist Society, founded in 1982, filled a genuine vacuum: an intellectual home for right-leaning law students, academics, and lawyers who felt alienated by the dominance of liberal thought in law schools and the legacy of the Warren Court (Bloomberg Law). ACS, founded in 2001, entered a field where the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law were already leading the charge — “its mission was also going to be much harder to accomplish” (Bloomberg Law). More than half of the current Supreme Court’s justices, including Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, have past membership or other ties to the Federalist Society — the scoreboard Brest is staring at (Bloomberg Law). ACS has long preached a “big tent” — any and all are welcome — but executing it against the left’s competing priorities and theories of change has never been easy; as Codrington put it, “One of the deficiencies over the last 25 years is it captures not as wide of a base of the progressive left that you would think” (Bloomberg Law).

The Carliner Award

ACS’s signature honor is the David Carliner Public Interest Award, named for David Carliner (1918–2007), “one of the great public interest lawyers of the 20th Century” (American Constitution Society). Carliner was a pioneering immigration lawyer, an ardent foe of Jim Crow, and a leading champion of full political rights for the citizens of the District of Columbia; he also played a leading role in building institutions for civil and human rights, serving as the founding chair of both the ACLU’s National Capital Area chapter and the International Human Rights Law Group, now GlobalRights (American Constitution Society). The award recognizes outstanding public interest lawyers whose work best exemplifies what ACS calls his legacy of “fearless, uncompromising and creative advocacy on behalf of marginalized people” (American Constitution Society). The 2014 recipient was Peter J. Wagner, co-founder and executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative (American Constitution Society).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not assert founding details beyond the Bush v. Gore origin — finer points (the Georgetown launch, the Madison Society working name, early funders) appeared only in snippet-level tertiary material and were not verified in a full read. It does not claim an exact current chapter count: sources variously say “over 200” and “250,” reflecting different vintages. It does not name the Trump-series figure said to have been a Carliner Award finalist; that identity could not be confirmed in a fully-read source, so it is recorded as an open item rather than asserted. It presents the revenue, staffing, and criticism material as Bloomberg Law’s reporting, not as independent findings.