The Triumph of Ed Meese


Published January 30, 2025

Law & Liberty

The position of Attorney General has changed dramatically since its inception in the Judiciary Act of 1789. The First Congress assigned important but limited duties to the Attorney General: to represent the United States in the Supreme Court and to advise the president and Cabinet officers on questions of law. But the position was in other respects a modest one. The Attorney General had no authority over the United States Attorneys whose positions the Act created in each judicial district throughout the country. The Attorney General’s pay was lower than that of other Cabinet officers because his work was part-time, and, as George Washington explained in his letter offering Edmund Randolph the position, it was expected that “the station would confer pre-eminence on its possessor, and procure for him a decided preference of professional employment” among the private clients he would also represent.

The Department of Justice wasn’t established until 1870. Only then did the Attorney General, in the person of Ebenezer Hoar, become the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

Like the federal government generally, DOJ has vastly expanded over the past century and a half. The Attorney General now stands atop a massive organizational chart that includes sizeable agencies in their own right, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Prisons, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. DOJ has an annual budget of nearly forty billion dollars. According to its most recent performance report, it has more than 115,000 employees and “maintains field offices in all states and territories across the United States and in more than 50 countries around the world.”

Edwin Meese III served as the 75th Attorney General of the United States during President Ronald Reagan’s second term, from 1985 to 1988. In The Meese Revolution, constitutional scholars Steven Calabresi and Gary Lawson make their case that Meese is the “most significant Attorney General in U.S. history.” They provide a comprehensive intellectual history of Meese’s “role in the triumph of originalism in legal interpretation.” No other Attorney General has “so thoroughly transformed the legal culture.”

Calabresi and Lawson lament that Ed Meese “does not get the public credit and recognition that he deserves.” Their book undertakes to correct that injustice, and it succeeds admirably in doing so. It stands as a towering monument to the man they rightly honor.

The core principle of originalism—or, more precisely, of its dominant “original meaning” version—is that laws are to be interpreted in accord with what their text meant at the time they were adopted. As Calabresi and Lawson detail, Ed Meese as Attorney General powerfully promoted the cause of originalism through various means.

The authors open with Meese’s speech to the American Bar Association in July 1985, “a speech that has reverberated throughout American constitutional law for the last four decades.” In that speech, Meese argued for a “Jurisprudence of Original Intention” that would make the text of the Constitution and the “original intention of those who framed it” the “judicial standard in giving effect to the Constitution.” He further committed that under his leadership the Department of Justice would “endeavor to resurrect the original meaning of constitutional provisions and statutes as the only reliable guide for judgment.” (Note that Meese’s interchangeable uses of “original intention” and “original meaning” signal that the competition between those two versions of originalism hadn’t yet emerged.)

Meese’s speech, the authors explain, “sparked a national conversation.” It elicited public responses from Justices William Brennan and John Paul Stevens, which in turn enabled Meese’s prompt reply to them. Their book analyzes that debate and presents several other important speeches Meese delivered on originalist topics.

Meese and his “right-hand man” Ken Cribb also made the Department of Justice an “incubator” of originalist ideas. Calabresi and Lawson were themselves among the many “brilliant and interesting legal minds” that Meese and his top advisers hired. Calabresi worked directly for Meese, and he proudly remains Meese’s “loyal and devoted follower.” Lawson was a line attorney in the influential Office of Legal Counsel. Their excitement decades later over the “intellectual atmosphere” that prevailed at DOJ is palpable.

Chuck Cooper, the very young head of OLC, “issued a blizzard of originalist OLC opinions on almost every subject under the sun.” The Office of Legal Policy, under Stephen Markman, produced a sourcebook titled Originalist Meaning Jurisprudence and a series of originalist monographs on subjects such as religious liberty, the Ninth Amendment, and criminal procedure. And DOJ hosted three major academic conferences, on federalism, separation of powers, and economic liberties.

Persuading Solicitor General Charles Fried to make originalist arguments in his Supreme Court briefs proved much more difficult. That wasn’t simply because Fried himself was not an originalist. It was also because Fried was arguing to a Court with justices and a body of precedents that were broadly hostile to originalism. Calabresi volunteers the deep doubts he had when he learned that Fried was being considered for Solicitor General—he “literally got down on his knees and begged” Cribb not to okay Fried—but he generously concludes in hindsight that Fried “might very well have been the best ambassador [to the Court] that the originalists in the Meese DOJ could have hoped for.”

Meese also aimed to advance originalism through Reagan’s judicial appointments. Drawing on Calabresi’s inside view, the authors discuss Meese’s role in Reagan’s decisions in 1986 to elevate William Rehnquist to replace Chief Justice Warren Burger and to select Antonin Scalia over Robert Bork for Rehnquist’s vacated seat.

One year later, Reagan nominated Bork to succeed Lewis Powell. After Bork’s crushing defeat, Reagan turned to D.C. Circuit judge Douglas Ginsburg, but news of Ginsburg’s marijuana use as a young law professor doomed his nomination before Reagan ever formally submitted it. Reagan then selected Anthony Kennedy.

One surprising flaw in the book is its sugarcoating of Kennedy’s dismal record as a justice. The tough political bind that Reagan was in—two failed picks, a hostile Senate, and an election year upcoming—makes it easy to understand how Meese and others might have thought him a sensible pick. But Calabresi and Lawson, perhaps motivated by a desire to minimize whatever share of responsibility that Meese might bear for Kennedy’s selection, contend that he proved to be a “solid constitutionalist” on “virtually every subject except so-called sexual privacy rights and the death penalty for minors.” Beyond stuffing the huge issues of abortion and marriage into the “sexual privacy” category, they grossly understate the extent of Kennedy’s flights of folly—see, for example, Boumediene v. Bush on habeas rights of aliens detained as enemy combatants at Guantanamo and Lee v. Weisman on the Establishment Clause. Kennedy’s gaseous musings are the very antithesis of “solid constitutionalist” reasoning.

Calabresi and Lawson are on much stronger ground in tracing Meese’s legacy through the decades that have followed his tenure as Attorney General. They make a compelling case that the flourishing of the conservative legal movement and the establishment of the current originalist majority on the Supreme Court would not have happened without his leadership.

As Pam Bondi prepares to become our 87th Attorney General, it’s worth contemplating what made Meese so successful. The book reveals four key ingredients.

First, Meese had Reagan’s complete trust. The ties between the two men were tight and longstanding. Meese was Reagan’s chief of staff during most of his years (1967 to 1975) as governor of California, worked full-time on his 1980 presidential campaign, and headed his presidential transition team. Meese held the title of Counselor to the President during Reagan’s first term and was a member both of his Cabinet and of the National Security Council. Amazingly, during his time as Attorney General, he continued to serve as a member of the National Security Council and also chaired the White House’s Domestic Policy Council.

Given how threatening DOJ’s investigatory and prosecutorial powers can be to a presidential administration, it’s not surprising that presidents put a high premium on having an Attorney General they can trust. So presidents will frequently turn to candidates they know well and are close to.

It might well be that an Attorney General who has strong personal connections to the president presents a greater threat of politicizing the Justice Department than one who doesn’t. But an Attorney General with only weak connections might invite White House intrusions. Reagan’s trust in Meese may well have made it easier to abide by (in the authors’ words) “a strict rule that no one in the White House was to contact the Justice Department or any person in the Justice Department on any case.”

In any event, there is little doubt that an Attorney General who knows he has the president’s full backing can be more influential. Meese could be bold in promoting originalism. He didn’t have to quiver in concern that the political controversy that his efforts sometimes generated would lead the White House to try to stifle him.

Second, Meese had a clear mission in mind. He was keenly aware of the dismal state of Supreme Court decision-making (I will not dignify it with the term constitutional law) that had persisted since his days as a prosecutor in the early 1960s, and he knew that a foundation had to be laid for genuine reform. He recognized the common-sense soundness of originalism, even as he knew that it required development.

In a bureaucracy as vast as that of DOJ, and with crises erupting unpredictably, it would be easy for an Attorney General to allow urgent short-term tasks to prevent him from ever turning to, much less making progress on, important long-term projects. By putting the promotion of originalism at the center of his work, Meese avoided that mistake.

Third, Meese knew that personnel is policy. He carefully selected his key advisers on the originalism project, put his trust in them, and delegated authority to them. More broadly, he knew better than to try to micromanage an organization of the size and complexity of DOJ.

Fourth, Meese had strong character as well as deep intellect. He inspired those who worked for him. I have had the pleasure of coming to know Meese over the past two decades, and the authors’ celebration of his character rings true.

Some readers might be put off by the fact that their praise sometimes crosses the line into hagiography. Humble as Meese is, I am guessing that he would recoil at their declarations that he “has lived a perfect life of service to other people and to his country, and to the world” and that “he exemplifies what St. Thomas Aquinas called the seven heavenly virtues: he is brave, wise, just, temperate, and full of faith, hope, and love.” But the very fact that Meese could receive such otherworldly acclaim is a compelling testament to the dedication he earned from those who had the honor to work for him.


Edward Whelan is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and holds EPPC’s Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies. He is the longest-serving President in EPPC’s history, having held that position from March 2004 through January 2021.

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