How charitable donations remade our courts

John M. Olin isn’t exactly a household name. Neither is the Olin Corporation, the gunpowder and chemical company he inherited from his father. But he played a crucial role in funding the rightward turn of American politics, and particularly American courts, in the past few decades.

If you’ve been to law school, you might notice that his name pops up a lot.

The John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard.

The John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy at Yale.

The John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics at UVA.

The other John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics at Stanford.

This week on the Future Perfect podcast, we talk to James Piereson, who used to run Olin’s foundation, and investigative reporter Jane Mayer. They explain how Olin’s name got attached to so many centers and programs — and how those centers and programs actually affect all Americans.

Olin was passionate about spreading the law and economics movement, which sought to use tools of economic analysis to ensure that laws were creating efficient markets, and that regulations weren’t strangling businesses without good reason.

He spread it on campuses with his namesake centers, and by funding weekend resort trips for federal judges, where jurists enjoyed lectures from Nobel-winning economists — called the Manne seminars — before having fun on the beach. Because they were presented as mere economics instruction, even liberal judges were enthusiastic about the retreats. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gushed in 1999, “The instruction was far more intense than the Florida sun.” A young Elizabeth Warren met her husband, Bruce Mann, at a Manne law and economics event.

The rise of law and economics, however, had profound jurisprudential consequences. According to a recent paper by economists Elliott Ash, Daniel Chen, and Suresh Naidu, judges who went to Olin-funded weekend trips ended up imposing longer criminal sentences, and were likelier to rule against unions and environmental regulations. One way we know it was the actual content of the seminars that made a difference? Attendees weren’t tougher on crime if their instructor was Milton Friedman, who lectured on the benefits of legalizing drugs. Because Friedman didn’t teach most seminars, though, the overall effect was to increase incarceration.

Olin’s foundation has helped push the judiciary to the right — and not just through those seminars. The foundation provided seed money for the Federalist Society when it was just a student group at Yale, Harvard, and UChicago; it has since risen to become the most powerful legal organization in the American right, and has close ties to five out of the nine justices of the Supreme Court. It directly provides shortlists of judges that President Trump uses to make appointments.

That’s just scratching the surface of what Olin, a conservative radicalized by the 1969 campus protests at his alma mater Cornell, was able to do with his foundation. Before and after his death, it funded conservative media like Firing Line and the American Spectator, and helped conservative journalists like Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza get their start in college.

Olin’s influence rivals that of far better-known political donors like George Soros or the Koch brothers, and it’s really important to understand what he and his team have achieved.

Scroll up and press play to listen to our episode and learn more.

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