The name of a little-known organization keeps cropping up as the Bush administration works to reshape the federal government and especially as it works at filling more than 100 federal judgeships. The Federalist Society was founded 20 years ago by students at the Yale and University of Chicago law schools, with the help and encouragement of law professors like Antonin Scalia, now a justice of the Supreme Court, and Robert Bork, whose nomination for the Supreme Court was rejected in a long and bitter fight.

With the help of support from wealthy individuals and conservative foundations, including $5 million from the Olin, Bradley and Scaife foundations, its 25,000 members include 40,000 lawyers and 5,000 law students at 140 law schools. One of its harshest critics, People for the American Way, lists 23 high-level members of the Bush administration as society members. Among them are Attorney General John Ashcroft, Solicitor General Ted Olson, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham, and John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs.

President Reagan and the first President Bush made some progress in reshaping the high court along conservative lines, but President George W. Bush, who has called Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas his models for future appointments to the high court, has the help of this network of Federalist Society members. Some of them hold key positions in the judicial selection process. Attorney General Ashcroft, Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh, Deputy White House Counsel Tim Flanigan, and Associate White House Counsel Brett Kavanaugh are all members of the Federalist Society.

The society says it takes no positions on specific laws or issues. It calls itself merely “a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the state of the legal order.” It says it stands for individual freedom and the separation of governmental powers and opposes “judicial legislating” and the expansion of federal governmental power.

Beyond such generalities, more can be learned about the society by considering the words and actions of its leading members. At their annual meetings, leaders of the society regularly display their hostility toward civil rights, reproductive rights, environmental protection, privacy rights, and health and safety standards. The weakening and eventual repeal of Roe v. Wade is one of their standard goals.

Even with the change of Senate majority leader of the Senate, a drive will still be on to fill the vacancies with like-minded judges, especially in the appeals courts, where many social issues are decided, and probably before long in the Supreme Court, when vacancies occur there. The administration will have to choose carefully after Sen. Trent Lott’s fiasco, but rather than just view this as a political problem that could be finessed, it should place greater emphasis on judges willing to uphold the many civil-rights protections Congress has created over the last generation.