2025 Summit Opening Remarks: Gregg Nunziata and Alan Raul

Gregg Nunziata, executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law, and Alan Raul, board secretary of the Society, delivered the opening remarks at our 2025 Summit.

Said Gregg: For those of you who don’t know us, we are a national membership organization of conservative, libertarian, and right-of-center lawyers who prioritize the defense of the rule of law, the Constitution, and American Democracy, without regard to partisan advantage or policy agenda.

This is our Third Annual, and most ambitious, Rule of Law Summit. We are delighted to see such a strong turnout, which reflects the importance of our work. (Next year, we will get a bigger room.) If you are new to our programming, I hope you will consider joining and supporting the Society.

We have a tremendous program for you today. Our theme is “checks and balances in polarized times.” Our system of checks and balances has seldom been more important, or more tested, and we will consider it from a variety of angles.

Over the course of today, you will hear from prominent conservatives and libertarians who have long approached Constitutional law and public policy from a deeply principled place.

You will also hear from those who don’t consider themselves part of the political right, but have important perspectives on the principles we share. We at SRL have always believed that our work is more important than party or faction. We welcome principled people from across the political spectrum as members, supporters, and guests.

We also, very much, welcome non-lawyers, because the law protects all of us and we must all protect it. What we will discuss today is too important to be left to lawyers alone.

Said Alan: Thank you, Gregg, and thank you all for coming.  I’m going to speak a little bit from a personal vantage about how the Society for the Rule of Law got to where we are today, what we’re doing now, why we do it, and whether we’re making a difference. We were founded in 2018 as Checks and Balances. That was the name of the organization as well as the one of the principles we were seeking to uphold. So, George Conway convened a group of former Federalist Society stalwarts and Republican appointees who wanted to take a stand on principle. We committed to do our patriotic best to defend our democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law regardless of person or party in power. A few years later in 2023, we were still in business, and we decided to relaunch in a bigger way as the Society for the Rule of Law. We recruited former Republican Congresswoman Barbara Comstock to join our board, joining George Conway, Stuart Gerson, Peter Kaisler, Donald Ayer, and me, as well as the inimitable Judge Mike Luttig, whose well-known advice to Vice President Mike Pence may very well have helped save the Republic.

Well, since then, it seems like the Republic hasn’t quite been done with us. We’ve seen a further obliteration of democratic norms and the trampling of checks and balances. Criminal justice has not just been politicized; it’s been egregiously personalized and deployed to carry out private vendettas. Due process and free speech are now lucky even to get lip service. In fact, the quiet part is often being screamed out loud.

For example, the academic compact that is currently being shopped around actually tells universities that if they don’t give up their First Amendment rights and agree to fall in line with the administration’s values, they will be deemed to forego the right to receive federal benefits like grants and contracts for life-saving medical research. Even the government itself has become a shameless pay-to-play operation. We also see the executive branch brazenly usurp Congress’s spending, taxing, tariffing, and lawmaking power. All of which, as this crowd well knows, even the non-lawyers, I’m sure, that the Constitution vests those powers in the legislative branch. It’s almost as though rewriting laws with a presidential Sharpie is just the way it’s supposed to work. Now, even the White House is literally being torn down in front of us without a peep from Congress.

So, how has the Society for the Rule of Law been trying to defend the Constitution and the Rule of Law regardless of person or party in power? Well, we’ve expanded our leadership and increased our members to well over a thousand, so we can have this annual Rule of Law Summit like this. By the way, thank you very much for being members and attending this this summit. We take positions, adopt principles, and issue statements on our website, societyfortheruleoflaw.org. For those of you who haven’t visited yet, please do. Our members also write influential articles, hold webinars, speak at law schools and universities and on prime-time TV, and sign and submit briefs.

All of this to drive home the point that constitutional principles and checks and balances still matter. Facts still matter. Good faith and honest judgment still matters. Limited Madison Madisonian government very much still matters. Patriotism matters. And basic human decency and respect still matter. As conservative, center-right, and libertarian lawyers, we try to communicate these messages as best we can to courts, fellow lawyers, the public, and perhaps even to get through to some members of the administration.

Sometimes the courts say it even better than we do. For example, in 2019, when Chief Justice John Roberts explained why the court was rejecting the Department of Commerce’s pretext for adding a controversial citizenship question to the 2020 census, the Chief Justice opined, “Our review is differential, but we are not required to exhibit a naivete from which ordinary citizens are free. Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose. If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.” So, speaking for myself, what I think the Society for the Rule of Law stands for is pretty simple. Congress has the exclusive power to legislate and appropriate. The president must faithfully execute laws, not substitute his own. An unrestrained version of the unitary executive theory threatens our constitutional order. Judicial review must enforce limits on executive overreach. Major transformation of our government and its policies require legislation, not executive fiat. To the greatest extent permitted after the Supreme Court some unity decision, no person, not even the president, can stand above the law. Checks and balances require accountability from and by each of the branches, not just mere separation of powers to insulate one branch. And as Alexander Hamilton well explained in Federalist 69, the president is no king. In sum, conservative values call on us to respect the tradition, history, and norms established by our founders to protect us from tyranny.

So, are we making a difference? Obviously, I hope so, and I know all of you do, too. I think we are, but all of us here believe in the principles at stake so fervently, we would continue to do what we’re doing, even if we weren’t so sure about the extent of our impact. But for purposes of some good old-fashioned positive reinforcement, I’ll close with an excerpt from District Judge Susan Ilston’s order earlier this year when she struck down DOGE’s reductions in force at about 20 government agencies whose reductions were unauthorized by law or in the Constitution. In her first paragraph, Judge Ilston wrote, quote, “Federal courts should not micromanage the vast federal workforce, but courts must sometimes act to protect, preserve the proper checks and balances between the three branches of government.” As a group of conservative former government officials and advisers have written in an amicus brief to the court, “unchecked presidential power is not what the framers had in mind.” With that helpful judicial inspiration, let’s all have a great conference and keep making as much of a difference together as we can. So, thank you. Enjoy the conference and thanks for being here.

Watch the opening remarks in their entirety here, and watch the rest of the Summit here.