Danube Institute 'Rule of Law as Lawfare' Conference Convenes US Heritage Foundation, Polish Supreme Court, Israeli Overhaul Author, and Federalist Society-Orbit Scholars in Budapest

Opening

On May 27-28, 2024, the Danube Institute — Budapest’s Fidesz-aligned think tank, formally partnered with the Heritage Foundation since 2023 — hosted a conference titled “Rule of Law as Lawfare.” Its panels brought the US legal-conservative movement onto a single platform with the named principals of three separate illiberal judicial-reform projects: Poland’s PiS-era courts, Israel’s 2023 Levin-Rothman overhaul, and Hungary’s own confrontation with EU rule-of-law enforcement. It is the most documented single convergence point of the US-to-international judicial-illiberalism network.

What Happened / Key Facts

Per the Danube Institute’s own published program (tier 1), confirmed speakers included:

• Charles “Cully” Stimson — Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow and Acting Director of its Institute for Constitutional Government, on the panel “Stacking the Deck — Lawfare as a Political Weapon in the US.”
• John Yoo — UC Berkeley Law professor, former Bush OLC official, Federalist Society contributor; in an accompanying Hungarian Conservative interview he framed EU rule-of-law proceedings against Hungary as a campaign “to force Hungary and other countries to accept a kind of pan-European ideology” designed to “eliminate national sovereignty.”
• Eugene Kontorovich — George Mason Scalia Law School professor and head of the Kohelet Policy Forum’s International Law Department, described in tier-1 Haaretz reporting as an architect of Israel’s judicial overhaul.
• Simcha Rothman — Israeli Knesset member, chair of the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, and co-author of the overhaul legislation. Hungary Today quoted him directly that “rule of law is used as a weapon.”
• Aleksander Stępkowski — Ordo Iuris co-founder installed as acting first president of Poland’s Supreme Court through the PiS judicial restructuring.
• Jerzy Kwaśniewski — Ordo Iuris president; plus Polish MEP Ryszard Legutko and US natural-law theorist Hadley Arkes (James Wilson Institute).

The unifying conference frame — “rule of law as lawfare” — recast independent judicial review and supranational rule-of-law enforcement as illegitimate political weapons, the shared vocabulary across all three national reform projects.

Why This Event Matters

The conference is the empirical anchor for the claim that the US legal-conservative network engages international judicial illiberalism — not through a single funder’s command, but through a shared ideological project and a recurring set of convening institutions (Heritage, Danube Institute). It collapses four threads (US, Poland, Israel, Hungary) into one verifiable, primary-sourced room, while still falling short of demonstrating operational US direction of the foreign reforms.

Broader Context

Heritage president Kevin Roberts signed a formal cooperation agreement with the Danube Institute in March 2023, calling modern Hungary “the model” for conservative statecraft. The Federalist Society template was separately exported to Israel via the Tikvah Fund’s Israel Law and Liberty Forum (2020). See the consolidated network map for the full set of confirmed links and verified absences.

Research Gaps

• Full session-by-session transcript (only the program and select interviews are public).
• Whether any concrete cross-border legal-strategy coordination (not just shared framing) was agreed.

Related Entries

• federalist-society-international-judicial-illiberalism-network-map
• 2025-03-11–heritage-foundation-hosts-mcc-ordo-iuris-eu-dismantling-workshop
• heritage-foundation
• leo-leonard
• federalist-society