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Taking a page from the playbook of civil rights activists, the right wing has embraced the strategy of using litigation to drive national policy change.

On the U.S. Supreme Court’s docket this year is Friedrichs v. California Teacher Association, a lawsuit that seeks to destroy public-sector unions by attacking their funding model. Rebecca Friedrichs and nine other nonunion teachers in California are challenging the law that requires them to pay their fair share, via agency fees, of the cost of services that the union is required by law to provide to all workers covered by a collective-bargaining agreement.

“It’s not the 10 teachers from California who are paying the bill,” noted UFT President Michael Mulgrew at a recent panel on the future of labor in New York City.

Bankrolling the case is the Center for Individual Rights, a Washington, D.C.-based law firm founded in 1988 by two lawyers active in conservative circles. The firm is representing the Friedrichs plaintiffs pro bono.

The Center for Individual Rights is funded by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, the F.M. Kirby Foundation and the John M. Olin Foundation. DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, both conduits for billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, have also given generously to CIR. All of these organizations collectively have spent billions of dollars aggressively promoting their right-wing agenda, according to SourceWatch.

The Bradley Foundation alone has handed out more than $500 million between 2000 and 2013 to conservative causes, according to the One Wisconsin Institute, a nonpartisan research organization.

“CIR made a name for itself fighting affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act,” said Brendan Fischer, the general counsel for SourceWatch. “It’s an organization trying to reshape the law into a corporate mold or right-wing framework.”

Moshe Z. Marvit, an attorney and fellow with the Century Foundation, has examined how the Center for Individual Rights did everything in its power to get the case before the U.S. Supreme Court as quickly as possible. At each step in the lower court proceedings, he said, attorneys for the Center for Individual Rights asked the judges to rule against Friedrichs and her co-plaintiffs.

“Usually it takes seven years for a case to reach the high court,” said Marvit. “The Friedrichs case got to the U.S. Supreme Court in a year and a half. It’s unheard of. They had no intent of arguing the merits in a lower court.”

Marvit, who is co-author with Richard Kahlenberg of the book “Why Labor Organizing Should Be a Civil Right,” said Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito invited such a fast-track strategy when he signaled in another recent opinion that the court was ready to overturn established case law allowing unions to collect agency fees.

The bull’s eye on public sector unions by the right is intentional, many experts in labor and good government agree.

Joshua Freeman, a labor historian at the City University of New York, said that as private-sector unions have faded, public-sector unions such as the UFT continue to wield power in the political arena — thanks to voluntary COPE contributions by members. For example, he said, the UFT has played a significant role not just in defending public education but also in a number of social justice causes, including civil rights, a higher minimum wage and affordable housing.

“Friedrichs hits unions in its fortress — the public sector,” said Freeman.