Sometime this year, the New York City-based John M. Olin Foundation will cease to exist, bringing down the curtain on of one of the conservative movement's most important institutions, National Review reports.

Created in 1953 by industrialist John M. Olin (1892-1982), the foundation has enjoyed an outsized influence despite never having had assets of more than $118 million. For example, the law schools at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, Virginia, and Yale all have law-and-economics programs named in honor of Olin, while the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that believes the duty of the judiciary is to say what the law is, not what it should be, grew out of a 1982 conference of law students and professors supported by the foundation. Other beneficiaries of the foundation's support have included the Center for Individual Rights, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the Manhattan Institute, the National Association of Scholars, the New Criterion, the Philanthropy Roundtable, and the Collegiate Network, a consortium of conservative college newspapers.

James Piereson, the foundation's executive director for nearly twenty years, hopes that new conservative philanthropists will step forward to pick up the torch. "The conservative foundation movement that took shape in the 1970s thus seems to have run its course," Piereson wrote in the Wall Street Journal last year. "The ground gained by conservative ideas in recent decades can be quickly lost if those ideas are not renewed and persistently articulated in public forums. [Conservative] principles must maintain a central place in the debates over our future, and a new generation of conservative philanthropists is needed to make sure that they do."