The Council was organised in 1935 out of an earlier alumni association, and its membership is drawn overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, from rabbis ordained at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, the rabbinical school of Yeshiva University. It is the largest body of Modern Orthodox rabbis in North America, with roughly a thousand members, and it functions in the ordinary ways a professional association does: admission standards, continuing education, a placement service that matches rabbis with congregations, pension and insurance arrangements, and a convention.
It works closely with the Orthodox Union, the congregational body whose synagogues most of its members serve, and the two are often described together as the institutional centre of Modern Orthodoxy in the United States. The relationship is one of parallel organisations rather than of a rabbinate governing a laity: the Council speaks to and for rabbis, the Union to and for congregations.
Guidance it issues is addressed to its own membership rather than to the Jewish public, and it is not a legislature. Orthodox Judaism has no body that can bind its rabbis on questions of halakhah, and a resolution of the Council has whatever weight its members and their communities choose to give it. What gives it real consequence is not its resolutions but its court.