Monday, September 26, 2022
Common Good Originalism After Dobbs
In 2020, Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule first outlined his proposal for a jurisprudence of “common good constitutionalism” in an essay in The Atlantic. I initially responded with a friendly essay at the Claremont Institute’s American Mind site that applauded Vermeule’s “beneficial exercise in Overton window-shifting,” while nonetheless offering some objections due to the debatable theoretical compatibility of Vermeule’s proposal with our distinctly Anglo-American constitutional heritage. I also raised a concern on more tactical grounds of “that great Burkean virtue, prudence.”
