Vermeule: What about the Common Good? - Supreme Court Justices Have Forgotten What the Law Is For - The New York Times

Adrian Vermeule: The Common Good -Supreme Court Justices Have Forgotten What the Law Is For - The New York Times

By Adrian Vermeule

Mr. Vermeule is the Ralph S. Tyler Jr. professor of constitutional law at Harvard and the author of the forthcoming book “Common Good Constitutionalism.”


Justice Stephen Breyer last week announced that he will retire at the end of this Supreme Court term. If the recent past is any guide, whoever is nominated to replace him will face a barrage of attacks from political opponents. Every Supreme Court nomination is now a battleground, featuring slander and even angry demonstrations, as when protesters of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination invaded the Senate building and attacked the very doors of the court.

The great promise of our legal system as understood by many modern theorists — that law can create a framework to reconcile plural interests in a diverse society — has manifestly failed. Instead the law has become ever more politically contested and bitterly divisive; the tolerance celebrated by the proponents of liberalism appears to be more science fiction than fact. Something has gone badly wrong: It is unclear, in America in 2022, what the point of the law is, what higher ends it should strive to attain. We have forgotten what law is for.

Today’s reigning theories of law are exhausted. On one side, legal progressivism shamelessly instrumentalizes the law in the service of a particular vision of social justice centered on identity politics and libertine social and sexual mores. This relentless crusade undermines the family, traditional morality and the well-being of the citizenry — especially those who lack the resources to buffer themselves against societal disintegration.

On the other side, originalism, which pretends to separate law from justice, rests on an invented tradition that has projected itself back into the past. As the historian Jonathan Gienapp puts it, originalists’ understanding of the Constitution is “anachronistic, a species of modern constitutional thinking that they unwittingly and uncritically impose on the eighteenth century.” Supposedly originalist judges constantly appeal, explicitly or implicitly, to a contemporary view of justice to fix the meaning of general or abstract texts (like “due process of law” or “freedom of speech”) or otherwise to resolve hard cases.