Adrian Vermeule, Harvard Law Professor
shaking up even fellow conservatives
Adrian Vermeule is an intriguing character. He rejects originalism and defends as a moral necessity the administrative state. I take this as a convert's embrace of the Catholic social tradition which is actually to the left of the Democratic Party by a pretty wide margin.
Vermeule is hostile to same sex marriage, and defense of the right of a woman to elect to terminate a pregnancy. He might line up with John Finnis and Robert George on fetal personhood protected by the 14th Amendment. I actually agree with that principle - but limit it to accept a woman's right to choose - like Italian law!
Vermeule co-authored Law & Leviathan with Cass Sunstein - Obama's Director of Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs* The book was the subject of a symposium at Balkinization. Basically Vermeule and Sunstein use Lon Fuller's list of factors regarding the morality of law to defend the administrative state. I discuss the Republican judges and Justices pose to the structure of government HERE and supply links to Vermeule and Sunstein's Law & Leviathan.
A central irony is that in this era of declining presence of religion the Catholic Church is divided along all too familiar lines. See, for example Massimo Borghesi's Catholic Discordance - Neo-conservatism vs. the Field Hospital Church of Pope Francis which we discussed in another panel..
- GWC 12.10.2022
By Ian Ward
December 9, 2022
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — It was half past two in the Revolution Room when Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett stepped up to the podium to introduce the final panel of the day. By that point in the afternoon, the symposium’s audience — composed of about 100 legal scholars, law students and a smattering of federal judges — had sat through six consecutive hours of abstract legal theorizing, and more than a few pairs of eyes were beginning to glaze over. Sensing, perhaps, the room’s flagging energy, Barnett impressed upon the crowd the momentous nature of what they were witnessing.
“For those of you who are students, you might think that this is what all academic conferences are like,” Barnett said. “But let me just tell you: This is not what they’re like. You will tell your students or your progeny someday that you were at this conference, and that you got to see what was happening here.”
Barnett was right that the gathering taking place at the Sheraton Commander Hotel on the Saturday before Halloween wasn’t your average law school symposium. The event was serving as a much-anticipated referendum on one of the most contentious ideas to emerge from the legal academy in recent years, and many of the biggest names in American constitutional law had come to Cambridge to join the debate.
At the center of this debate was Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, whose latest book served as the ostensible subject of the symposium. In conservative legal circles, Vermeule has become the most prominent proponent of “common good constitutionalism,” a controversial new theory that challenges many of the fundamental premises and principles of the conservative legal movement. The cornerstone of Vermeule’s theory is the claim that “the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to ‘protect liberty’ as an end in itself” — or, in layman’s terms, that the Constitution empowers the government to pursue conservative political ends, even when those ends conflict with individual rights as most Americans understand them. In practice, Vermeule’s theory lends support to an idiosyncratic but far-reaching set of far-right objectives: outright bans on abortion and same-sex marriage, sweeping limits on freedom of expression and expanded authorities for the government to do everything from protecting the natural environment to prohibiting the sale of porn.
* (OIRA) is a statutory part of the Office of Management and Budget within the Executive Office of the President. OIRA is the United States Government’s central authority for the review of Executive Branch regulations, approval of Government information collections, establishment of Government statistical practices, and coordination of Federal privacy policy. The office is comprised of six subject matter branches and is led by the OIRA Administrator, who is appointed by the President and confirmed by the United States Senate..
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