Common Good Constitutionalism

[NewOrleans]

😐  This is no joke. Harvard professors, Georgetown Law professors and students…

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

Vermeule coined the term “common good constitutionalism” to describe his alternative theory, and he was not coy about what it would entail. Unlike originalists and legal liberals, common good constitutionalists would not “suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy,” and they would display a “candid willingness to ‘legislate morality.’”

The origins of this potential insurgency are often traced to an essay that Vermeule published in The Atlantic in March 2020 under the headline “Beyond Originalism.” In that piece, Vermeule set the stage for his broader intellectual take-down of conservative legal orthodoxy. In the latter decades of the 20th century, Vermeule argued, originalism had been a useful political tool for conservatives, allowing them “to oppose constitutional innovations by the Warren and Burger Courts [by] appealing over the heads of the justices to the putative true meaning of the Constitution itself.” But following the rise of the conservative legal movement in the ’90s and 2000s, originalism had “outlived its utility,” becoming “an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.” Instead of offering a bold vision of judicial power, originalism had mired conservatives in “tendentious law-office history and endless litigation of dubious claims about events centuries in the past.”

@
article references Dobbs case / abortion

www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/12/09/revolutionary-conservative-legal-philosophy-courts-00069201

[basilosaurus]

Dafuq?