Adrian Vermeule

Adrian Vermeule is a professor at Harvard Law School. The Harvard Crimson traces "common-good constitutionalism", the legal theory most associated with him, to his work at the school. The Catholic Register described him in 2023 as perhaps the most public intellectual associated with Catholic integralism and noted that he became Catholic in 2016. Coverage of his reception into the Church, reprinted by the Herald Malaysia, reported that he credited John Henry Newman's reasoning as central to the move.

Common-good constitutionalism. In an essay in The Atlantic in March 2020 (reprinted by Teaching American History), Vermeule argued that originalism had outlived its usefulness for conservatives and proposed instead a constitutional approach directed toward the common good. As summarised by the ABA Journal and Religion News Service, the essay held that strong rule aimed at the common good is legitimate, that the aim is not to maximise individual autonomy, and that law should be understood in the classical sense Aquinas gave it: an ordinance of reason for the common good. RNS linked the idea to the political thought of Pope Leo XIII. He expanded the argument in Common Good Constitutionalism (Polity, 2022).

Reception. According to the Crimson, The Atlantic ran rebuttals by Garrett Epps and Randy Barnett three days after the essay; the ABA Journal reported that Epps, then a University of Baltimore law professor, called it authoritarian extremism. Reviewing the book, Baude and Sachs in the Harvard Law Review concluded that its challenge to originalism fails, and Pojanowski and Walsh, writing in the Notre Dame Law Review as sympathisers of the classical natural-law tradition, faulted what they saw as indifference to the enacted Constitution. Randy Barnett credited the book with exposing a real weakness in conservative legal thought but rejected its conclusions. The ABA Journal reported that two federal appeals judges attended a 2022 conference on the theory.

Integralism. The Catholic Register reported that Vermeule acknowledged in 2018 that a Catholic state would treat baptised citizens differently from others, a point critics cite when arguing integralism would be theocratic in practice. The Los Angeles Review of Books lists him among the founders of the Postliberal Order newsletter, alongside Patrick Deneen, Chad Pecknold and Gladden Pappin.