Ideas With(out) Consequences?: The Natural Law Institute and the Making of Conservative Constitutionalism During the Cold War, 1947–1951

Abstract Recent scholarship on conservative constitutionalism in the United States focuses near-exclusively on the development of originalism as a method of constitutional interpretation. Before conservatives turned to originalism to counter the perceived threats of an activist judiciary in the 1980s, however, this article demonstrates that conservatives employed a very different interpretive philosophy to counter a very different perceived threat. To do so, this article reconstructs the history of a conservative legal movement that predated “the” conservative legal movement. Indeed, this article uncovers how conservatives employed natural law philosophy to respond to the elite legal academy’s seemingly morally foundationless positivism during the Cold War. The network of natural lawyers that sustained this earlier movement was deeply indebted to the Natural Law Institute (NLI), an academic initiative of the University of Notre Dame established in 1947. By framing the founding fathers’ natural law philosophy as a bulwark of individual liberty against the encroachments of legal realists, World War II-era totalitarians, and Cold War communists, the NLI created what the political scientist Amanda Hollis-Brusky has termed a “political epistemic network.” In concluding, this article suggests that recovering the history of the NLI’s epistemic network reveals the importance of natural law to the making of conservative constitutionalism during the Cold War.