Theistic Illiberal Constitutionalism: A Review of Adrian Vermeule’s <i>Common Good Constitutionalism</i>

Adrian Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism drew a remarkable amount of attention from constitutional law scholars when it was published in 2020. About eighteen months later, Vermeule published a piece complaining that the critics had missed the point, that they had ignored the natural law jurisprudence that grounds the work. He was correct. This Review addresses Vermeule’s natural law jurisprudence, emphasizing the fact that it is a religious natural law jurisprudence. His arguments are in the tradition of ScholasticismAristotelian logic incorporated into Christian theology by St. Thomas Aquinas. Scholasticism is a remarkably weak foundation for constitutional jurisprudence. It is a vast system of intuitions, essences, definitions, and deductions from “reason” instead of inferences from empirical observation. The consequences of introducing thirteenthcentury metaphysics and epistemology into twenty-first-century law and legal theory are, predictably, catastrophic. When combined with Vermeule’s earlier work on the concentration of power in the presidency and the administrative agencies, the outlines of a constitutional theocracy are visible.