Common Good Constitutionalism: A Very Short Introduction

I was recently invited to write a very short introduction to the basics of Common Good Constitutionalism for the Elgar Concise Encylopedia of Legal Theory, which should be published sometime in 2025. In case any of our readers want to access to this short introduction, I include a link to a draft here.

Here is the abstract:

Common good constitutionalism is a theory of constitutionalism and constitutional law, grounded in the classical legal tradition. It is influenced by both its philosophical and juristic strands. On the philosophical side, common good constitutionalism's normative and conceptual accounts of the source, point, ends, and limits on political and legal authority are squarely built upon the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Suarez, Vitoria, and more recently the likes of Heinrich Rommen, Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon, Charles De Koninck, and John Finnis.

Common good constitutionalism also draws heavily upon the civilian juristic side of the classical legal tradition, which is both more practical in its focus and partially independent of the philosophical and theological strands. This side of the tradition is concerned with identifying, implementing and harmonizing the classical sources of law in the concrete circumstances of a given political community and through institutions of law and legal practice. On the classical view, the sources of law include positive civil law, the law of nations, natural law and divine law. The corpus of the classical legal tradition includes inter alia the work of the Roman law jurists, the great texts of Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis – the Digest, the Code, the Novels – that codified Roman law for the Empire, the many influential legal codes and commentaries building on the Corpus following its recovery in 1300’s Europe, the ius commune tradition – the stew of Roman law, canon law, and the other legal sources that formed the matrix within which European legal systems developed – and regional adaptations of the ius commune like the Anglo-American common law tradition. 

Common good constitutionalism aims to revive an immemorial way of viewing the purpose of law, of public law, and how law relates to the common good. This concise entry proceeds by providing an account of what common good constitutionalism’ theoretical framework has to say about some perennial questions of constitutional theory.