Common Good Constitutionalism & the Classical Legal Tradition

A Selected Bibliography

We are always gratified when we get requests from our readers, especially law students, for reading lists of things we’ve written on common good constitutionalism and the classical legal tradition. In this post, we offer a bibliography of our long-form work on these subjects, so it can serve as a one-stop-shop for those interested in reading more.

Conor Casey & Adrian Vermeule

Myths of Common Good Constitutionalism —Harvard JLPP 45:1 · 2022

Takes stock of the CGC debate and argues the standard critiques rest on misconceptions and question-begging claims, especially about the superiority of originalism.

Argument by Slogan — · Harvard JLPP: Per Curiam · 2022

Short rejoinder to slogan-level objections to common good constitutionalism; keywords common good, classical legal tradition, originalism.

Judge Rao’s Unintentional Surrender: On the Augustan Settlement of Our Law — with Conor Casey · 2023

Argues textualists retain the outward forms of their regime while ceding the operative content of law to classical-tradition principles.

Adrian Vermeule

The Bourbons of Jurisprudence — Harvard Public Law Working Paper 22-31 · 2022

Reply to Baude and Sachs’s review of Common Good Constitutionalism, targeting their versions of positivism and originalism.

Reason and Fiat in the Jurisprudence of Justice Alito — Harvard Public Law Working Paper 22-05 · 2022

The reason-versus-will (ratio / voluntas) theme read through Justice Alito’s jurisprudence.

The Original Scalia — Harvard JLPP: Per Curiam · 2023

Distinguishes an ‘original Scalia’ of the late 1980s, whose interpretive method is consistent with the classical tradition and expressly premised on Aristotle and Aquinas, from a later ‘evolved Scalia’.

The Many and the Few: On the American Lex Regia — Revue Internationale des Droits de l’Antiquite · 2023

Roman-law grounding of delegation and executive power in the American constitutional order.

The Rule of Law Without Separation of Powers: Legality in the Classical Tradition — Harvard Public Law Working Paper 23-29 · 2023

Legality as understood in the classical tradition, detached from separation-of-powers formalism.

Enriching Legal Theory: Response to the Symposium on Common Good Constitutionalism — Harvard JLPP 46:3 · 2023

Reply to the Harvard JLPP symposium on Common Good Constitutionalism.

Democracy, Disagreement, and Authority: A Response to the Symposium on Common Good Constitutionalism — Harvard Public Law Working Paper · 2024

Further reply to the Oxford University CGC symposium, on democracy, disagreement and legal authority.

The Constitution of Hierarchy — Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 17:547 · 2024

Drawing on Roman public law and the classical ius commune, sketches a law-governed ‘constitution of hierarchy’ meant to displace unjust hierarchies of elite power and corruption; the conceptual parent of The Many and the Few.

Universalism and Nationalism: Thesis and Hypothesis (Working paper)

Explores the perennial debate over universalism and nationalism, from the standpoint of classical law, political theory and political theology.

“Un État despotique qui a plusieurs despotes”: A Juristic Interpretation of The “Society of Tyrants” (Keynote address for a conference on “The Common Good and Federalism in the Thought of Charles De Koninck”, Université Laval October 1-3, 2025).

Offers a juristic interpretation of a famous idea that De Koninck proposed: misconceptions about the common good, or unwillingness to pursue the common good, threaten to create a “society of tyrants.”

Conor Casey

Constitutional Design and the Point of Constitutional Law — 2022

Engages Finnis amid the classical resurgence on the purpose and point of constitutional law.

Constitutionalism and the Common Good: On the Role of Unwritten Principles — with Michael Foran · 2022

Links Canadian debates over unwritten constitutional principles to the revival of the classical tradition in common good constitutionalism.

The Irish Constitution and Common Good Constitutionalism — HJLPP 2022

How classical-tradition precepts are applied within Irish public law, and the pressures now placed on that tradition.

What Pleases the Prince? The Relevance of Classical Legal Principles to Contemporary Public Law — 2023

On the tradition’s reconciliation of the twin imperatives of empowering and constraining the State for the common good.

Continuity and Evolution in Vermeule on Legal Interpretation — American Journal of Jurisprudence · 2023/24

Reads Vermeule’s turn to the classical tradition as giving retroactive coherence to his earlier work on interpretation.

Political Liberalism and Liberalism’s Politics — Constitutional Commentary 38(3) 485 · 2024

Review of Professor Frank Michelman’s Constitutional Essentials from a natural-law vantage. Contains extended critique of Rawlsian political liberalism.

Reflections on The Natural Law Moment in Constitutional Theory — Harvard JLPP 48 2024/25

Uses two mid-century natural-law moments, in the United States and Ireland, to weigh the prospects of the current one.

Common Good Constitutionalism: An Introduction — Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Theory and Philosophy · 2024

Encyclopedia entry framing CGC in the Aristotelian-Thomistic line (Rommen, Maritain, Simon, De Koninck, Finnis).

Classical Natural Law, Common Good Constitutionalism, and the Process of Constitutional Change — 2024

A classical natural-law framework for both the procedural rules of constitutional change and limits on its substantive content.

Natural Law, Practical Reasoning, and Legal Interpretation in ‘Natural Law and Modern Society’ — Jurisprudence · 2024/25

Symposium contribution on Professor Sean Coyle’s book, drawing his account of law’s nature and point into debates on constitutional adjudication and interpretation.

The Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice Option: A Classical Natural Law Method for Interpreting the ECHR — 2024/25

Builds a classical-natural-law method for interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights out of British Judge Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice’s dissents, concurrences and writings.

Jeremy M. Christiansen

The Classical Legal Tradition as Our Tradition — 76 Catholic University Law Review (forthcoming 2026)

Argues that key components of the classical tradition are rightly called our own in American legal thought and practice, against originalists who cast it as alien or recast it in positivist terms.

Proprius Effectus Legis: Saving Substantive Canons and Presumptions Through a Presumption of Legislative and Executive Morality - (Working draft)

Offers a defense of some traditional canons of construction and presumptions from the perspective of the classical legal tradition as the means of saving them. They help us understand the reality of the law itself, and provide grounds for interpreting that law in accordance with its essence.

Natural Law, Unjust Laws, and Judicial Recusal: A Response to the “Natural Law” Originalists — 41 Notre Dame J.L., Ethics & Public Policy (forthcoming)

A classical critique of the “natural law originalists” (Scalia, Strang, Alicea) on the recusal question.