As liberals lick their wounds from the recent Supreme Court term, a small but noisy band on the right has launched a dissent against the conservative legal movement that produced the court’s majority. They want a new jurisprudence of “moral substance” that elevates conservative results over legalistic or procedural questions such as individual rights, limited government and separation of powers. Some advocates call this idea “common good originalism,” but it isn’t originalism. It’s no different from the raw-power judicial activism conservatives have railed against for decades as unaccountable, unwise and dangerous.
The “common good” pitch arrived nearly full-born in a 2020 essay by Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule. A brilliant eccentric, Mr. Vermeule is best known for his advocacy of unchecked presidential and administrative supremacy and for the incorporation of Catholicism into civil law, which he calls integralism and critics call theocracy.
