Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule (,Martin, Douglas (December 9, 2008) "Cornelius C. Vermeule III, a Curator of Classical Antiquities, Is Dead at 83", The New York Times. Retrieved September 8, 2012 born May 2, 1968) is an American legal scholar who is the Ralph S. Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. An expert on constitutional and administrative law, since 2016 he has voiced support for integralism. He has articulated this into his theory of common-good constitutionalism.
Early life and education Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule was born on May 2, 1968, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III, was a curator of ancient and classical art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His mother, Emily Vermeule, was a professor of philology and archaeology at Harvard University. Vermeule graduated from Harvard College in 1990 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in East Asian languages and civilizations. He then attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1993 with a Juris Doctor, magna cum laude.
After graduating from law school, Vermeule was a law clerk to Judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1993 to 1994 and to Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 to 1995.
Career Vermeule joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in 1998. Vermeule became professor of law at Harvard Law School in 2006, was named John H. Watson Professor of Law in 2008, and was named Ralph S. Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law in 2016. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012 at the age of 43.
Vermeule's writings focus on constitutional law, administrative law, and the theory of institutional design. He has authored or co-authored nine books. He teaches administrative law, legislation, and constitutional law.
In 2015, Vermeule co-founded the book review magazine The New Rambler. Vermeule became a contributing editor to Compact in 2022.
In February 2020, Vermeule sparked a controversy when he used Twtter to post an image of 26 attendees at a conferences for political conservatives with the caption: “The very first group for the camps.” He later clarified the Tweet was intended as a joke describing how far left academics might want to imprison political conservatives in concentration camps if they had the power to do so. The Harvard Crimson wrote at the time: "The comment drew criticism from professors and Harvard alumni, who interpreted the line as a reference to Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust."
On July 24, 2020, Vermeule was appointed to the Administrative Conference of the United States.
Legal and political philosophy
Integralism
A convert to Catholicism, Vermeule has become an advocate of integralism, a form of modern legal and political thought originating in historically Catholic-dominant societies. Integralism advocates for a political and social order based on the primacy of the Catholic faith. Rather than electoral politics, the path to confessional political order in integralist theory is "strategic ralliement", or transformation of institutions and bureaucracies from within. Ralliement lays the groundwork for a realized integralist regime to succeed the liberal democratic order. The new state would "exercise coercion over baptized citizens in a manner different from non-baptized citizens".Peters, Nathaniel (April 11, 2018) "The Ultimate Catholic Showdown? Liberalism vs. Integralism at Harvard" Public DiscourseVermeule, Adrian (March 16, 2018) "Ralliement: Two Distinctions" The JosiasBeauchamp, Zack (September 9, 2019) "The anti-liberal moment" Vox
Judicial interpretation
On judicial interpretation, Vermeule believes:
Vermeule is a judicial review skeptic. Jonathan Siegel has written that Vermeule's approach to the interpretation of law:
In 2007, Vermeule said about the United States Supreme Court that it should stay away from controversial political matters, such as abortion laws and anti-sodomy statutes and defer to Congress, as the elected representatives of the people, except in extremely obvious cases. This would require both liberals and conservatives to step back and realize that the benefits of such a court would outweigh the drawbacks for both. Vermeule was thus suggesting "a kind of arms-control agreement, a tacit deal".Shea, Christopher (October 7, 2007) "Supreme downsizing" The Boston Globe
Vermeule believes that legal change can only come about through cultural improvements. In an interview in 2016 after his conversion to Catholicism, Vermeule said,
Common-good constitutionalism
In an article in The Atlantic in March 2020, Vermeule suggests that originalism – the idea that the meaning of the American Constitution was fixed at the time of its enactment, which has been the principal legal theory of conservative judges and legal scholars for the past 50 years, but which Vermeule now characterizes as merely "a useful rhetorical and political expedient" – has outlived its usefulness and needs to be replaced by what he calls "common-good constitutionalism".
Vermeule's concept of common-good constitutionalism is:
based on the principles that government helps direct persons, associations, and society generally toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate. ... This approach should take as its starting point substantive moral principles that conduce to the common good, principles that officials (including, but by no means limited to, judges) should read into the majestic generalities and ambiguities of the written Constitution. These principles include respect for the authority of rule and of rulers; respect for the hierarchies needed for society to function; solidarity within and among families, social groups, and workers' unions, trade associations, and professions; appropriate subsidiarity, or respect for the legitimate roles of public bodies and associations at all levels of government and society; and a candid willingness to "legislate morality" –indeed, a recognition that all legislation is necessarily founded on some substantive conception of morality, and that the promotion of morality is a core and legitimate function of authority. Such principles promote the common good and make for a just and well-ordered society.Vermeule, Adrian (March 31, 2020) "Beyond Originalism" The Atlantic Monthly
Vermeule specified that common-good constitutionalism is "not tethered to particular written instruments of civil law or the will of the legislators who created them". However, the determination of the common good made by the legislators is instrumental insofar as it embodies the background principles of the natural law. In other words, while the legislative intent is not per se controlling, positive law always seeks to put into effect natural law principles, and the intended principles behind the positive law are controlling. In that vein, he also says that "officials (including, but by no means limited to, judges)" will need "a candid willingness to 'legislate morality'" in order to create a "just and well-ordered society."
The main aim of common-good constitutionalism:
is certainly not to maximize individual autonomy or to minimize the abuse of power (an incoherent goal in any event), but instead to ensure that the ruler has the power needed to rule well ... Just authority in rulers can be exercised for the good of subjects, if necessary even against the subjects' own perceptions of what is best for them — perceptions that may change over time anyway, as the law teaches, habituates, and re-forms them. Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.
In a critique in New York, politics and economics writer Eric Levitz argued that this theory of jurisprudence "allows the religious right to impose its vision of the good on the American people, whether they like it or not."Levitz, Eric (April 2020) "No, Theocracy and Progressivism Aren't Equally Authoritarian" New York Garrett Epps, a professor of law at the University of Baltimore, also wrote a critique in The Atlantic, linking common-good constitutionalism to integralism and arguing that Vermeule's approach represents authoritarianism and objects "not [because] it is harmful and antihuman, but simply that, in the end, it is so banal.Epps, Garrett (April 2020) "Common-Good Constitutionalism Is an Idea as Dangerous as They Come" The Atlantic
Responses Vermeule's common good constitutionalism has drawn a range of responses, both positive and negative. Legal scholar Richard H. Helmholz, in a review of Common Good Constitutionalism, described it as "a serious contribution to some of the most pressing legal debates of our times... Vermeule's book has the merit of providing some of the details about how such a change might occur. It also includes some marching orders." Jack Goldsmith praised Common Good Constitutionalism as "the most important book of American constitutional theory in many decades".
Legal scholar Conor Casey has criticized critics of common good constitutionalism as having fundamentally misunderstood it. According to Casey, common good constitutionalism "is entirely consistent with the natural law legal tradition and emphatically not an argument for authoritarianism unbound from legal and democratic constraint or concern for human rights".
According to Eric Levitz, the values Vermeule promotes are those of Catholicism and the Christian right. Law professor Randy E. Barnett characterizes Vermeule's essay as "an argument for the temporal power of the state to be subordinated to the spiritual power of the Church".Barnett, Randy E. (April 3, 2020) "Common-Good Constitutionalism Reveals the Dangers of Any Non-originalist Approach to the Constitution" The Atlantic Monthly Constitutional law professor Garrett Epps characterizes Vermeule as "an authentic Christian nationalist to whom the Constitution is only an obstacle". Vermeule's common-good constitutionalism argument is, according to Epps, really "authoritarian extremism" which "has absolutely nothing to do with the actual United States Constitution, and in many ways flatly contradicts it. ... In fact, the Constitution as such is not a binding text to Vermeule" since it must be, in Vermeule's words, "read into" in order to arrive at the results he prefers. In the end, Epps criticizes Vermeule's concept as a "banal" anti-constitutional theory akin to Falangism.Epps, Garrett (April 3, 2020) "Common-Good Constitutionalism Is an Idea as Dangerous as They Come" The Atlantic Monthly Levitz notes that Vermeule received little support from conservatives for his arguments, although some did object to characterizing him as "authoritarian".
In a column in The Washington Post, libertarian columnist George F. Will described Vermeule's "common-good constitutionalism" as "Christian authoritarianism — muscular paternalism, with government enforcing social solidarity for religious reasons. This is the Constitution minus the Framers' purpose: a regime respectful of individuals' diverse notions of the life worth living." About Vermeule's and some other contemporary conservative views, Will goes on to say that "... American conservatism, when severed from the Enlightenment and its finest result, the American Founding, becomes spectacularly unreasonable and literally un-American."Will, George F. (May 29. 2020) "When American conservatism becomes un-American" The Washington Post