Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule (, born May 2, 1968) is an American legal scholar who is currently the Ralph S. Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. He is an expert on constitutional and administrative law. Since 2016 he has voiced support for Catholic integralism. He has articulated this into his theory of common-good constitutionalism.
Life and career
Vermeule was born May 2, 1968. Vermeule graduated from Harvard College in 1990 with an A.B., 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. Vermeule clerked for judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1993 to 1994 and for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 to 1995.
He 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 eight 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.
On July 24, 2020, Vermeule was appointed to the Administrative Conference of the United States.
Legal and political philosophy
Integralism and support for Catholic world government
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 and opposed to the Founding Fathers' ideal of division between church and state. Integralism in practice gives rise to state order (identifiable as theocratic) in which a religiously-conceived "Highest Good" has precedence over individual autonomy, the value prioritized by American democracy. Rather than electoral politics, the path to confessional political order in integralist theory is “strategic ralliement,” or transformation within institutions and bureaucracies, that lays the groundwork for a realized integralist regime to succeed a liberal democratic order it assumes to be dying. The new state would "exercise coercion over baptized citizens in a manner different from non-baptized citizens".
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 conservative 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."
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". Under this theory of jurisprudence, according to writer Eric Levitz, the moral values of the religious right would be imposed on the American people whether they, as a whole, believe in them or not.
Vermeule's concept of common-good constitutionalism is: