To both its sharpest critics and strongest proponents, natural law increasingly appears to be enjoying a “moment” in American legal discourse. The 2024 Herbert W. Vaughan Lecture at Harvard Law School, in fact, took as its subject “The Natural Law Moment in Constitutional Theory.” Following the publication of Adrian Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism, among other works on natural law in the last half-decade, the 2024 Vaughan Lecture raises two important questions for those interested in the United States’ contemporary jurisprudential debates: is there something unique about today’s natural law moment, and, if so, what might understanding previous natural law moment(s) portend for contemporary debates about natural law?

In light of the 2024 Vaughan Lecture, this Article historicizes the United States’ latest natural law moment. First, this Article demonstrates that there were at least two natural law moments in twentieth-century American legal history which emerged in response to then-novel developments in the legal academy—namely, the advent of legal realism and, decades later, originalism. Then, this Article reveals that today’s natural law moment shares important (dis)continuities with its predecessors. For example, leaders of the United States’ second natural law moment—like those writing during the first moment, but unlike many today—privileged outcome determinacy over methodological purity. If an interpretive method produced outcomes irreconcilable with the natural law tradition, they argued, that method was itself illegitimate. As this Article reveals, this conviction not only shaped much twentieth-century legal scholarship, but it also informed how natural lawyers engaged with political movements and approached nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In concluding, this Article makes a predictive judgment that today’s natural law moment may be one of reconciliation between natural lawyers on the relative margin of American legal discourse and (positivist) originalists squarely within the judicial and scholarly mainstream. Indeed, as new historical scholarship on the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States continues to uncover natural law’s importance to the intellectual environment in which the U.S. Constitution’s drafters were situated, future originalists may be led to conclude with increasing frequency that, as a matter of “original meaning,” “original intent,” or “original law,” judges must take seriously the natural law thinking of past generations. Should this prediction prove prescient in time, contemporary originalists will have refashioned a method of constitutional interpretation that was first articulated— albeit in less theoretically nuanced forms—during the United States’ last two natural law moments.

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