{"id":2910,"date":"2026-08-21T17:10:42","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T21:10:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/?page_id=2910"},"modified":"2026-08-21T17:10:42","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T21:10:42","slug":"our-natural-law-moments","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/in-print\/volume-24-issue-1-winter-2026\/our-natural-law-moments\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Natural Law Moment(s)"},"content":{"rendered":"

To both its sharpest critics and strongest proponents, natural law increasingly appears to be enjoying a \u201cmoment\u201d in American legal discourse. The 2024 Herbert W. Vaughan Lecture at Harvard Law School, in fact, took as its subject \u201cThe Natural Law Moment in Constitutional Theory.\u201d Following the publication of Adrian Vermeule\u2019s Common Good Constitutionalism<\/em>, 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\u2019 contemporary jurisprudential debates: is there something unique about today\u2019s natural law moment, and, if so, what might understanding previous natural law moment(s) portend for contemporary debates about natural law?<\/p>\n

In light of the 2024 Vaughan Lecture, this Article historicizes the United States\u2019 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\u2014namely, the advent of legal realism and, decades later, originalism. Then, this Article reveals that today\u2019s natural law moment shares important (dis)continuities with its predecessors. For example, leaders of the United States\u2019 second natural law moment\u2014like those writing during the first moment, but unlike many today\u2014privileged 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.<\/p>\n

In concluding, this Article makes a predictive judgment that today\u2019s 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\u2019s importance to the intellectual environment in which the U.S. Constitution\u2019s drafters were situated, future originalists may be led to conclude with increasing frequency that, as a matter of \u201coriginal meaning,\u201d \u201coriginal intent,\u201d or \u201coriginal law,\u201d 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\u2014 albeit in less theoretically nuanced forms\u2014during the United States\u2019 last two natural law moments.<\/p>\n

Continue reading Our Natural Law Moment(s)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To both its sharpest critics and strongest proponents, natural law increasingly appears to be enjoying a \u201cmoment\u201d in American legal discourse. The 2024 Herbert W. Vaughan Lecture at Harvard Law School, in fact, took as its subject \u201cThe Natural Law Moment in Constitutional Theory.\u201d Following the publication of Adrian Vermeule\u2019s Common Good Constitutionalism, among other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"parent":2883,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"abstract.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2910","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2910"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2911,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2910\/revisions\/2911"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}