Continuity and Evolution in Vermeule on Legal Interpretation

Abstract This article is a constructive interpretation of Adrian Vermeule’s thought on legal interpretation, putting his previous work on these issues in conversation with his explicit embrace of the classical legal tradition so prominently on display in Common Good Constitutionalism. What emerges is a picture of Vermeule’s contemporary thinking on interpretation that has an interesting core of continuity, one running concurrently with several significant conceptual and normative evolutions brought about by his more explicit embrace of a classical legal framework. Part I offers a synthesis of Vermeule’s treatment of core questions of legal interpretation pre-Common Good Constitutionalism. Part II begins by outlining Vermeule’s express turn to the classical legal tradition and how this tradition approaches important public law issues linked to interpretation. Part II then proceeds to pick out and elaborate on themes of continuity and evolution. I argue here that while Vermeule’s embrace of the classical legal tradition has involved several significant conceptual and normative shifts in his thinking, this has not involved repudiation of his prior work on legal interpretation. Rather, the thrust and insights of much of his previous public law thought on interpretation retain vibrancy within the explicitly classical framework he has now adopted. Overall, I suggest Common Good Constitutionalism, and the works accompanying and building upon it, can be profitably read as providing a form of retroactive coherence to Vermeule’s long-standing arguments concerning legal interpretation, offering them a unifying conceptual framework. From the perspective of a classical natural law jurist at least, Vermeule’s embrace of the classical tradition provides his extensive body of scholarship in this area a more explicit and robust conceptual and normative anchor.