Challenging common good constitutionalism Common Good Constitutionalism: Recovering the Classical Legal Tradition , by Adrian Vermeule, Polity Press, 2022, 270pp

Adrian Vermeule's new vision of public law has whipped up a storm.It first aired on 31 March 2020, in his blogpost 'Beyond Originalism', under the rubric 'common-good constitutionalism'. 1 Within a week, several leading scholars had responded, with Randy Barnett describing it as 'dangerous' (for Barnett, 'This wolf comes as a wolf'); Garrett Epps as 'an idea as dangerous as they come' and 'an argument for authoritarian extremism'; and David Dyzenhaus calling it 'more scary than the COVID virus itself'. 2 This backlash did not deter Vermeule: within two years, his blogpost had become a monograph, Common Good Constitutionalism (CGC). 3The back-cover blurbs of Vermeule's slender book hail it as 'elegant, insightful, magisterial' (Sohrab Ahmari) and 'the most important book of American constitutional theory in many decades' (Jack Goldsmith).But the (numerous) reviews have largely been negative: one claims that 'Vermeule writes as a prophet trying to start a popular movement rather than a scholar engaged with his professional colleagues' and another calls it 'a mere apologia for brute power and the suppression of difference'. 4So what is all the fuss about?And to what extent is the praiseand are the criticismsjustified? OverviewCGC has five chapters (plus a revealing introduction and crisp conclusion) and I read it as making three big claims and aiming at three big targets.But CGC is a challenging book to read.That is not to say that it is poorly-written; in fact, it is a challenging read partly because it is such an easy read.Dan Priel recently said of Vermeule's intellectual (but certainly not moral) hero, Ronald Dworkin, that he writes in 'a mellifluous, story-like style' that makes for 'pleasant reading' but that often makes it 'difficult to pin down his precise views'. 5