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Commands and Principles in the Administrative State, 130 YALE LAW JOURNAL FORUM (Jan. 6, 2021); and The Unitary Executive: Past, Present, Future, SUPREME COURT REVIEW (2021) (with Cass R. Sunstein). Thanks to the co-author of the last for his gracious permission to adapt some material for the book.

      American public law suffers from a terrible amnesia. Putting aside the work of a few legal historians and other specialists, our law has all but lost the memory of its own origins and formative influences in the classical legal tradition – particularly the ius commune, the classical European synthesis of Roman law, canon law, and local civil law.1 The ius commune was heavily influential in England, in a somewhat variant form;2 both English and continental streams influenced Americans right from the beginning, throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.

      The consequence of this amnesia is that our public law now oscillates restlessly and unhappily between two dominant approaches, progressivism and originalism, both of which distort the true nature of law and betray our own legal traditions. Against both camps, I argue for a view I will call common good constitutionalism. On this view, the classical tradition should be explicitly recovered and adapted as the matrix within which American judges read our Constitution, our statutes, and our administrative law. The centerpiece of the classical legal tradition is that law should be seen as a reasoned ordering to the common good, the “art of goodness and fairness,”3 as the Roman jurist Ulpian put it – an act of purposive and reasoned rulership that promotes the good of law’s subjects as members of a flourishing political community, and ultimately as members of the community of peoples and nations. Accordingly, the master principle of our public law should be the classical principle that all officials have a duty, and corresponding authority, to promote the common good – albeit in a manner consistent with the requirements of their particular roles, an important qualification to which I shall often return.

      Of course a simple return to the classical legal tradition and its particular legal rules is neither desirable nor even possible. Even were that feasible, which it is not, one would risk simply recreating the conditions that caused the present to come into being. But the core theoretical insights and jurisprudential principles of the classical legal tradition can be recovered, adapted and translated6 into our world, so as to yield a better interpretation of the past and present of our operative constitutional order. Those insights are scarcely so remote as to preclude recovery; in fact, they are close at hand, if obscured from our current vision. Key elements of the classical view of law remain vital within our law, even as lawyers and judges have ceased to defend or even recognize them.

      In the classical tradition, law is seen as – in Aquinas’ famous definition7 – an ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by a public authority who has charge of the community. Law is seen as intrinsically reasoned and also purposive, ordered to the common good of the whole polity and that of mankind. Classical law treats enacted texts as products of the reasoned deliberation of public authorities who give specific content to the law where background legal principles need specificity or leave relevant issues to discretionary choice. Where at all possible, classical law reads the law of a particular jurisdiction (the ius civile) in light of the ius gentium (the law of nations or peoples) and the ius naturale (natural law), which the civil positive law is taken to specify or “determine” within reasonable boundaries. General principles of law might, for example, say that, at some point, peace and order require that potential defendants should have repose from the risk of being sued; it would then be up to the civil law in such an instance to determine a specific statute of limitations and to resolve the many questions that flow from it.

      Today both progressives and originalists either deny the existence of the natural law altogether (the usual progressive view), or deny its relevance to law except in strictly historical terms, as a background belief potentially incorporated into the law laid down by the framers and ratifiers (the now-standard originalist view). Both camps therefore attempt, in different ways, to reduce all law to positive law adopted by officials; for them, all law is in this sense lex. But just because ius is lost to view does not mean that it has actually been purged from American law – far from it. The classical vision of law as a rational ordering to the common good, embedded in a broader framework of legal principles, has merely been driven underground. Judges and others unavoidably and unmistakably work with some account or other of the common good and of law’s ordering to that good. We will see this point over and over again, in disparate areas.

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