Wieboldt on Our Natural Law Moment(s)

Dennis J. Wieboldt, III, University of Notre Dame, is publishing Our Natural Law Moment(s) in the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy. Here is the abstract.

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, Alicea's 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? This Article assumes the challenge of historicizing the United States' latest natural law moment. In light of the 2024 Vaughan Lecture, it first illustrates that there were at least two discernible natural law moments in twentieth-century American legal history which emerged in response to then-novel developments in the legal academy. Then, this Article demonstrates that today's natural law moment shares important continuities and discontinuities with the natural law moments that the American legal profession began to experience almost exactly one hundred years ago. In concluding, this Article proposes that those today engaged in normative jurisprudential debates would be benefitted by a more capacious understanding of twentieth-century American legal history that takes seriously our often-forgotten natural law moments.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.