Last Friday, Chief Judge William Pryor of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit delivered a lecture responding to calls for "common-good constitutionalism" by some conservative pundits and legal scholars. This lecture, "Against Living Common Goodism," was the Keynote address at the Federalist Society's 2022 Ohio Chapters Conference and is now available online (including as a nicely formatted PDF).
Judge Pryor's lecture takes direct aim at the work of Harvard Law School's Adrian Vermeule, in particular, and argues that there is little to distinguish "common good constitutionalism" from progressive legal theories of a living constitution, other than its explicit political valence.
Here is a taste:
