At National Review, Dan McLaughlin recently had a compelling takedown of the new push for “common good originalism.” That brand of originalism received a fuller explication yesterday in a joint statement at The American Mind from Hadley Arkes, Josh Hammer, Matthew Peterson and Garrett Snedeker. I’ll try to write about this in more detail in essay form, but the essential complaint against originalism is that it has failed to produce conservative policy ends. Originalism’s focus on text and intent rather than natural law earns its defenders the dreaded epithet of “positivist,” which is loosely, and wrongly, deployed as a synonym … Continue reading Constitutionalism and the Common Good