At the center of this debate was Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, whose latest book served as the ostensible subject of the symposium. In conservative legal circles, Vermeule has become the most prominent proponent of “common good constitutionalism,” a controversial new theory that challenges many of the fundamental premises and principles of the conservative legal movement.

On the one side of this debate are defenders of the conservative legal status quo, who made up the majority of the speakers at the Cambridge symposium. By and large, these conservatives continue to champion the time-honored legal principles of the right: the sanctity of individual rights, the importance of judicial restraint and the wisdom of limited government. Practically all of them continue to identify as originalists. On the other side of the debate are those who, like Vermeule, want to push the conservative legal movement in a more radical direction. Partisans of this camp hail from different sectors of the American right, and they go by different names. (Some eschew the label of “conservative” for the edgier “postliberal” or “integralist,” two terms that are variously applied to Vermeule.)

For the most part, the debate between these two factions has been unfolding outside of the conservative mainstream. Instead, it’s being hashed out in the pages of academic law journals, in back-and-forths on obscure conservative blogs and in the nerdier corners of conservative legal Twitter, where Vermeule was until recently a prolific

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