by Dennis J. Wieboldt III
Abstract
Few forces are more important to the study of American conservatism than the law. As Steven Teles, Ann Southworth, Amanda Hollis-Brusky, and other political scientists have illustrated, twentieth-century conservatives successfully built an institutional network that enabled conservative ideas about the law to permeate both scholarly thinking and judicial decision-making. What Teles, Southworth, and Hollis-Brusky have uniformly overlooked, however, is one of the most significant philosophical influences on conservative legal thought in the United States: natural law. Indeed, with the exception of Ken Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution, scholarly treatments of conservatism from the perspective of American Political Development have generally failed to explore natural law’s place in conservative legal thought, even as they have advanced our understanding of conservatism by examining the internal (and especially operational) dynamics of the conservative legal movement. While R. H. Helmholz and Stuart Banner have recently demonstrated natural law’s importance to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American legal profession, neither they nor other historians have devoted much sustained attention to natural law’s place in the twentieth-century Untied States. With the publication of Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism Since the New Deal, Johnathan O’Neill has made a welcome entry into this historiographical lacuna.