Book Launch The War Against Law: What's wrong with common good constitutionalism by Professor David Dyzenhaus

Lawyers at elite universities are taking a wrecking ball to the rule of law and democracy while claiming to defend both. This, they claim, is done for the ‘common good’, which they portray as a version of Catholic classical natural law thought, but which I expose as an illiberal ideology with roots in the authoritarian thought from the 1930s of the fascist political and legal theorists Carl Schmitt and Eric Voegelin. I examine the ideas of these lawyers in a specific context with special attention on one episode. In the UK, lawyers of the ‘Judicial Power Project’, principally John Finnis and Richard Ekins, with close ties to far-right figures in the US and Europe, for example, Adrian Vermeule at Harvard, rail against ‘judicial overreach’. But on close inspection of their arguments, we see that they aim at establishing rule by an illiberal executive. To show this, I focus on the 2024 Rwanda Act which required rendering asylum seekers to Rwanda. The debates both before and after the Act make possible concrete answers to profound questions about the nature of the rule of law and its role in a liberal democracy.

David Dyzenhaus is University Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy

This event is hosted by the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law and the Centre for Legal Theory

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