At Eugene’s kind invitation, I’ll have several posts this week at the Volokh Conspiracy excerpting and summarizing my new article, Traditionalism Rising. The first post is here, defining traditionalism and locating it in the Court’s 2021 term cases. Here’s a bit:

The piece builds on and extends a larger project about constitutional traditionalism developed in earlier papers (here and here), as well as in a broader research program, The Tradition Project, that my colleague (and Volokh co-conspirator) Mark Movsesian and I have pursued over several years at our Center for Law and Religion. I’ve been a dedicated reader of the Volokh Conspiracy since I was a law prof pup, so it is a pleasure for me to contribute something.

My posts will: (1) define traditionalism and locate it in the Supreme Court’s work this past term; (2) compare traditionalism and originalism, particularly what the paper calls “liquidated originalism”; (3) address traditionalism’s “level of generality” problem, the problem how to select the operative tradition; (4) offer several justifications for traditionalism; (5) consider the problem of traditionalism’s politics. Most of the material is excerpted or summarized from the article, but I invite readers to look at the piece for the full-dress argument. I welcome reactions to the paper, which is still a draft.

What is traditionalism? When people hear the word tradition connected to law, they sometimes think of judicial restraint, or deference, or minimalism (or “Burkeanism”), or some vaguer injunction to “go slow” or respect stare decisis and the interests served by it. Or they may think of approaches to particular clauses or parts of the Constitution—to the Due Process Clause, for example, or to Justice Frankfurter’s “tradition” approach to inherent executive power.

Traditionalism is different from all of these. Traditionalism is a unified approach to determining constitutional meaning and constitutional law with two central elements: (1) concrete practices, rather than principles, ideas, judicial precedents, legal rules, and so on, as the determinants of constitutional meaning and law; and (2) the endurance of those practices as a composite of their age, longevity, and density, evidence for which includes the practice’s use before, during, and after enactment of a constitutional provision.