Anchoring Truths contributing editor and JWI affiliated scholar Josh Hammer joined JWI Deputy Director Garrett Snedeker to discuss his new essay in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, entitled “Common Good Originalism: Our Tradition and our Path Forward.” In the podcast, we talked about the failures of the positivist originalist project, Hammer’s vision for an originalism that pursues substantive conservatives principles, and the role of the Preamble of the Constitution as articulating the telos of the American regime. We also discussed the issues of judicial fortitude, epistemological humility and the problem of history in originalist jurisprudence, and the role of the state in preserving the ends put down in the Preamble.

Josh Hammer is a contributing editor to Anchoring Truths, opinion editor of Newsweek, a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation, the counsel and policy advisor for the Internet Accountability Project, and a syndicated columnist. A frequent pundit and essayist on political, legal, and cultural issues, Josh has been published by many leading outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, National Affairs, The National Interest, National Review, City Journal, First Things, Public Discourse, The Spectator, The American Mind, and Tablet. His legal writing has been featured at the University of St. Thomas Law Journal and the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. Josh is a campus speaker through Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Young America’s Foundation, and the Federalist Society. He previously worked at a large law firm and clerked for the Honorable James C. Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Josh has also served as a John Marshall Fellow with the Claremont Institute. He graduated from Duke University and the University of Chicago Law School.