Gregory E. Louis
, Associate Professor at CUNY School of Law, introduces a new constitutional framework in his article, “Protecting Commoners’ Goods: Pluralist Coexistence Through the Common Good Constitution’s Subsidiarity Municipalism,” forthcoming in the British Journal of American Legal Studies. The article argues that applying the principle of subsidiarity, drawn from classical legal tradition, to U.S. constitutionalism can create space for local governance that protects multiply marginalized communities.
The piece begins from the premise that Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule’s “common good constitutionalism” may increasingly influence U.S. legal thinking, particularly in light of initiatives like Project 2025, and goes on to contribute to the discussion by exploring how his “skeletal theory can serve the interests of outsiders.”
Professor Louis proposes that this framework, typically viewed as aligned with conservative interests, can in fact be leveraged to advance progressive aims. By grounding his argument in subsidiarity—a principle historically used to justify legal pluralism in the Roman Empire—he outlines a theory of “subsidiarity municipalism” that empowers municipalities as legal sites of inclusion and coexistence. This approach reimagines local governance not as retreat, but as resistance.
“At first, subsidiary municipalism feels like retreat because it seems to replace solidity with fluid arrangements,” Louis writes. “But it directs the progressive movement from national and international litigation to granular community building, drawing on administrative and corporate law. But I do not see how pluralistic coexistence can ever avoid such fluidity, as it happens by muddling through. Rights must always be interpreted to be applied; and when they are, they are interpreted by people of an age. To explain this sentiment with a reference to the most recent pontificate, Pope Francis’ administration was described as the search for unity over conflict. Such unity must always be messy because it is an attempt to harmonize opposites, or a unity of people as they are, in their initial and apparent incompatibility. Subsidiarity municipalism represents one potential path that legal tradition has taken to work out such messes.”
The article builds on the author’s 2022 UCLA Law Review essay “The Jurisprudence of Trousered Apes,” which reflects how first-generation lawyers such as himself and those whom he teaches uniquely contribute to legal analysis, capturing the law as lived reality. This perspective continues to shape his scholarship, which centers those oppressed by the law, rather than those “enveloped in its tutelary cocoon.”
By reimagining common good constitutionalism as a tool for local empowerment, Professor Louis challenges dominant assumptions about tradition, rights, and governance. His framework aligns with CUNY Law’s understanding of using law in service of human needs—specifically the need for belonging.