Pro Societate Bene Ordinata et Iusta
Kosma Institute was founded to recover the intellectual foundations of law, political economy, philosophy, and statecraft. Its work begins from a conviction older than modern ideology and more demanding than ordinary public commentary. Law has an end. Public authority carries moral obligations. Economic life depends upon families, communities, production, property, law, and sovereignty. Political judgment requires prudence, not impulse. A society that forgets these truths may preserve institutions in name while losing the reason those institutions exist.
Our motto, For a Well-Ordered and Just Society, expresses the Institute’s governing purpose. Order and justice belong together. Order gives justice a public form. Justice gives order its moral claim. A political community worthy of loyalty needs both the principles that define the good and the institutions capable of serving it.
Kosma Institute brings together students, lawyers, scholars, and public leaders who want to think seriously about that task. We draw from classical jurisprudence, natural law, American constitutionalism, the Salamanca tradition, law and economics, political economy, and the tradition of prudent statesmanship. These sources do not offer a retreat from modern public life. They offer the discipline needed to govern it.
Modern education often separates the disciplines that public life holds together. Law becomes a technical craft detached from its final causes. Economics becomes a science of exchange without a sufficient account of obligation, family, production, or national strength. Philosophy withdraws from institutional life. Politics becomes a struggle for power after the language of common purpose has already weakened. Kosma Institute answers that fragmentation through formation.
We train students to reason from first principles while remaining attentive to office, jurisdiction, text, remedy, institutional competence, and political circumstance. The jurist must know more than doctrine. The economist must know more than models. The philosopher must speak to the conditions of human life rather than merely describe abstraction. The statesman must understand that power can only serve the common good when disciplined by prudence and law.
The Institute carries out this work through fellowships, legal scholarship, campus chapters, and LSAT preparation. The Kosma Fellows Program forms students in economics, classical jurisprudence, philosophy, and statecraft. Lex Kosma publishes legal scholarship on jurisprudence, law and economics, public policy, criminal law reform, national security, foreign policy, and constitutional order. The Kosma Society builds chapters across leading law school campuses for students seeking a serious home for classical legal thought and common good constitutionalism. Kosma Academy helps talented students enter the legal profession through rigorous instruction, scholarship seats, mentorship, and admissions guidance.
Directors
Kosma Institute brings together builders, scholars, and lawyers formed in the institutions the Institute now seeks to strengthen. William B. Donahue, Chairman of Kosma Institute, is a Notre Dame Law School J.D. Class of 2026 and the founder of Kosma Corp, Kosma Consul, and College Republicans of America. His work joins legal study with institution-building, political organization, and the practical demands of public leadership. He has published on constitutional law, with broader interests in classical jurisprudence, criminal justice reform, political economy, and the recovery of public authority as an instrument of justice rather than mere administration. Kosma Institute reflects that same impulse. Ideas must become institutions, or they remain private convictions without public consequence.
The Institute is led day to day by its Executive Director, Stephen Sills. ,Sills received his B.A. in History and Philosophy from Stanford University and now studies at Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship. His formation lies in political philosophy, natural law jurisprudence, constitutional law, and the American founding. His work has moved through the same intellectual world Kosma Institute seeks to gather into institutional form, including the Hoover Institution, the James Wilson Institute, and the Claremont Institute, where he served as a Publius Fellow. He brings to the Institute a rare combination of philosophical seriousness, constitutional literacy, and administrative judgment.
The Institute’s directors also include Kimo Gandall, Harvard Law School Class of 2025, a lawyer, Professional Registered Parliamentarian, and legal-technology founder. Gandall has published on constitutional law and institutional procedure, with work concerning legislative authority, quorum, proxy voting, decision-making, and the legal consequences of artificial intelligence. His presence reflects one of the Institute’s central convictions. Public law does not operate in abstraction. It works through rules, offices, procedures, bodies, votes, records, remedies, and institutions capable of acting with lawful authority.
Senior Fellows
Adrian Vermeule, Senior Fellow in Constitutional Law, gives the Institute one of the defining intellectual voices in the contemporary recovery of the classical legal tradition. Vermeule is the Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, where his work focuses on administrative law, the administrative state, institutional design, and constitutional theory. He previously served as the Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, has authored or co-authored nine books, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. Most notably, he is the author of Common Good Constitutionalism, one of the defining works in the contemporary recovery of the classical legal tradition.
David R. Crouch II, Senior Fellow in Economics, brings the Institute a practical account of political economy rooted in finance, strategic industry, supply-chain resilience, natural resources, and national development. As Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer of Decorus Imperium, Crouch leads the firm’s strategic vision, investment philosophy, and global growth. His work has moved across traditional and alternative assets, digital finance, energy infrastructure, economic policy, and government advisory. His experience extends to policy discussions in the House and Senate on supply-chain resilience, tax policy, and natural-resource management, along with work involving federal departments concerned with defense, treasury, diplomacy, commerce, and national security. David has completed the Yale Financial Markets program with honors and coursework in Behavioral Economics through Duke University. He is currently pursuing advanced graduate studies in finance and economic policy, while continuing independent research in areas including mechanism design, trade theory, and macro-financial modeling.