The Kosma Fellows Program
The Kosma Fellows Program forms young scholars and public leaders in the disciplines that shape a serious constitutional order. Each fellowship combines directed reading, writing, seminars, mentorship, and publication opportunities. Fellows study under a classical account of law and politics while applying that inheritance to the practical questions now facing the United States.
The David R. Crouch II Fellowship in Political Economy
The Crouch Fellowship studies economics as a moral and institutional science, not merely as a technical language of incentives. Fellows examine production, labor, capital formation, industrial policy, monetary order, market concentration, family economics, and the conditions that allow a nation to sustain material independence. The fellowship gives special attention to law and economics, national development, antitrust, corporate power, financialization, and the legal architecture of political economy.
The program rejects the assumption that markets alone can supply a people with order, solidarity, and strategic capacity. A nation that cannot build, manufacture, finance, defend, and reproduce itself cannot remain free in any serious sense. Fellows therefore study economic life through the lens of political community, asking how law can discipline capital toward productive enterprise, restore the dignity of work, and secure the material basis of national sovereignty.
The Adrian Vermeule Fellowship in Classical Jurisprudence
The Vermeule Fellowship anchors Kosma Institute’s legal work. Fellows study the classical tradition of law as reason ordered to the common good, with sustained attention to Aquinas, the ius commune, the School of Salamanca, James Wilson, administrative law, constitutional interpretation, and contemporary common good constitutionalism.
The fellowship trains students to think beyond the sterile contest between living constitutionalism and hypertrophied originalism. Law requires text, promulgation, office, jurisdiction, and settlement. It also requires an account of the good that gives those forms their authority. Fellows learn to reason within that tension, recovering a jurisprudence that honors positive law while refusing to reduce law to historical retrieval, semantic management, or procedural restraint.
The Kosma Fellowship in Philosophy and First Principles
The Philosophy Fellowship gives students the metaphysical, moral, and anthropological foundations necessary for serious public thought. Fellows study classical and Christian philosophy, natural law, virtue ethics, political obligation, human nature, liberalism, sovereignty, authority, and the philosophical errors that shape modern legal and political institutions.
A statesman without philosophy becomes a manager of forces he does not understand. A lawyer without first principles becomes fluent in rules whose purposes he cannot explain. This fellowship restores the intellectual architecture beneath law and politics, giving students the ability to ask what man is, what law does, what authority serves, and what kind of community deserves the name of a republic.
The Kosma Fellowship in Statecraft and National Capitalism
The Statecraft Fellowship studies the practical art of governing a sovereign nation. Fellows examine foreign policy, national security, industrial strategy, immigration, energy, critical minerals, defense procurement, technological competition, and the legal powers of the administrative and constitutional state.
National capitalism begins from the premise that economic life must serve the durability, independence, and flourishing of the political community. The fellowship therefore joins political economy to strategic judgment. Fellows study how a government can secure supply chains, defend borders, cultivate domestic industry, protect families, and wield public authority without dissolving into either technocracy or market idolatry. The goal is prudence in command of power.