THe Catholic Wringer

This is a belated follow-up on Steve Bainbridge's post from the Pepperdine conference where we both spoke a couple of weeks ago, This excellent conference, organized by our friend and colleague Bob Cochrane, gave Steve and me an attempt to revisit the debate we have been having in print, at conferences and in blogs about the nature of a Catholic corporate law or, more modestly, the nature of a Catholic perspective on corporate law. As those of you who have followed this debate, including the contributions of our co-blogista Susan Stabile, well know, Steve and I have come up with pretty conflicting conclusions.  What I addressed at Pepperdine was an interesting phenomenon: after Steve and I each put some central corporate law questions thru our respective versions of the "Catholic wringer," we ended up with conclusions virtually identical to the secular presumptions with which we approached that question. Why did this happen? I try to answer this question in a written version of my comments posted under my name in the sidebar entitled "Deja Vu All Over Again: Foundational Problems in Defining a 'Catholic' Corporate Law." While I don't think I resolved any of those foundational problems in this little essay, I think the problems are relevant to any attempt develop a distinctively Catholic "take" on any area of law, and not just corporate law. Also posted in the sidebar is another paper that deals with some related issues. It is a response to Steve's brilliantly original "Apologia for Law & Economics," which appeared in the Yale anthology on Christian legal thought, and is entitled "Utility, the Good and Civic Happiness: A Catholic Critique of Law & Economics." I don't know if it is brilliantly responsive, but it does call into question the consistency of the normative claims of L&E's utility-based social welfare principle with Catholic concepts of the good and civic happiness. It is an extended version of the paper that I gave at the San Francisco conference on "Taking Christian Legal Thought Seriously," where Mark Scarberry channeled Steve so effectively. I look forward to the blog group's and our readers' comments on these papers.

       A final note: a while ago in a report on two upcoming conferences at St. Tom's, Rob (I think it was him) mentioned that the "omnipresent Mark Sargent" would be speaking at both. Of course, being a mere dean, I cannot claim omnipresence (although it would be useful to be able to do so). Perhaps one of the following would be a better description: "Zelig-like", "annoyingly everywhere," or "not him again!".

-Mark