some thoughts on Catholic legal education

This is a belated comment on some of the recent exchanges.

I agree wholeheartedly with John Breen's article on Jesuit legal education. I think it is beyond argument that some law schools affiliated with universities that were founded by Catholic religious orders or Catholic dioceses can not honestly claim to be offering something distinctive. That is, they are indistinguishable from their secular counterparts.

Possible remedies for this situtation--if one assumed that this state of affairs was a problem and that one wanted to foster a Catholic identity (by complying with Ex Corde Ecclesiae, for example)--are extremely difficult to implement. A law school with only one or two Catholics on its faculty, for example, is going to have a very hard time trying to do this in any serious way. I have some ideas about this but I think it is profitable to think about what a Catholic law school might look like if one had the freedom to begin from scratch. Due to God's providence, I and several colleagues were blessed to be in that situation a few years ago. Here are a few thoughts about what we at Ave Maria tried to do, although I don't want to suggest by any means that what we've done is the only way to build a Catholic law school.

We began with Ex Corde Ecclesiae, and I think that is the place to start. The school ought to view itself as "born from the heart of the Church." It should not be thought of as a bridge between the Church and legal education more generally. An important part of this is that the school ought to be an "authentic human community animated by the spirit of Christ." Of necessity, that community must contain many Catholics, particularly on its faculty. These Catholics ought to be people who embrace their identity as faithful sons and daughters of the Church, and in particular who embrace the Catholic intellectual tradition. It is certainly not enough that the school have a few Catholics like this, or Harvard would be a Catholic law school because Mary Ann Glendon is on the faculty there. It is not enough to have a few Catholics to add to the pluralistic conversation in the law school. It bears noting, I think, that most law schools are not terribly diverse. When I taught at a secular law school that was pretty typical of US law schools I was the only regular member of the faculty who would, for example, defend the pro-life side in public discussions of abortion or euthanasia.   

The school ought to have a rich liturgical life--daily Masses, frequent Confession, Eucharistic Adoration, the Rosary, etc.            

Non-Catholics would be welcome of course, but as Ex Corde states they would be expected to understand and respect the Catholic identity of the school.

A Catholic law school ought to be distinctive in the types of conferences it sponsors, the speakers it brings to campus, and the persons upon whom it bestows honorary degrees.

With regard to the curriculum, I think that the faculty in general ought to be scholars who reject the "dictatorship of relativism" that Pope Benedict warned about. There ought to be certain distinctive courses so that students would encounter the richness of Catholic social thought. At Ave Maria, we do this in several required courses. These courses include Moral Foundations of the Law (a first year course that emphasizes the connection between law and morality), Jurisprudence (a course that we expect will acquaint students with a knowledge of the natural law tradition), and Law, Ethics, and Public Policy (a third year course in which students examine in detail a current issue in light of Catholic social thought). But perhaps just as importantly students ought to encounter Catholic social thought throughout the curriculum. So, for example, a Constitutional Law class might consider Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae when the students considered the concept of freedom articulated in Casey and Lawrence.      

There is a lot more that could be said, but this sketch of a few ideas is probably already too long. I only wanted to add that I agree that Catholic law schools ought not strive to be "conservative" or "liberal." They ought to be faithful to the vision expressed in Ex Corde.

Richard