Style, Substance, and Reality

In response to Rick's question, I certainly agree that some people are likely to conclude that almost any active presence of the Catholic intellectual tradition in the academic life of the law school constitutes "imposition."  I simply think we can't ignore that reality, and we have to be very clear in speaking about these things to emphasize that what we're talking about is not imposition or indoctrination.  The fear of some of those reluctant to engage in this conversation sometimes seems to be that to give voice to the Catholic intellectual tradition, or to make faith questions explicit, is to give that voice and those questions a privileged place that may become an orthodoxy that will exclude other voices from the pluralistic intellectual exchange.  That's certainly not what I'm proposing and I know it's not what Rick's proposing, but I suspect that such a perception is often the reality we face.  I would characterize that as an unfair reaction and an inaccurate perception, but people really do sometimes react in these ways, often with great depth of feeling, and our response has to take that reality into account.  We can try to make it very clear that we really do acknowledge the reality of their reaction and explain why the approach we're advocating is different.  We want to make available the resources of a rich intellectual tradition that should be part of the academic enterprise of the law school, but there's no denying that some people at our institutions might not be interested in that dimension of the enterprise.  Even if their reluctance or disinterest is based on misunderstanding, they have to be assured that they're not going to be excluded, and that assurance may come more from an inclusive style that strives to remain engaged in conversation than it will from efforts to convince people that their substantive concerns about impostion are misplaced.  For whatever reason (and I'm sure the reasons are various and of varied legitimacy), there can be a lot of anxiety and mistrust as soon as faith becomes part of the conversation.  We have to move forward in ways that will generate increased trust, not deepening anxiety or suspicion.  In order to do this, I think it's clear that the style in which we speak is at least as important as the substance of what we say.  If a more authentic embodiment of Jesuit legal education is going to take root, people have to be invited to become a part of an exciting experiment; they have to be offered opportunities to learn why they might want to be part of an effort that at least some of them will genuinely feel at home with.  (The importance of assuring people who are now members of a pluralistic academic community that they can feel at home in an institution of which they may have been a member for many years also has relevance to the important questions around crucifixes in the classroom and the style of public prayer at graduation -- different Catholic schools are going to embody different sorts of cultures that affect the proper way to approach those issues, and wading too quickly into either one of those potentially neuralgic issues may well be a nonproductive diversion from the more central question of how to go about making the resources of the Catholic tradition and other faith traditions an active part of the academic life of a Jesuit, Catholic academic institution.)

With respect to that central question of the academic enterprise, I really would have some questions about a required course in Catholic Social Thought.  There may be Catholic law schools where the existing culture would be open to that, but I suspect that at many places a required course with an explicit Catholic focus would be experienced by many students and faculty members as an imposition.  I definitely think that an introduction to the tradition of Catholic Social Thought should be a part of the curriculum at any Catholic law school.  I'm pretty sure that a lot of our students are interested in such a course, and the excitement of some will generate interest among more.  And I know that a number of excellent CST courses are being successfully offered at various schools.  But to require first-year students to take such a course, at many currently functioning Catholic law schools, would probably not be a fruitful way to move the effort forward at this moment.  There will be members of the community who may well react by saying, "I don't care about that Catholic stuff, don't impose it on me."

In some way's I find John Breen's suggestion of a required course offering students an opportunity to explore the idea of justice in an academic context to be a more appropriate and attractive option to consider.  I suspect that the different faculty members who would teach the various sections of such a required course would have different approaches, just as we find different approaches in different sections of Civil Procedure or Constitutional Law.  In my Civil Procedure course, for example, I'm pretty explicit about raising virtue questions at various points: e.g., who might you become as a lawyer and as a person as you use these various tools of Civil Procedure in different ways?  I actually try to talk some about justice as a virtue -- a way of living that has to be habitually embodied in your life as a lawyer and as a person -- and I recently heard with a bit of consolation one of my Civ Pro students remembering that part of the class as evidence of what he found to be distinctive and attractive about the BC law school experience.  Other Civ Pro sections might address the question of justice in other ways.  I probably ask different questions about Roe or Goodridge in my Con Law II class than get asked in other sections of that required course, and, similarly, if I were teaching a required course on justice I'd include exposure to CST and the Catholic tradition, but other sections might not.  Still, the central objective of bringing the question of justice to the heart of the academic enterprise would at least be on the table, and a bit more forward movement in the conversation might be recognizable.  How realistic it is to expect such a course actually to be made a required part of the curriculum, I leave to those with more experience of the politics of faculty governance and institutional resource allocation, especially when it comes to the structure of the first-year curriculum.