CST at Yale, Week 1

On Monday, we had our first CST class at Yale.  As I suspected, the students were almost (but not quite) exclusively active Catholics, including one ordained Jesuit priest (!).  (I had joked with my wife about one of the dangers of teaching at Yale being the risk of having students with doctorates in the subject you're trying to teach.  I had noticed in one of the Dean's letters that one of the second year students was a Jesuit, and I joked to my wife that he would probably end up in may class.  Sure enough...)  We spent a bit of time at the beginning of class talking about why it might make sense to study CST in a secular law school, as an intellectual (as opposed to devotional) endeavor.  One thing that came up was the dominance of law and economics analysis in the first year curriculum, and the perception by these Catholic students that the methodology of law and economics was both unsatisfying on some level and fundamentally inconsistent with their own moral commitments.  I think the hope was that studying CST might give them some alternative tools of legal analysis.

Being new to this blog, I'm wondering what others think of this point.  I for one find it the hegemony of law and economics in legal scholarship very frustrating.  That said, I struggle when I try to come up with better ways (particualrly in the absence of moral side-constraints) to think about how to make rational policy choices at the collective level.  This seems to me to be particularly relevant to discussions about the meaning of the "common good," which comes up over and over again in CST.  Clearly, the "common good" is not the same as "aggregate utility."  But, as Aquinas's discussion of the need for private ownership suggests, the two are not wholly unrelated either.  Is it appropriate to use utilitarian analysis as part of one's process of reasoning towards the common good, or does doing so inevitably involve adopting the morally problematic underpinnings of utilitarianism, which seem to me to be wholly inconsistent with a Catholic approach?