More on Baylor conference

The panel on justice in Jesuit legal education sparked a lively conversation earlier today.  John Breen laid out his argument that Jesuit legal education as currently practiced is a failure because Jesuit law schools rely on clinical opportunies as a fulfillment of their mission.  This is problematic, according to John, because justice in the clinic is something felt, not something thought.  Jesuit law schools need to offer students training in the Catholic intellectual foundations of the commitment to justice, and a required jurisprudence course would help fill the void.  John believes that currently Catholic identity is viewed as an additive to what a university already does, like icing on a cake.  Instead, the Catholic identity should be viewed as the air in the balloon, and this requires a more explicit and deliberate intellectual exploration of justice.

Greg Kalscheur, S.J. resisted John's characterization of Jesuit legal education as a failure, emphasizing that justice is a virtue, a quality of character that disposes us habitually to see the world in a certain way.  Adding a course to the curriculum will not make justice a reality for students.  While Greg welcomes a jurisprudence course (I think), he prefers a stronger commitment to push students to think deeply about the sort of people they will become as lawyers, which has a lot to do with the questions we ask them (or don't ask them).  For him, the pursuit of justice in our training of law students should focus on finding ways to relate to each other that are more open to recognizing the sacredness of the human being. 

Amy Uelmen, as moderator, echoed the emphasis on student formation; much of the problem, in her view, is the lack of personal/professional integration occuring in law schools.  In this regard, she sees the mission being advanced by a professor willing to model the integrated self to her students, even if she does not make religion an explicit part of that modeling.

Rob