Brainstorming about CST about Fordham

Amy Uelmen and Fordham's law school graciously hosted a "brainstorming" on Catholic Social Thought and the Law this past week.  Although I was only able to participate during one of the three days, it was great to see and talk with so many MOJ folks.  Thanks so much to Mike Scaperlanda, Alison Sulentic, Amy, and Lisa Schiltz for putting the event together.

The agenda for the sessions included (1) a crash course, provided by Fr. Ken Himes, on the basics and background of the Catholic Social Thought tradition; (2) a discussion about how to structure and teach "CST and the Law" classes; and (3) planning for a "CST and the Law" summer institute (or, "boot camp"), the point of which would be to provide law profs who are interested in, but perhaps new to the subject, with (1) and (2).

During the six hours I sat on the runway at JFK, I had plenty of time to mull over a few thoughts about the sessions, and the broader "CST and the Law" enterprise.  For starters, it seems to me that it is, and will remain, a challenge to deploy and teach "CST and the Law" in a way that avoids simply baptizing or anathamatizing certain policy outcomes or programs, and that does not excerpt, or cut-and-paste, from the tradition in a way that might line up comfortably with a particular scholar's views but might not be true to the tradition's premises, taken as a whole. 

Now, I've never taught a CST and Law course (though I will next year).  Still, it seems misguided to me to think that one could excise or skate over the marriage-and-family teachings and Evangelium vitae -- focusing instead on documents relating to, say, the economic order or political participation -- and not lose something.  We cannot really understand "subsidiarity" without thinking about the Church's understanding of marriage and family; we cannot really understand "human dignity" if we separate human dignity's implications in the realm of labor and welfare policy from its implications with respect to abortion and euthanasia; and so on.

It strikes me that another real challenge (for me, anyway) in teaching this material, in a way that is faithful and rigorous, is to carefully distinguish applications of principles, about which reasonable and faithful people can disagree, from the principles themselves and the premises on which they are grounded.  At the same time, I imagine all of us are sometimes tempted to deploy the "prudential judgment" in a way that protects policy outcomes we prefer, but that might still be in tension with the relevant writings and teachings.

Another challenge, I think, has to do with the nature of law, the vocation of lawyers, and the meaning of "the rule of law."  I can imagine wrestling, in a CST and the Law class, with the temptation to evaluate the big constitutional cases -- Roe v. Wade, for example, or the death-penalty cases, or cases about sovereign immunity and the Americans with Disabilities Act -- entirely in terms of the consonance between the policies promoted by the cases' outcomes and the principles of CST.  As I see it, though (and I know we've talked about this before), the rule of law is constitutive of the common good, and so a commitment to the rule of law is as thoroughly Catholic a commitment as one to subsidiarity and solidarity.

Finally, I came away thinking that a "CST and the Law" class should probably be constructed and taught more as a "Law and the Catholic Tradition" class.  I'm inclined to think that we cannot just start with Rerum novarum; the natural law tradition, the Church's sacramental vision and understanding of the person as both fallen and imago Dei, the Church's long experience of wrestling with the state and its claims, etc., all need to be a part of the course.

Thanks again to those who arranged this event.  I'd love to hear the thoughts of others who were there . . .