Porter on Due Process

Notre Dame's Jean Porter has a good essay, "Protecting Individual Rights:  A Deeply Catholic Tradition (really)", in Commonweal.  Although I would probably quibble with some of her claims about nature and scope of the "Executive Power" which our Constitution vests in the President, the piece offers some very timely theological reflections on "due process" and its Christian pedigree.

I'm reminded, by the way, of an excellent conference, just held at St. Thomas, "The Relevance of Faith Traditions to Jurisprudence."  One of the presentations was by Judge Diamuid O'Scannlain, "Must a Faithful Judge Be A Faithless Judge," who discussed the very important, and -- as the debates surrounding recent judicial nominations revealed -- misunderstood, question whether a judge who takes her faith seriously, and integrates it into her vocation, will for that reason be a judge who subordinates the commands of the positive law to her understanding of morality and Church teaching.  As the Judge explained, there are very good, Catholic reasons for insisting, not that "morality is not relevant to civil law" but that "it is moral for judges to uphold the rule of law by not judging willfully."