Preliminary Call for Articles -- The 2007 Conference on Catholic Social Thought and the Law.

I wanted to announce that the Fifth (mirabile dictu!) Conference on Catholic Social Thought and the Law will be held on September 21, 2007, sponsored by Villanova University School of Law and the Journal of Catholic Social Thought, and held at the Villanova Conference Center outside of Philadelphia.This year's topic will be "CST on the the Market, the State and the Law." The goal of this conference will be to shed some light on the never-ending battle over where CST stands on economic life, economic regulation and the virtues and deficiencies of the market. Those who have followed the MOJ debates on just wage, corporate law and globalization will remember the very different points of view among those of us working in the CST vineyard. This topic will, I think, bring to the fore the difficulties of translating the broad precepts of CST into specific policy and legal applications. Those difficulties, however, do not relegate CST to the airy realms of abstraction, leaving the tough questions to "prudential" resolution: If CST is to mean anything, it must somehow guide or constrain our choices in a serious way. In other words, we have to ask whether CST is broad enough to encompass the very different conceptions of economics, politics and law that have invoked its name. Our conference will be broadly interdisciplinary as usual, including law profs, economists, business ethicists, theologians and others. I will be posting a more formal call for articles shortly. The articles will be published in the JCST as usual. My colleague Mike Moreland will be joining me in organizing this and future conferences; feel free to contact either of us with questions, though we will be publicizing all the logistical details before too long.

           A note on last year's conference on the "The Meaning of the Preferential Option for the Poor for the Law:" The articles are all going through the editing process (some are finished) and we hope to publish that issue of the JCST by the end of the semester.

--Mark