"Law and the Catholic Social Tradition" at the University of Chicago

Yesterday, I finished teaching my seminar, "Law and the Catholic Social Tradition," at the University of Chicago.  (Here's an earlier post, which includes the syllabus.)  We met for 8 weeks, two hours each week.  The group was a bit large for a seminar (30 students), but the class still proceeded as a discussion, rather than a teacher-led lecture.  The students were a wonderfully diverse and engaged group -- Catholics and non-Catholics, religious believers and non-believers, liberals and conservative.

I enjoyed the experience immensely.  I thought that the "thematic" approach (rather than, say, a chronological examination of the leading encyclicals) worked well, as did the incorporation of disagreeing Catholic views (e.g., Sargent v. Bainbridge) but also the incorporation of standard legal materials and articles (e.g., the Ten Commandments case, Geoffrey Stone's op-ed on public moralism, an Andy Koppelman article on religious freedom, etc.). 

I hope, over the next few weeks, to post some short reflections by some of the students who took the course.  (If any of them are reading this:  "Thanks!").

If there was any one theme, it was, I think, "integration."