My recap of the Conference on Catholic Legal Thought prompted a reader (and practicing lawyer) to express his concern that our conversations may be too theoretical and too disconnected from the issues that matter to Catholic lawyers. Here's an excerpt of his email:
The disassociation between the world of academia and the world of practice is unfortunate, especially because the Catholic faith is a lived aesthetic experience, not something we just know intellectually. I think a lot of us who are actually practicing law want our friends in academia to do some thinking for us about how we can re-shape the practice of law in the U.S. to make it, as JPII says, "more human and more fraternal." At some level, this will have to go beyond theoretical discussions about the difference between JPII v. Benedict's view of natural law, and will need to involve a critique of the culture in which lawyers live and work, what impact that culture has on the law and the public's perception of the law, and the connection between the culture of law and justice. . . . Too much emphasis on engaging the "law" can make the needs of the human person secondary or even irrelevant, and can render CST just another academic form of analysis rather than a prophetic movement that seeks the liberation of the human person in his daily struggles and burdens.
He offered several examples of lines of inquiry that he would find helpful:
1. The structure of law firms - billable hours (Kaveny has addressed this a little bit), the commercialization of the practice of law, and the problem of over-specialization; lack of mentoring; the loneliness and competitiveness experienced by associates;
2. The connection between the problems in #1 and the huge tuition bills we have from law school that force, or appear to force, many students into big firms. Are Catholic law schools helping students to choose their professional paths wisely, or are Catholic law schools just complicit in promoting the dehumanizing aspects of lthe practice of law, with their own focus on rankings, prestige and endowed chairs?
3. The practice of American-style litigation and whether Catholics can/should participate in it (i.e. fomenting conflict in order to keep the billable clock running; overwhelming opponents who don't have deep pockets with filings and delay tactics that have nothing to do with achieving a just result; using the courts to resolve marriage issues - what does "winning" look like in a marriage dispute; etc).
4. What is a profession? Is the current legal profession actually a profession? Should it matter? Could a reinvigoration of the concept of "profession" help to change the practice of law and in what ways? 5. In what ways are lawyers participating in the healing work of God? Doctors and priests are seen, in many circles, as healers; why are lawyers seen as scoundrels? How does the concept of privilege work into our role as healers, etc.
These, to me, seem like very practical and very important issues that really affect practicing lawyers (and law students) and that also have a social impact (i.e. how we structure law firms affects how those in need of legal services experience lawyers, either as money-grubbers or servants; how we structure law schools affects how available and disposed students are to pursue careers focused on justice, rather than money; etc.). I would love to see academics tackle these issues in order to provide law students and practitioners with a new vision of what it means to be a lawyer.
In fairness, I think some of these areas have been explored by MoJ-ers and other Catholic law profs, but undoubtedly there is more work to be done. (An area that merits much more exploration, in my view, is the role of Catholic law schools in exacerbating or remedying the plight of the debt-laden law student.) The broader question -- whether Catholic legal thought is spending too much time on theory -- merits some discussion. One way I would explain it is this: our project, at least in the context of American law and lawyering, is relatively new. A significant amount of theoretical spade work is needed in order to make the practical implications authentically insightful, rather than just a dressed-up version of our own predispositions.
What do others think: has the Catholic legal thought project been too focused on theory?
I've just arrived in Rome, where I'll be spending the summer teaching at the joint University of St. Thomas/Villanova law school summer law program, after a wonderful but exhausting five days treking through Germany, showing my kids where I grew up. We spent the first couple of days with friends in Mainz, attending Mass at the beautiful baroque Church of St. Peter's, and admiring the astonishingly moving stained glass windows of Chagall at St. Stephen's. (After years of pleading, the pastor of St. Stephen's, Fr. Klaus Mayer -- himself of Catholic and Jewish heritage, convinced Chagall -- all of whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust -- to make these windows, as an expression of German-Jewish reconciliation. Chagall did them for free, but would NOT come and see them -- he would not visit Germany).
I am really not intending to write a travelogue, but you have to admit I kept the posting Catholic-related so far, didn't I? But I really did have a Catholic legal theory-related reason to post, namely the news of this extraordinary conference going on somewhere very close to where I am now sitting. It's a international conference of women religious working on stopping human trafficking and ministering to the victims of human trafficking. From the Pope's message for the opening of the conference, he said it was important to bring about "a renewed awareness of the inestimable value of life and an ever more courageous commitment to the defense of human rights and the overcoming of every type of abuse."
Some descriptions from the ZENIT report on this conference struck me as a poignant reminder of the significance of this problem, and the importance of addressing not simply the legal structures that allow this exploitative industry to continue, but also the human dimension -- ministering to the victims. The time and attention these women religious are devoting to this issue does seem to be to me, as Archbishop Veglio states, "prophetic."
In the Friday press conference presenting the conference, it was reported that 2.5 million people are affected by trafficking, which is a $150 billion business -- money that goes in the pockets of those who control the markets of prostitution, trafficking in organs, and forms of slavery that predominantly affect women and children.
In this context, Archbishop Vegliò affirmed, the Church has a role that is "not only important, but also prophetic."
He said that before all else, it is important to "know the factors that encourage and especially attract prostitution, and the strategies used by recruiters, traffickers, intermediaries and those who abuse the victims."
Then, in the commitment made by the religious to combat human trafficking, the Vatican official affirmed that personal and spiritual formation is needed, so that they know how to deal with difficult and broken lives that need to be reconstructed.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Over at First Things, Andrew Peach has written a beautiful reflection on fatherhood in the context of lamenting its demise. You should read the whole thing, but here's a snippet:
Faith in fatherhood, when such faith has existed, has always been faith in a tradition, which is to say faith in a communally and historically based institution that is wiser and more robust than any individual’s desires, whims, or considered judgments. Even before the children arrive and he is standing on the altar, the young father-in-the-making can hardly be said to be giving full consent to his marriage vows. The groom has little idea what he is getting himself into when he agrees to love his bride “for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health.” Legally speaking, no groom could ever satisfy the criterion of assent necessary for a binding contract; he only understands the content of the vows he has made long after he has uttered them.
To speak more metaphorically, what vowing spouses are doing is putting up a fence around themselves so that the seeds of the relationship will have the protection and space needed to grow. In a negative sense, they are barring the exits, but they are doing so because the positive goods to be attained—for them, their children, and society—are too good and often too unexpected to be entrusted to fleeting feelings of fidelity. As horse farmer and communitarian author Wendell Berry observes, marriage—like friendships, families, and neighborhoods—“is a form of bondage, and involved in our humanity is always the wish to escape. . . . But involved in our humanity also is the warning that we can escape only into loneliness and meaninglessness.”
Compare this to the essay by Jeff Redding that I posted a couple of days ago, in which the self-transcendence of marriage is dismissed as a "mausoleum" and marriage participants as being "held hostage." Now ask, which view is more firmly grounded in an authentic vision of human nature? The marginalization of marriage cannot help but marginalize the understanding of the human person as a social creature who is capable of -- and suited for -- relational commitments that are deeper and more foundational (to both personal identity and society) than those that are entered into based on readily discernible and calculable self-interest (especially to the extent that self-interest is equated with short-term gratification).
