"Catholic Social Thought and Legal Education"

On Saturday, I had the pleasure of joining a number of my fellow MOJ-ers at Villanova for the Joseph T. McCullen, Jr. Symposium on Catholic Social Thought and the Law.  It was a wonderful event.  At the same time, it was, for many of us, bittersweet, in that it reminded us of the leadership that our friend Mark Sargent provided, for many years as Villanova's dean, to those of interested in bringing the resources of the Catholic Social Tradition to law and legal scholarship.

I will not hope to summarize the whole conference, and I hope my colleagues who were there will share their own reactions.  I was particularly impressed with Dean Thomas Mengler's (St. Thomas) keynote, "Why Should a Catholic Law School Be Catholic?"  And, I thought Susan Stabile's remarks -- "Vocation, Formation, and the Next Generation" -- were particularly helpful, given that my new role as Associate Dean at Notre Dame has prompted me to think more about what we at a Catholic law school should mean by, and aspire to with, "formation."  John Breen and Lee Strang closed out the event with an interesting presentation of the early history of Catholic law schools, and suggested that these schools missed an opportunity, in the early-mid century, to develop a distinctive intellectual character and scholarly mission.  Their paper was, for me, a reminder that the current "Catholic Law School Project", in which many of us are engaged, is not reactionary or nostalgic; we are attempting something new and exciting.