Mirror of Justice

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Kalscheur on Catholic Higher Education

MOJ-friend Greg Kalscheur, SJ (Boston College Law) has an insightful piece at Inside Higher Ed about the challenges facing Catholic universities:

For Christians, the dialogue between faith and culture is as old as their earliest efforts to articulate what it means to be a distinctive faith community. As the Christian way moved beyond its original Jewish communities, attracted Gentile converts, and spread across the Roman world and beyond, a Christian intellectual tradition developed, which was the product of a continuous dialogue between faith and cultures.

This dialogue reflected two essential characteristics of the Christian, and especially the Catholic, understanding of human experience: that faith necessarily seeks understanding, and that all intellectual inquiry leads eventually to questions of ultimacy that invite faith responses. As a result, reason has been intrinsic to the life of the Catholic Church, which sees the search for truth as a manifestation of the Creator. For the Catholic, thinking is part of believing, and the Catholic view sees no conflict among faith, knowledge, and reason; it looks to how they illuminate one another. The most probing questions in every discipline are never deemed to be in opposition to faith, but are welcomed into the conversation on the conviction that ongoing discovery of the intelligibility of the universe will reveal more of the truth about God.

Ten years after Ex Corde was formally adopted by U.S. Catholic bishops, Catholic colleges and universities today must meet the challenge to reaffirm and revitalize their engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition.

Saint Ambrose, Doctor of the Church (and Lawyer)

By Michael Moreland

Thomas More is, to my knowledge, the only common lawyer ever canonized by the Catholic Church, but a number of civil and canon lawyers have been. Today is the Feast of Saint Ambrose, one of the four great doctors of the early Church (along with Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great), who was trained in the law and an imperial governor under Valentinian before he was elected bishop of Milan by acclamation in 374 (Ambrose was a catechist at the time, so he was baptized and ordained bishop in the course of just a few days). In addition to his important contributions to Christian theology (particularly the refutation of Arianism) and music, he was also instrumental in the conversion of Augustine, who wrote that Ambrose "was one of those who speak the truth, and speak it well, judiciously, pointedly, and with beauty and power of expression" (On Christian Doctrine, IV.21).

Breen & Strang, "The Road Not Taken"

By Marc DeGirolami

Our own John Breen and Lee Strang have published an excellent piece, The Road Not Taken: Catholic Legal Education at the Middle of the Twentieth Century, in the American Journal of Legal History. Congratulations to them both on an informative and interesting article, which I was fortunate to see in draft. Unfortunately you need to have access to the journal to get the article, but maybe John and Lee will find a way to share it more broadly.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

A visit from Michael Paulsen

By Robert George

My students and I got a real treat today. The visitor in my undergraduate course on constitutional interpretation was the incomparable Michael Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas School of Law. He is the lead editor of the casebook we are using. He was in town to visit his son Luke, a sophomore at Princeton. We opened with a conversation about competing approaches to constitutional interpretation and ideas about the scope and limits of judicial power under the Constitution of the United States. Then we invited the students into the discussion, broadening the topics to include such issues as the purpose and meaning of various provisions of the 14th Amendment. Michael was sparkling, as anyone who knows him would have predicted he would be.

"School Choice is Social Justice Concern"

By Rick Garnett

Indeed, it is. A report from a recent conference at Catholic University.

OWS, lawyers, and Catholic legal education

By Rob Vischer

Should Occupy Wall Street protestors include lawyers in their list of grievances? Columbia Law prof Katherine Franke thinks so:

By and large, it's investment bankers who have been in the protesters' crosshairs, but the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstrations also offer an opportunity to consider what role lawyers may have played in the creation of these sophisticated financial instruments, enabling the overreaching decried on the OWS protesters' placards. Behind every credit default swap or short of subprime mortgage-backed assets sit legal counsel sanctioning these practices. The greed that has motivated bankers to sacrifice the public's interests for short-term personal gain has been made possible, in no small part, by the work of lawyers.

As far as remedies, she highlights what should be a strength for Catholic legal education:

As legal educators, we are reminded to teach our students that being a "good lawyer" must include the cultivation of responsible moral judgment. Implicit in the OWS protests is a condemnation of an approach to lawyering that regards all legal rules simply as the price of misconduct discounted by the probability of enforcement: Skirting too close to, if not over, the limits of law is seen as the cost of doing business, or as my colleagues trained in economics call it, "efficient breach."

I don't mean to suggest that the role of the corporate lawyer will always be clear, even from a Catholic perspective, or that corporations do not deserve top-notch legal representation from graduates of Catholic law schools. But if Catholic social teaching is going to have traction among our students, this is a key area for starting the conversation, even if we cannot prescribe -- or sometimes even discern -- easy answers.

Friday, December 2, 2011

Brennan and Moreland on the Current Condition of Religious Liberty

By Marc DeGirolami

Our colleagues and friends Patrick Brennan and Michael Moreland have an important response to Michael Kinsley's recent column. Besides the engagement with Kinsley, it seems to me that the piece by Patrick and Michael is useful as a concerning description of the present condition of religious liberty. Whether a constitutional free exercise jurisprudence left in a comparatively weak state is one less barrier against the aggravation of that condition is a difficult question about which thoughtful people disagree, but one perhaps worth asking, too.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

"Keeping Faith" interview with Shivaji Sondhi

By Robert George

Here is my interview on Hinduism with Princeton physicist Shivaji Sondhi in the Daily Princetonian's six-part series entitled "Keeping Faith."

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2011/12/01/29513/

Previous interviews were with political scientist Amaney Jamal (Islam), historian Harold James (Catholicism), and religious studies scholar Martha Himmelfarb (Judaism). The two remaining interviews will be with engineering professor Paul Cuff (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) and religious ethics scholar Eric Gregory (Protestant Christianity).

"Liberty's Refuge"

By Rick Garnett

I was delighted to receive today my copy of John Inazu's hot-of-the-presses book, "Liberty's Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly" (Yale). To quote one Paul Horwitz, "This is a splendid act of retrieval. . . . Thoughtfully argued, beautifully written, and drawing on a wealth of sources, Inazu's book is a valuable contribution to First Amendment law and theory."

Congrats, John!

Teaching & Understanding Vatican II

By Elizabeth Schiltz

UST's Theology department is hosting a conference in September on "Vatican II: Teaching and Understanding the Council after 50 Years." The call for papers asks for 300-word proposals by Jan. 30, 2012, on a range of topics that may be of interest to MOJ readers:

Much has changed in our Catholic schools, colleges, and universities in the fifty years since the opening of Vatican II on October 11, 1962. Catholics still make up a significant part of the student population but now they study alongside of students from many different faith traditions and non-believers. Theology and Religious Studies courses are still part of the core curriculum for undergraduates, but who teaches, how we teach, and even what we teach have all changed dramatically over the years. The Council has also influenced how we engage other academic disciplines. Students may be just as likely to encounter Catholic Social Teaching, for example, in their Business or Social Work courses as they would in their Theology courses. Changes such as these have set the stage for renewed discussion about teaching and understanding the Council in today’s world.

“Vatican II: Teaching and Understanding the Council after 50 Years” has three interrelated objectives. First, it will examine the effects of Vatican II in shaping the methods and content of our work as educators and scholars. Second, it will consider how theological reflection on the experiences of teaching since the Council has shaped our understanding of the event itself. Third, it will look more broadly at the role of Catholic colleges and universities in educating students to be agents of the proper development of human culture for “the good of the community and of the whole society” (Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes §59; see also John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae §32).