Thursday, September 6, 2012
For all those going to the "meat market" next month:
Touro Law Center will be hosting the annual reception of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools at the AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference in Washington, DC. This year’s reception will be held on Thursday, October 11, 2012, from 7:30 to 9:00, in the Hoover Room of the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. All faculty candidates are invited to attend.
Thanks to Sam Levine (Touro) for the reminder!
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
This op-ed has a nice shout-out for recent and ongoing work, in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies and the U. of Chicago L. Rev., by Nicole Stelle Garnett and her co-author, Margaret Brinig, on the social-capital and neighborhood-health effects of Catholic schools (and Catholic-school closings). A bit from the op-ed:
A series of research articles by University of Notre Dame Professors Margaret Brinig and Nicole Garnet have laid out the case. In a paper summarizing their findings, "Catholic Schools, Urban Neighborhoods, and Education Reform" Brinig and Garnet used three decades of data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to evaluate the effect of a Catholic school closure on its neighborhood. They found -- even after controlling for other demographic variables that might predict decline -- that neighborhood social cohesion decreases and disorder increases in neighborhoods that have had a Catholic elementary school close. Last month an article about Brinig and Garnet's research, "Catholic Schools and Broken Windows," was published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. This research demonstrated that during a time of overall decline in crime, Catholic school closures slowed the rate of decline of crime as compared to beats without a Catholic school closure.
There remain many questions not answered by this research as to why inner-city Catholic schools might have this effect. However, the authors conclude that "...Catholic school closures are strongly linked with increased disorder, reduced neighborhood social cohesion, and eventually, serious crime." . . .
. . . at McGill (in Montreal), taught by Victor Muniz-Fraticelli, called "Church and State":
This course will trace the development of the idea of “church autonomy”—or, more properly, the autonomy of religious organizations—in Western political thought. It is divided into three parts. In the first part, we will explore the
emergence of the idea of libertas ecclesiae (freedom of the church) from the
waning days of the Roman Empire to its vigorous assertion in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, a period which culminates in the Concordat of Worms in the
Holy Roman Empire and the revocation of the Constitutions of Clarendon in Britain. In the second part we discuss the transformation of the idea of religious
freedom in the Early Modern Period, which saw the assertion of supremacy by the secular state over religious bodies and their reconception as
voluntary associations of individual citizens. Finally, in the third part, we
consider various current controversies where religious organizations
corporately assert rights to autonomy—including control of membership, property, and governance, exemption from generally applicable laws, and application of religious adjudicative norms—to determine whether the idea of libertas ecclesiae is descriptively useful or normatively desirable.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
I have a short piece in the new issue of Commonweal, called "Executive Overreach." It was solicited as part of a "what's important to think about, as the election approaches" series that the magazine is running. Here's a bit:
. . . Constitutionalism is about more than our particular charter’s text, the Supreme Court’s various decisions, or pieties about shared values and fundamental rights. It is an attachment to the enterprise of protecting human freedom and promoting the common good by structuring, separating, and limiting power in entrenched and enforceable ways. It is a mechanism for conferring power and authorizing action, a vehicle for governing and getting things done, but it’s also an embrace of constraints, processes, and forms, and a willingness to accept delays, inefficiencies, and frustrations as unavoidable costs, perhaps even benefits. In constitutional
government, how and by whom things are done is at least as important as what is
done and when, or how quickly. And this is why it is troubling, rather than
inspiring, to hear the president keep saying, “We can’t wait.”
This is not a partisan concern. Both parties have been guilty of overreach . . . .
This is not a Tea Party point, even if the Tea Party sometimes makes it. It is certainly not an endorsement of the constitutional provisions that once entrenched slavery or a denial that some others are anachronistic. Nor is it a defense of the various congressionally created, non-constitutional rules that sometimes make a mockery of the idea of structured deliberation by setting up a maze of holdouts, vetoes, and hostage taking.
Electoral majorities will sometimes reward those whose proclaimed or perceived energy and vision are too big for the rules and who promise to ignore or abolish procedures that—especially during times of deep political divisions—seem to deliver only delay and dead ends. And yet, as Chief Justice Warren Burger observed almost thirty years ago, “With all the obvious flaws of delay, untidiness, and potential for abuse, we have not yet found a better way to preserve freedom than by making the exercise of power subject to the carefully crafted restraints spelled out in the Constitution.” Those who designed the Constitution understood that political liberties are best served through competition and cooperation among plural authorities and jurisdictions, and through mechanisms that check, diffuse, and divide power. . . .
My friends and colleagues, Dan Philpott (Political Science) and Paolo Carozza (Law) have a great new paper out. Check it out (HT: Center for Law and Religion Forum):
In Pope Benedict XVI’s address to the Roman Curia of December 22, 2006, he made reference to the Catholic Church’s own journey toward embracing human rights and religious freedom. Perhaps surprisingly to some, he gave credit for this development to the Enlightenment, which he said could count human rights and religious freedom as its “true conquests.” More predictably to most, he reiterated his longstanding criticism of the Enlightenment’s attempt to ground these principles on positivist and skeptical foundations. He argued rather that a constructive synergy of faith and reason was the best foundation for tolerance, human rights, and the preservation of religious freedom.Benedict’s thesis points to an ambivalent historical relationship between the social teachings of the Catholic Church and modern political institutions based on human rights and democracy. It is in part a story of convergence. Gradually, over the course of the twentieth century, then far more rapidly beginning with the Second Vatican Council, following upon several centuries of consistent resistance to the momentum of European politics, the Church came to embrace norms of human rights and democracy reflective of those that appeared in international instruments like the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the constitutions of western democracies. As the term convergence—rather than accommodation or adaptation—suggests, the Church did not simply conform itself to what others had long before pioneered. True, as Benedict argues, a dialogue with the Enlightenment did beget Catholic evolution in certain dimensions of rights, especially religious freedom. But it is also the case, as we point out below, that the Church has articulated a tradition of rights since as early as the sixteenth century. For its own part, the state and the “international society” of states had to evolve, too. The sovereign states system signified by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 clearly evaded the accountability that human rights and democracy demand. The French Revolution and its liberal republican legatees in Europe and Latin America propounded a portfolio of rights, to be sure, but with prominent lacunae, particularly in the case of the religious freedom of the Catholic Church. Indeed, the Church’s own willingness to embrace religious freedom at Vatican II arose in part from the assurance that post–World War II Western European democracies as well as the US Constitution provided that the Church could be free under a liberal democratic constitution.
But the long rapprochement between the Church and modern norms of human rights and democracy is neither complete nor un-contested. After Vatican II, tensions between the Church and modern states and international institutions did not disappear; ongoing clashes included the Church’s complex confrontation with authoritarian states and its fracases with democracies over abortion, divorce, fetal research, euthanasia, war, and other issues, with the UN overpopulation policy, and with the European Union over Europe’s Christian identity and its policies on the family and sexuality.
This article argues that the Catholic Church’s relationship to human rights and democracy in the modern world can only be understood through both of the above dynamics: a historical convergence and the persistence of tension. The first half of the article argues for this dual theme in the doctrines of the Church, where today, as over the past several centuries, the Catholic conception of the common good yields both an embrace of human rights and democracy and a critique of their secular espousal. The second half of the article focuses on practice, showing how the Church’s efforts to advance its teachings on human rights and democracy sometimes succeed and sometimes encounter resistance, both on account of conceptual differences with modern states and international organizations as well as problems rooted in institutional realities. Doctrine and practice are not hermetically separable, but they are distinct enough for our analysis. Both realms, we argue, manifest historical convergence as well as ongoing ambivalence.
Monday, September 3, 2012
Read it lately? Here it is! St. Joseph, pray for us!
Glorious Saint Joseph, you are the pattern of all who work. Obtain
for me, please, the grace to work conscientiously and to put devotion to duty
before my selfish inclinations. Help me to labor in thankfulness and joy, for it
is an honor to employ and to develop by my labor the gifts I have received from
almighty God. Grant that I may work in orderliness, peace, moderation and
patience without shrinking from weariness and difficulties. I offer my fatigue
and perplexities as reparation for sin. I shall work, above all, with a pure
intention and with detachment from self, having always before my eyes the hour
of death and the accounting which I must then render of time ill-spent, of
talents unemployed, of good undone, and of empty pride in success, which is so
fatal to the work of God. For Jesus through Mary, all in imitation of you, good
Saint Joseph. This shall be my motto in life and in death. Amen.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
The Republicans are holding their convention, and the Democrats soon will. In November, there will be an election.
My reactions to and thoughts about these conventions, and this election, are shaped (I hope!) by my ongoing, work-in-progress effort to understand and live out better the call, challenge, and promise of the Gospel. In my view, given all the givens, at this particular time, the common good of all -- that is, the "sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily", conditions which include, inter alia, the rule of law, religious liberty, a sustainable economy, and a thriving civil society -- will be better (not perfectly, but better) served if Gov. Romney is elected (and so appoints federal judges, fills upper-level administrative positions, takes the lead in proposing a legislative agenda, "executes the laws", and so on), and if Republicans have a majority in the Senate, than if President Obama is re-elected, and the Democrats retain their majority in the Senate.
A whole lot of Catholic (and other) bloggers, writers, commentators, and public intellectuals will be, in great detail, arguing that this conclusion of mine is wrong, or explaining why this conclusion is right, in a wide variety of venues and outlets. I hate to miss out on the increased blog-traffic that usually comes with election season, but -- not out of disingenuous false modesty, and certainly not because I'm somehow serenely "above politics" -- I'm inclined to try to not say much more about or in defense it (i.e., this conclusion) here. The engaged and thoughtful people who read, or come across, this blog have probably reached their own conclusions, and are comfortable with them. Some will prioritize (a horrible word!) the issues that I tend to -- school choice, religious freedom, pluralism in the non-state sector, the selection of federal judges, abortion regulation -- and some will emphasize others (which I certainly agree are important).
The "Catholic Legal Theory" project -- the Mirror of Justice project -- is about more than answering the "for whom should we vote? and "which policies should we enact and enforce?" questions (thought these are, obviously, crucially important questions). It is also, and maybe more fundamentally, about the implications for the legal enterprise, and our understanding of what "law" is and is for, of the Christian proposition that every person is created, sustained, loved, and saved by God.
As I wrote in my first MOJ post (in February 2004):
One of our shared goals for this blog is to . . . "discover[] how our Catholic perspective can inform our understanding of the law." One line of inquiry that, in my view, is particularly promising -- and one that I know several of my colleagues have written and thought about -- involves working through the implications for legal questions of a Catholic "moral anthropology." By "moral anthropology," I mean an account of what it is about the human person that does the work in moral arguments about what we ought or ought not to do and about how we ought or ought not to be treated; I mean, in Pope John Paul II's words, the “moral truth about the human person."
The Psalmist asked, "Lord, what is man . . . that thou makest account of him?” (Ps. 143:3). This is not only a prayer, but a starting point for jurisprudential reflection. All moral problems are anthropological problems, because moral arguments are built, for the most part, on anthropological presuppositions. That is, as Professor Elshtain has put it, our attempts at moral judgment tend to reflect our “foundational assumptions about what it means to be human." Jean Bethke Elshtain, The Dignity of the Human Person and the Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries, 14 JOURNAL OF LAW AND RELIGION 53, 53 (1999-2000). . .
In one article of mine, "Christian Witness, Moral Anthropology, and the Death Penalty," here, I explore the implications for the death penalty of a Catholic anthropology, one that emphasizes our "creaturehood" more than, say, our "autonomy." And, my friend Steve Smith (University of San Diego) has an paper out that discusses what a "person as believer" anthropology might mean for our freedom-of-religion jurisprudence that fleshes out excellent article. I wonder if any of my colleagues have any thoughts on these matters?
Of course . . . who am I kidding? It's only a matter of time before a "Real Catholics love teacher-unions" or "President Obama is the pro-life candidate" post or piece will pull me back in, right? [Insert smiley-face emoticon here].
Notre Dame's Institute for Church Life publishes a wonderful quarterly, Church Life: A Journal for the New Evangelization. The latest issue is available here. This issue includes a variety of pieces united by the theme / topic of "rites of return." Also, here's the "call for papers" for the 2013 volume:
CHURCH LIFE: A JOURNAL FOR
THE NEW EVANGELIZATION
2013 ISSUE THEMES AND DEADLINES:
• Jesus Christ and Evangelization Manuscripts due November 16, 2012
• Catholic Education and Evangelization Manuscripts due February 15, 2013
• Preaching and Evangelization Manuscripts due May 17, 2013
• Culture and Evangelization Manuscripts due August 16, 2013
Manuscripts should be 2000 - 5000 words in length. Send to the editor, Timothy P. O’Malley, Ph.D.
[email protected]). For more detailed submission instructions, go to:http://liturgy.nd.edu/church-life-journal-for-the-new-evangelization/2013-themes/
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Monday, August 27, 2012
So suggested / noted / warned Bob Dylan (responding, perhaps, to Milton's Lucifer). I thought about Dylan's song during yesterday's First Reading:
Joshua gathered together all the tribes of Israel at Shechem,
summoning their elders, their leaders,
their judges, and their officers.
When they stood in ranks before God,
Joshua addressed all the people:
"If it does not please you to serve the LORD,
decide today whom you will serve,
the gods your fathers served beyond the River
or the gods of the Amorites in whose country you are now dwelling.
As for me and my household, we will serve the LORD."
But the people answered,
"Far be it from us to forsake the LORD
for the service of other gods.
For it was the LORD, our God,
who brought us and our fathers up out of the land of Egypt,
out of a state of slavery.
He performed those great miracles before our very eyes
and protected us along our entire journey
and among the peoples through whom we passed.
Therefore we also will serve the LORD, for he is our God."
Relatedly (maybe): The legal enterprise proceeds from certain premises and "serves" certain ends, for better or worse. That enterprise can be evaluated, it seems to me, in part by (i) evaluating those premises and ends, and (ii) evaluating how well the enterprise respects those premises and serves those ends, whether or not they are worthy of respect and service. It seems to me that part of the "Mirror of Justice" / "Catholic Legal Theory" project should be to remind . . . everyone that "thinking like a lawyer" should involve (i), as well as (ii).
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