Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Friday, February 6, 2004

Law and "Moral Anthropology"

By Rick Garnett

One of our shared goals for this blog is to -- in Mark's words -- "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). As my colleague John Coughlin has written, the "anthropological question" is both "perennial" and profound: "What does it mean to be a human being?” Rev. John J. Coughlin, Law and Theology: Reflections on What it Means to Be Human, 74 ST. JOHN’S LAW REVIEW 609, 609 (2000).

In one article of mine, "Christian Witness, Moral Anthropology, and the Death Penalty," 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?

Rick

Thursday, February 5, 2004

Conference on Religious Values and Corporate Decision-Making

By Amy Uelmen

Fordham Conference on Religious Values and Corporate Decision-Making
An Interfaith Interdisciplinary Conference for Corporate Executives and Counsel Monday February 23, 2004, 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM

Each year Fordham Law School’s Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer’s Work sponsors a conference to explore how religious values might inform a particular area of legal practice. This year the Institute has teamed up with the Fordham Economics Department and the Graduate School of Business Administration to explore the extent to which religious values may serve as a creative resource to help lawyers and corporate executives to sustain their commitment to professional integrity and social responsibility. Among other questions, it hopes to consider: What may be gained by bringing religious values to bear on corporate decision-making? What may be the concerns and pitfalls? Would current economic models allow room to bring religious values to bear on corporate decision-making? According to current standards of legal and business ethics, are lawyers and other professionals restricted in the ways in which they may bring religious values to bear on corporate decision-making? Are there viable models that illustrate how religious values might be integrated into corporate decision-making?

Of our blog group, speakers include Mark A. Sargent and Amy Uelmen. The keynote will be by Prof. Stefano Zamagni from the University of Bologna Economics Department, a key advisor on Centesimus Annus.

For a brochure and/or more information, contact Amy Uelmen, [email protected]

For online registration visit the Fordham Law School Website http://law.fordham.edu/cle.htm
(Approved for 5.5 CLE credit hours: Non-transitional; 3 ethics and 2.5 professional practice)

Wednesday, February 4, 2004

Fordham Program on Litigating Clergy Abuse

By Rick Garnett

This is a belated announcement of an interesting program at Fordham Law School's excellent Institute on Religion Law & Lawyer's Work on "Counseling, Litigation, and the Church: Room for Gospel Values?", next Monday, Feb.9 at 6pm at Fordham Law in NYC. The panelists are Rod MacLeish, one of the leading lawyers for survivors, Pat Schlitz of St Thomas (MN), who has been on the defense side and written some good stuff on the topic, and Mark Chopko, General Counsel of the UCSSB. For more info, contact the Institute's Executive Director, Amy Uelmen, one of our blog group (email in bio).

Tuesday, February 3, 2004

Conference on Catholic Social Thought and the Law 2004

By Rick Garnett

Many of the members of this blog group participated in a conference held at Villanova in October 2003 on the topic of "Catholic Social Thought and the Law." The papers from this conference will be published in Villanova's new interdisciplinary journal, the Journal of Catholic Social Thought. As the papers are edited, we will post some of them in our sidebar. Next year's conference (October 2004) will be on the meanings of subsidiarity for the law. Subsidiarity is a key concept in Catholic Social Thought and, interestingly, has both right and left interpretations. The right uses it to emphasize the importance of intermediary private institutions as means of restraining the power of the state; the left finds in it a basis for emphasizing the communitarian nature of those intermediary institutions (and urges state support for them). European Catholic Social Thought theorists have elaborated the concept far more than Americans. We hope to explore subsidiarity's implications in a variety of fields, and invite proposals for paper. Contact Mark Sargent at Villanova directly if interested.

Welcome

By Rick Garnett

Welcome to Mirror of Justice, a group blog created by a group of Catholic law professors interested in discovering how our Catholic perspective can inform our understanding of the law. Indeed, we ask whether the great wealth of the Catholic intellectual and moral tradition offers a basis for creating a distinctive Catholic legal theory- one distinct from both secular and other religious legal theories. Can Catholic moral theology, Catholic Social Thought and the Catholic natural law tradition offer insights that are both critical and constructive, and which can contribute to the dialogue within both the legal academy and the broader polity? In particular, we ask whether the profoundly counter-cultural elements in Catholicism offer a basis for rethinking the nature of law in our society. The phrase "Mirror of Justice" is one of the traditional appellations of Our Lady, and thus a fitting inspiration for this effort.

A few things about this blog and us:

1. The members of this blog group represent a broad spectrum of Catholic opinion, ranging from the "conservative" to the "liberal", to the extent that those terms make sense in the Catholic context. Some are politically conservative or libertarian, others are on the left politically. Some are highly orthodox on religious matters, some are in a more questioning relationship with the Magisterium on some issues, and with a broad view of the legitimate range of dissent within the Church. Some of us are "Commonweal Catholics"; others read and publish in First Things or Crisis. We are likely to disagree with each other as often as we agree. For more info about us, see the bios linked in the sidebar.

2. We all believe that faith-based discourse is entirely legitimate in the academy and in the public square, and that religious values need not be bracketed in academic or public conversation. We may differ on how such values should be expressed or considered in those conversations or in public decisionmaking.

3. This blog will not focus primarily on the classic constitutional questions of Church and State, although some of our members are interested in those questions and may post on them from time to time. We are more interested in tackiling the larger jurisprudential questions and in discussing how Catholic thought and belief should influence the way we think about corporate law, products liability or capital punishment or any other problem in or area of the law.

4, We are resolutely ecumenical about this blog. We do not want to converse only among ourselves or with other Catholics. We are eager to hear from those of other faith traditions or with no religious beliefs at all. We will post responses (at our editorial discretion, of course.) See "Contact Us" in the sidebar.

5. While this blog will be highly focused on our main topic, we may occasionally blog on other legal/theoretical matters, or on non-legal developments in Catholicism (or on baseball, the other church to which I belong.)

6. We will be linking to relevant papers by the bloggers in the sidebar. Comments welcome!

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