Tuesday, August 11, 2015
This morning, Professor Brian Leiter posted on the Law School Reports the 2015 ranking of American law schools by Scholarly Impact.
The complete ranking and narrative are available here.
In 2012 and again in 2015, I have shepherded the Scholarly Impact study, along with my librarian colleagues here at the University of St. Thomas, Valerie Aggerbeck, Nick Farris, and Megan McNevin, assisted by a team of students led by Maria Pitner. The preparation of the Scholarly Impact Ranking involves months of painstaking work identifying tenured faculty at law schools, performing citation counts (including sampling where necessary), double-checking and reconciling results, and calculating scores, scaling, and ranking.
Three years ago, through a series of posts here on Mirror of Justice, I offered several arguments as to why scholarly work and scholarly impact are especially important to Catholic legal education. Those points remain just as salient today.
The first argument, made here, was that a meaningfully Catholic law school must be an intellectually engaged law school, which is not possible without a faculty also engaged in the quintessential intellectual activity of scholarly research and writing.
My second point, made here, was that through scholarly excellence and law school scholarly prominence, we witness to society the vibrancy of intellectual discourse by persons of faith and counter the anti-intellectual stereotype often attaching to religiously-affiliated institutions, including law schools.
My third point, made here, was that, as Catholic Christians, we have are called to share the Gospel, both directly and indirectly. The central role of scholarly research in our academic vocation is affirmed by no less a Catholic authority than St. Pope John Paul II in the apostolic constitution for Catholic universities, Ex Code Ecclesiae: “The basic mission of a University is a continuous quest for truth through its research, and the preservation and communication of knowledge for the good of society.”
In sum, while we are called to teaching and service as well, we cannot fully participate as academics in the search for the truth without also contributing to the scholarly literature, which reaches audiences beyond the walls of our own institution and which is preserved in medium so that we can affect the scholarly discourse long after we have departed. It is a tremendous privilege – and a grave responsibility.
With respect to the 2015 updating of the Scholarly Impact Ranking, I may be forgiven here for highlighting certain results for schools at which members of the Mirror of Justice family teach:
The University of Notre Dame ranks in the top 25. Emory is ranked #27. The University of St. Thomas ranks in the top 40 (at #39) for Scholarly Impact -- almost 100 ranking levels above its relegation in the U.S. News ranking.
Below the fold, I've set out the top 40 ranking in a table:
Continue
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Tony Jones is an interesting blogger. He's a former leader in the "Emergent" movement among young evangelicals, a movement that one needs to understand in order to see where evangelicals are likely to head in the future. (That in turn should be a matter of interest to those asking the same questions concerning Catholicism.) Now Tony tends liberal more frequently, but he still has evangelical elements. (He has a new book out called Did God Kill Jesus?, grappling with the tough theological questions about the meaning of Jesus's Atonement.)
At any rate, Tony has a new post up on "Liberal Arrogance." It isn't, and isn't intended to be, an analytical review of this phenomenon. But it came into my inbox just as a bunch of other complaints and news stories about the same phenomenon arrived, some of them (like Tony's) complaints by people who themselves are mostly liberal. (See. e.g., Jonathan Haidt on Morning Joe today talking about political correctness on college campuses, in response to a recent Atlantic story about standup comics who run into this when they play college venues.)
"Liberal arrogance" is in danger of becoming like the weather (apologies to Mark Twain). Everyone talks about it, but no one does anything about it.
Monday, August 10, 2015
Thanks, Marc, for the interesting post. I too see a difference in trends between (1) excluding religious or private groups altogether from state-promoted social efforts and (2) subjecting them unyieldingly to conditions (e.g., nondiscrimination conditions) that may effectively exclude them. I think the former impulse--to exclude religious (or more generally private) groups as such has weakened over the last 30 years, with no reversal of that recently. Obama has mostly continued the Bush administration's effort to enlist faith-based groups in social services (and channeled additional funds to FBOs in the 2009-10 stimulus package); the contribution of those groups has been commended in the 2012 Democratic platform (see p. 15) and in speeches by both Barack and Michelle Obama.
But the second impulse above, to subject groups rigidly to accompanying conditions, has significantly strengthened in recent years. I think it's an open question how much of this is attributable to the gay-rights revolution, and how much to the broader establishmentarian idea that the state can and should make use of religions that are willing to conform fully to the state's norms. (As Marc suggests, the latter approach is one that separationists have warned against for a long time.)
Sunday, August 9, 2015
Here's an insightful post by Paul Horwitz on the Garnett, Inazu, McConnell essay. Paul introduces the post with a discussion about contemporary attitudes toward government's "insist[ence] that private organizations comply with its own sense of the good," and he claims that though many people continue to believe that such insistence is illegitimate, "the momentum" within the elite classes (or call them how you will) "is on the other side." I am always pleased when Paul shares at least some of my sensibilities.
One more thought connected to Paul's comment on these interesting matters. Tax exemption for private nonprofit organizations made a certain amount of sense when two conditions obtained: (1) the size of government, and the scope of its role in American social life, were a good deal smaller than they are today, thereby both necessitating and making space for the involvement of private nonprofit institutions for the support of civil society; and (2) the view that these private institutions could and should play an independent role in shaping civil society in accordance with their own senses of the political and moral good, senses that might diverge in important respects from the state's.
The conditions are mutually reinforcing and mutually dependent. As government becomes larger, both the need and the space for private institutions shrinks as does the perception that private institutions might actually have something of value to say in the way civic formation that is very different from what the state says. The "need" question is complex, because the breakdown of condition #1 would not necessarily mean that we would see fewer private institutions performing the sort of work that they had performed in the past. Indeed, the increase in the size and scope of the government's role might itself necessitate greater numbers of private institutions to help it fulfill its enlarged offices. But we should expect to see a sharp decline in private institutions engaged in civic formation whose values differed sharply from the government's. Whatever public/private arrangements endured after the fall of condition #1 could not continue to operate under the premises of condition #2. One might say that this is to be expected--indeed, it might be said to validate a hoary separationist rallying cry: if private institutions want to be in the business of performing civic functions, they ought to expect pressure to conform to the government's preferred views of the civic, political, and moral good. (A footnote: I’m always struck by how decidedly Protestant the theology supporting these kinds of separationist arguments seems.) All true, though one could offer in return that such increased pressure is not inevitable but the product of a historical contingency: the breakdown of the two conditions above.
Friday, August 7, 2015
Just noticed that Steubenville put up a presentation I gave there this past spring on human embodiedness and its consequences for women especially. I discuss gender theory, the reproductive asymmetry between men and women (and the feminist and Catholic responses), sexual economics, and finally, relying on MacIntrye and Eva Feder Kittay, why human vulnerability and dependency point to distinctive contributions of mothers and fathers. I prepared the paper thinking I'd be speaking to students with a background in philosophy, but most of the attendees were nurses and nursing students. I enjoyed trying to simplify the concepts on the fly...but it did make for a lengthier talk!
Ryan Anderson and I weigh in on the discussion launched by Rick Garnett, John Inazu, and Michael McConnell:
http://dailysignal.com/2015/08/06/4-reasons-we-must-protect-freedom-for-everyone-after-supreme-courts-marriage-ruling/
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2015/08/on-marriage-protect-freedom-for-all
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Here is a response from Robby and Ryan to the piece that I posted yesterday -- by Mike McConnell, John Inazu, and I -- on the First Amendment Defense Act. I encourage readers to check it out. I'll just say, for now, that my co-authors and I certainly agree that "religious freedom is a basic human right" and that "religious freedom is not just for groups we 'admire' and not just for groups that help 'the poor and oppressed.'" Our piece did not argue or suggest otherwise. (We had nothing to do with the title, which -- as Robby and Ryan point out -- unfortunately used the word "admire.")
I was very sorry to learn that Yale Law School Prof. Robert A. Burt ("Bo") passed away on August 3. Here is a bit from Yale's announcement (quoting Prof. Anthony Kronman):
"The range of Bo's interests and accomplishments is startling enough. But what is more amazing still is that all of his writings express Bo's unfaltering belief in the value of conversation, dialogue and the continuing struggle to find common ground, and an abiding suspicion of authoritarianism in all its forms, whether it be a doctor's imperious prescription, or the Supreme Court's deaf assertion of power, or even God's declaration that he need not explain himself to anyone at all."
Kronman continued, "Bo's humane resistance to the reliance on mere power and his insistence that every type of authority, human or divine, is an interactive achievement, is the theme of all his writings. It represents the enduring achievement of this noble human being. It is there in his work for all to see. Still, I miss the man himself, and count his friendship among the best things that have ever happened to me."
Bo was a gentle, thoughtful, caring, generous, and deeply good man. He was also my teacher, mentor, and friend. I learned so much from him and he shaped profoundly what I think of as my academic vocation. He set, and lived, a standard for teacher-scholars that I wish I could meet.
I first "met" Bo in the pages of Prof. Joseph Goldstein's strange, but fascinating and provocative, Criminal Law casebook , in which his brief in the Michigan case of Kaimowitz v. Michigan Department of Mental Health -- which involved experimental psychosurgery on a prisoner -- was excerpted. He became for me, over the course of many conversations, a few classes, and my reading of several of his books, including The Constitution in Conflict, a model and an always-welcome challenge. My first law-review article, 19 years ago, was inspired by him. Our last face-to-face conversation, during a visit by him to Notre Dame for a workshop, was about a chapter on Job in what became his fascinating political-theory work, In the Whirlwind: God and Humanity in Conflict.
The Yale Law School was fortunate, and many hundreds of YLS graduates are blessed, to have known, worked with, and learned from Robert Burt. May the memory of this righteous one be a blessing.
