Over at Prawfsblawg, there have been a number of interesting posts -- by Paul Horwitz, Jason Solomon, Gordon Smith, etc. -- about religiously affiliated law schools. MOJ-ers might want to weigh in, here or there. For my own part, I wrote:
this might not be the forum for thinking-out-loud about what a “Catholic law school” should be, what precisely should be its distinguishing features, etc. In my view, the project of building such a law school — an engaged, open, critical, and distinctively Catholic law school — is not an exercise in nostalgia, reaction, or retrieval. The project is, in my view, a new one.
It’s also, I think, an exciting and worthy one, and I’m inclined to think that it should be regarded as such by the legal academy generally, not just by co-religionists and the like. It is not just “not a bad thing”, it is a good thing, that there be distinctive law schools. Our commitments to diversity need not, and should not, lead us to insist on homogenization at the level of institutions. Quite the contrary — the same commitments that push us to respect and learn from diversity in many academic settings might also push us — and the AALS, and the ABA — to stay our hand from requiring that each institution look and act in precisely the same way.
Garvey fleshes out a number of reasons — reasons that I find persuasive — why we might think that institutional pluralism in the academy is a good thing. It seems to me that we ought not to resist, but instead should welcome, not only law schools that have focused on serving underserved populations, or law schools with a particular strength in a specific subject-matter area (for example, Lewis & Clark in environmental law), or even law schools with a particular animating point-of-view (Law & Economics at George Mason?), but also law schools that are distinctive in being meaningfully animated by a shared — even if contested — religious tradition.
Paul Horwitz's post, I think, is particularly thought-provoking. (Paul visited at Notre Dame law year.) He writes:
. . . I do mean to suggest that one of the great and perhaps underlooked qualities of the religiously affiliated law schools is a profound sense of shared mission that unifies faculty and students alike. That common cause can, in the best instances, be deeply tied to a questing intellect and a sense of underlying values, and can thus provide the kind of mystical marriage between practical skills, ethical values, and intellectual rigor that we keep hoping for in the best of our law schools. And none of it need be the kind of warmed-over bien-pensant liberalism that I see, somewhat over-simplistically, as the result of the usual attempts to mix values and intellect at the top secular law schools. . . .
Go over to Prawfs, and join the conversation!
