Here's the schedule for the June Conference on Catholic Legal Thought to be hosted this year by the University of St. Thomas, in Minneapolis. Highlights:
Wednesday, June 13, 2007: Introductory Day on Catholic Social Thought, Through the Lens of the Ethics of Economic Life, by Daniel Finn, Dept of Economics & Department of Theology, St. John's University, Collegeville, MN
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Roundtable:Tensions in Arguments from Scientific and Theological Bases in Development of CLT Related to “Life” Issues – Stem Cell Research, Assisted Reproduction, Abortion, Contraception (Teresa S. Collett, University of St. Thomas School of Law; Sr. Marie Paul Lockerd, M.D., Religious Sisters of Mercy; O. Carter Snead, Notre Dame Law School; Paul J. Wojda, Unversity of St. Thomas Dept. of Theology, Catholic Studies Program; Moderator: Amy Uelmen, Fordham University)
Workshopping Book Project: "To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds: Rekindling the Spirit of Our Living Constitution," Michael Scaperlanda, University of Oklahoma College of Law
Spiritual Reflection Susan Stabile, St. John’s University School of Law
Friday, June 15, 2007
The challenges modern legal theories pose to traditional Catholic understanding of the law William T. Cavanaugh, University of St. Thomas Theology Dept.
Discussion of Chapter 1 (“The Myth of the State as Saviour”) of Cavanaugh’s Theopolitical Imagination Respondents: Patrick M. Brennan, Villanova University School of Law & Kevin P. Lee, Campbell University School of Law
Relating the encyclical Quas Primas to the ordering of the business world (Dennis Q. McInerny, Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary; Brian M. McCall, University of Oklahoma College of Law; Lyman P. Johnson, Washington & Lee School of Law)
If you need a pick-me-up today, there's a heartwarming story in our local paper about a struggling St. Paul Catholic high school that had announced three weeks ago that it was closing, but was rescued in a rather miraculous 3 week grassroots enrollment & fundraising effort.
In the 19 days since St. Agnes' pastor announced that the high school was in danger of closing because of shrinking enrollment and mounting debt, the school has gained 67 new students and raised $3 million. . . .
On April 20, school officials announced that the high school had piled up $1 million in debt, largely by subsidizing a shrinking student body that could not afford to pay the full tuition of about $7,000 annually. More than 80 percent of St. Agnes high school students receive some type of financial aid. And the number of students committed to coming back in the fall did not look good.
Our Vicar-General added these thoughts about the future of urban Catholic schools:
The Rev. Kevin McDonough, vicar general and moderator of the curia for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, said St. Agnes' troubles mirror those facing urban Catholic schools across the country. In 2003, St. Bernard's Catholic School -- another St. Paul parish -- faced closing its grade school until a fundraising drive raised more than $600,000.
"We have, in our urban schools, 1,147 kids this year who qualify for free or reduced lunch," he said. "Ten years ago, the number would have been 20 percent of that. A lot of families are choosing our schools because they want an education for their kids, but they can't afford the tuition."
To survive, McDonough said, urban Catholic schools must do what colleges did before them -- reach out to donors, seek endowments, envision a future less dependent on tuition. Three years ago, a group of urban pastors and principals helped form Friends of the Catholic Urban Schools (FOCUS) to work on joint fund-raising reaching income sources that might not give to an individual school. "People are trying to get upstream on poverty," he said. "There is a lot of sympathy for our story.
I actually had a much more positive reaction than Rob to the NYT article on the grass-roots efforts of parents of kids with Down Syndrome to educate doctors & genetic counselors on the reality of D.S. While the reporter did acknowledge the self-interest motivating parents, I thought she was rather forceful in articulating the larger questions, even daring to give credence to the suggestion that we might be talking about something "that can border on eugenics."
Their goal, parents say, is not to force anyone to take on the task of parenting a child with disabilities. Many participants in the ad-hoc movement describe themselves as pro-choice. Yet some see themselves as society’s first line of defense against a use of genetic technology that can border on eugenics.
“For me, it’s just faces disappearing,” said Nancy Iannone, of Turnersville, N.J., mother to four daughters, including one with Down syndrome. “It isn’t about abortion politics or religion, it’s a pure ethical question.”
But then, of course, there's this:
Genetic counselors, who often give test results to prospective parents, say they need to respect patients who may have already made up their minds to terminate their pregnancy. Suggesting that they read a flyer or spend a day with a family, they say, can unnecessarily complicate what is for many a painful and time-pressured decision.
Suggesting that they READ A FLYER might be an unnecessary complication????? Come on!! And why does the decision have to be time-pressured? Did I miss something? Have we enacted some time restrictions on abortions here in the U.S.? This decision is time-pressured mainly because of the pressure that genetic counselors and doctors put on their patients to make this "painful" decision quickly.
Now HERE's a great-sounding conference, brought to my attention by my colleague, Teresa Collett. An attempt to address the dearth of women in leadership positions? And it's in Rome . . . in June . . . Registration open until May 15.
From June 11-20, 2007, the Institute for Higher Studies on Women at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, in collaboration with the European University of Rome, will be presenting the summer course “Women’s Education and Leadership for a Better Society.”
Objective:To offer the elements necessary for fostering “feminine leadership” conducive to a society which promotes the dignity and integral development of every human being.
Program:The course consists of four seminars, which provide an international panorama of women’s reality and their opportunities to make a positive impact in their varied surroundings.
The MIT Workplace center just released a new report "Women Lawyers and Obstacles to Leadership" documenting the exodus of women from law firms and its effect on male/female partnership ratios in law firms in Massachusetts. From the summary:
Massachusetts law firms do not generally assume responsibility for the need of their lawyers to take time for their families. The result is an exodus of women from firm practice and an extremely low number of women among equity partners—the present ratio being 17% women, 83% men. These conclusions emerge from a recent report of two MIT Workplace Center surveys tracking the career paths of nearly 1000 women and men in Massachusetts firms over a five year period.
The specific findings of the surveys show that women and men enter law firms in essentially equal numbers but women leave firm practice at every pre-partner level at a far higher rate than men—more than 30% for women and less than 20% for men. The primary reason, far above all others, is the need for more time for family than the firms support. And this reason is borne out by what these women do when they leave. They do not opt out of the workforce. Nearly 80% move to workplaces that do allow the time they need, even if they are working fulltime.
The survey also shows the promise of reduced hours as a means of solving the time-squeeze problem. 47% of women with children practice part-time at some point, and those who do stay in their firms longer than women with children who work full-time. But the promise is unfulfilled because those who take part-time are likely to be penalized later. They are less likely to make partner than those who are able to stay full-time.
I haven't had a chance to read the whole report yet, but a Boston Globe article about it raised this concern:
The study echoes the findings of other recent major reports, but offers more detailed statistics and demographic data. It also aims to draw attention to the social consequences of this troubling exodus: As fewer women ascend to leadership positions in their firms, the pool of women qualified to become judges, law professors, business chiefs , and law firm managers is shrinking.
. . . For years, law firm leaders have insisted that as more women graduate from law school and enter private practice, the presence of women in leadership positions in the judiciary, in business, and in academia would grow correspondingly. But even though the gender gap in law firm hiring has been narrowing over the past decade, women are dropping off the partner track at alarming rates.
I think that is a valid point, generally, though I question whether that's true in academia. Doesn't staying in private practice long enough to make partner virtually disqualify you from a tenure-track position in most law schools? The way this same dilemna plays itself out in academia is the timing of the tenure track, and the paucity of part-time tenure track or options of pausing the tenure track, as I've argued and documented elsewhere.
But are the social consequences of the lack of women in leadership positions really all that adverse? Maybe we're all just better off if at least one spouse prioritizes her children over her career. As I've argued here before, though, and as I've argued elsewhere, too, I think there are very serious reasons to be concerned about the persistence of this imbalance.
MOJ reader Jonathan Watson had these thoughtful comments on the Campell essay on Burke v. Crow that I excerpted:
I think that Ms. Campbell's final statement does not draw a careful enough line among competing "free speech" doctrines. There is a certain minimal guarantee of free speech set forth in the Constitution. Aside from whether the current legal thought on that guarantee is overbroad or overly-restrictive, there is no guarantee set out that anyone need listen to what one says, respect the content of what one says, or even avoid saying that what one says is motivated by an impermissible set of norms. The guarantee only prevents the state, state-related actors, or even private actors, from taking certain actions against one in regard to what or how one engages in speech.
Where Ms. Campbell seems to be aiming, and what needs better definition, is the implications for the philosophical marketplace of ideas, the naked public square. C.S. Lewis described the issue as one of bulverism, where one need not argue that one's opponent is wrong - just assume that he is wrong, and then spend the rest of the time showing how he came to be wrong. What has occurred with Archbishop Burke, and to a greater or lesser extent, to any Christian apologist or thinker, is precisely this. The hows of our time include arguments by anyone who embodies or holds a normative set of commitments which purport to be simultaneously religiously informed and true for all of humanity. So, then, if such an individual's conclusion (cutting Medicare is wrong) agrees with secular conclusions, there is no need to reach the second part of Lewis's bulverism. However, if the individual's conclusion disagrees with secular thought (Sen. Kerry's position on abortion is wrong), then the individual is simply assumed to be wrong because of the religious commitment, without need for further definition or argument. This has serious implications not for the legal doctrine of free speech, but for the philosophical marketplace of ideas, and for society at large.
Colleen Carroll Campbell has an interesting essay at NRO online about the criticism of Bishop Burke's resignation from the foundation board of the Catholic children's hospital in St. Louis in reaction to their decision to feature Sheryl Crow (a very public advocate for abortion rights and embryonic stem cell research) at a fundraiser. Her closing paragraphs:
Many religious leaders have learned that they receive more flattering press if they focus their political pronouncements on the fight against poverty or global warming and avoid issues like abortion. Burke surely learned this lesson. The same critics who loudly told him to stay out of politics in 2004, when he criticized Sen. John Kerry’s views on abortion, voiced no such concern in 2005, when he protested Missouri’s Medicaid cuts.
Today’s religious leaders increasingly face a double standard when it comes to their public pronouncements: They can say what they want as long as they express politically correct views or stay mum on hot-button social issues. Where secular pundits and celebrities are given free reign to plead their case to the public, religious leaders are derided as theocrats for injecting religiously derived moral principles into political debates. This stifling of religious voices is intended to prevent religious conflicts in the public square. But it also prevents the most fundamental form of deliberation necessary to the functioning of a pluralistic democracy: honest debates about right and wrong, good and evil, truth and falsehood.
Burke’s resignation from the foundation board clarified how seriously the Catholic Church takes its teaching about the sanctity of human life from its earliest stages. That teaching may not be popular or politically correct, but Burke has the right to defend it. To vilify him for speaking out because he wears a bishop’s mitre is the epitome of religious intolerance. Such intolerance should frighten religious believers and free-speech defenders of all political persuasions.
From the trenches of tax law, here's the abstract of an article posted on SSRN by Paul Caron, entitled "When Does Life Begin for Tax Purposes?"
I have written before about what I call “tax myopia” - the tax law's failure to consider insights from other areas of law that would inform the tax debate. (Tax Myopia, 13 Va. Tax Rev. 517 (1994); http://ssrn.com/abstract=799007). One illustration of this theme is how the tax law has ignored insights from other areas of law on perhaps the dominant social issue of our time: when does human life begin? The question was addressed in two tax cases decided over 55 years ago, and then revisited recently.
Although Wilson v. Commissioner, 41 B.T.A. 456 (1940), refused to treat an unborn child as a person for purposes of the income tax dependency exemption, Faulkner v. Commissioner, 41 B.T.A. 875 (1940), treated as unborn child as a person for purposes of the gift tax annual exclusion. The Board of Tax Appeals justified the different results on the ground that the dependency exemption benefitted the parents while the annual exclusion benefitted the unborn child. In subsequent rulings, the Service has rejected this distinction and refused to treat unborn children as persons for both income tax and gift tax purposes. In Cassman v. United States, 31 Fed. Cl. 121 (1994), the Court of Federal Claims recently denied the dependency exemption for an unborn child but accepted the Board's facile distinction permitting unborn children to be treated as persons for tax purposes where they benefit from that treatment. Cassman thus perpetuates the schizophrenic state of the tax law in this area and ignores both basic tax principles and nontax considerations in addressing this pivotal issue.
Note the picture that accompanies the CNN website's story about the PBA decision. When I copied it to paste here, I noticed the gif title was "Story-SCOTUS-stormy."
Subtle, no?
UPDATE: MOJ reader Emily Friedman noted the sharply contrasting picture of the Supreme Court accompanying CCN's recent story about the decision in Massachusetts v. EPA:
Perhaps the sunny blue sky is intended to illustrate the effects of global warming?
Ashley K. Fernandes, an assistant professor of pediatrics and community health, has an opinion piece in the May issue of First Things commenting on India's recently-announced plans to open orphanages to take in and raise unwanted baby girls. He explains: "While both India and the world acknowledge that sex selection is a crisis of epic proportions, one that has already seriously tipped the gender balance to favor boys, the laws to ban the practice in India have so far been ineffective."
What I found almost breathtakingly refreshing about the article was the fearlessness with which the Indian government deals with those who would question the cost-effectiveness, the economic efficiency of this plan:
India’s orphanage plan is called the cradle scheme. According to Renuka Chowdhury, the minister of state for women and child development, it has already been funded in the coming national budget. Precise figures on cost and a time frame for set-up are lacking; nevertheless, it is a beautiful example of how—in a world that prizes stark efficiency, the supremacy of personal autonomy, and the purported “rationality of utilitarianism”—a country of a billion people can take a collective stand to protect the most vulnerable in its midst. India is by no means perfect; Chowdhury herself, obsessed with population control, once sought to ban women and men with more than two children from contesting Parliamentary and state elections. There are many more in India who see abortion as a solution to the country’s stifling population problem. But it nonetheless seems a significant step in the right direction.
The article quoted Chowdhury: “What we are saying to the people is have your children, don’t kill them. And if you don’t want a girl child, leave her to us.” When asked if setting up such a system of orphanages might encourage even more abandonment of baby girls, the minister replied: “It doesn’t matter. It is better than killing them.”
Although even pro-abortion academics and politicians in the United States would likely condemn sex-selective abortion as morally impermissible (although it is hard to see on what grounds, if abortion is a fundamental right), skeptics and cynics will still say that the cradle scheme is too ambitious, too optimistic, and too inefficient. Who will pay for all these children? Should a developing country waste its resources on babies who are unwanted anyway? What will be the social impact of hundreds of thousands of girls brought up by the state?
India has its simple answer: We don’t know. We don’t know for how long and how much we will be able to pay for this program (but we are committed to trying); we don’t know the impact of spending resources on unwanted babies (but we know it is not a waste); we don’t know the social implications of girls growing up under the care of Mother India (but it is better than killing them). India’s plan is a model of inefficiency—and simultaneously a valiant stand for the value of human life. . . . But the cradle scheme is an inefficiency in which we—and all humanity—can rejoice. It is an inefficiency for justice, an inefficiency for the sake of another.
