I spent this past Friday and Saturday with an exceptionally congenial group of scholars, at a symposium the Murphy Institute co-sponsored with the Center for Thomas More Studies at the University of Dallas. Under the extremely able guidance of the Center's Director, Dr. Gerard Wegemer, and two of its Fellows, David Oakley and Louis Karlin, we read and discussed portions of More's Utopia, Richard III, Tyrannicide, documents about his trial, and various letters, including the Dialogue on Conscience. Participants included a number of fellow MOJ-ers (Marc DeGirolami, the Michaels Moreland & Scaperlanda, Tom Berg, and Susan Stabile), as well as other legal scholars from here and abroad.
I had always admired More for the courage of his witness, but never read his work. Reading such a wide swath of his work under such informed guidance was a revelation. We were challenged to think about More's actions and his writings as lawyers, not just scholars -- a rich exercise for bringing to life both the stakes and the contemporary relevance of his actions and his words (and his silences). Wegemer, Oakley, and Karlin are all contributors to a valuable new resource for anyone who might want to use More as the subject of any law school class: Thomas More's Trial by Jury: A Procedural and Legal Review with a Collection of Documents. (The volume also includes contributions from two of the other participants in our symposium, Sir Michael Tugendhut, Justice of the Queen's Bench, and Richard Helmholtz.)
But the symposium certainly helped me appreciate that More's writings deserve attention for more than just the lessons of conscience and principle on display in his trial. Some of our criminal law professors at the symposium were struck by how effective Raphael Hytholoday's account of his conversation with Cardinal Morton on how to properly punish thieves (in Book I of Utopia) might be in teaching theories of punishment in a criminal law class.
One of the pieces I personally found most intriguing is from the Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, an essay entitled On Private Property, Riches, and Poverty, in which More attempts to sort through some of Jesus' most challenging charges: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple" (Lk 14:26) and: "whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple" (Lk 14:33). In the essay More (as is typical for him) teases out the many complex layers of the practical implications of what those charges might mean for us. In our symposium, Steve Smith made the point that More's analysis might be a helpful contribution in many of our contemporary political debates, such as immigration. I agree. It seems to me that More's work might be a helpful supplement to some arguments typically made in terms of subsidiarity, the preferential option for the poor, or Aquinas' 'order of charity'.
More writes, for example: ". . . though I am obliged to meet in some way the needs of every kind of person, whether friend or foe, Christian or heathen, my obligation is not the same toward every person, nor toward any one person in every situation. A difference in circumstances greatly affects the matter. . . . Those are ours who belong to our charge either by nature, by law, or by some commandment of God. . . . Once God has by such chance sent [some stranger in need] to me, and has matched me with him, I consider myself definitely responsible for him until I can be rightly and decently, without any risk to his life, discharged of that responsibility. . . . [On the other hand] as much as God and nature both bind me to the sustenance of my own father, his need may be so little (though it is something), and a stranger's need so great, their needs may be so unequal, that both nature and God would have me releive that urgent necessity of a stanger -- even if it's an enemy of mine and God's too . . . -- before releiving a little need that is unlikely to do great harm to my father and my mother too."
I highly recommend the resources of the Center for Thomas More Studies -- both on their website and in on their staff -- for anyone interested in studying this great saint.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
My colleague, Teresa Collett, wrote
this powerful op ed for our local paper laying out why Kermit Gosnell could not be prosecuted in the state of Minnesota.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
As the academic year winds down, many of us academics and scholars are engaged right now intensively in either grading or writing. I just finished grading a group of final papers from my Consumer Law students. I was, as usual, pleased by some of the excellent, elegant writing that I saw, but frustrated by some of the writing that showed signs of the cut-and-paste-from-electronic-sources-and-hope-the-structure-will-be-evident approach that seems to characterize a lot of writing these days. (And not just student writing. This is a frequent complaint I hear from my husband, a judge who increasingly encounters this in court filings.)
I'm also working intensely on some of my own writing, and I find myself this morning at my computer, surrounded by piles of note cards covered with my handwritten scribbles, organized into piles that correspond to the themes I want to address in my paper. The process of scribbling out those note cards while I research something is never efficient. It always takes much more time to get through books when I'm taking these sorts of notes than it would be if I just read the book & tagged important sections with sticky tabs, or even if I typed the 'important quotes' directly onto my computer. I often think there must be a quicker way to do some of this, but I can't bring myself to work any other way when I'm really trying to think something through.
This morning, I read a book review in the Chronicle of Higher Education that I think will ease my mind about this process, and explain why I was so happy to drive my 12-year old daughter to Target to buy her some more note cards that she wanted to use for studying. It was a review of a new book by Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting. Robert Bliwise, the reviewer, explains:
Hensher's overarching idea is that we're at a cultural tipping point:
This is "a moment when, it seems, handwriting is about to vanish from
our lives altogether," he writes. He wonders whether that vanishing act
will point to a more profound phenomenon. "Is anything going to be lost
apart from the habit of writing with pen on paper? Will some part of our
humanity, as we have always understood it, disappear as well?"
I haven't read the book yet, but the review focuses mostly on Hensher's concern that what will disappear is all the signals about the individuality of the hand-writer -- in Catholic terms, perhaps, the aspect of the words that reveals the human person behind the ideas. I wonder, though, if the transition to an all-mechanical world of writing might also carry some cost in terms of the content of the writing itself. Bliwise writes:
Hensher says his creative-writing students increasingly resist the idea
of the handwritten journal and the practice of taking notes by hand.
Handwriting, he suggests, slows us down, and we can't think deeply
without slowing down. The very best students are "the ones who take out a
piece of paper and a pen" in the classroom—the ones who "write down the
things that they think are interesting as you talk, making sense of it
as they go."
If all op-ed authors had to hand write their opinions before they could be published, if T.V. and radio pundits had to hand write their thoughts before reading them on air, if all bloggers had to hand write their posts before posting, might that positively influence what is commonly seen as the 'cheapening' of public discourse? ( ..... I write, on-line, mechanically, without having put pen or pencil to paper myself yet today...)
