Monday, March 27, 2006
A city official tells an organization planning to hold a rally to "get out" of the city. The city's board of supervisors issues an official condemnation of the group, calling the rally an "act of provocation" that aims to "negatively influence" the city's politics.
Another public sighting of the Nazis? The KKK? Nope, an evangelical youth organization in San Francisco.
Rob
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Another highlight from the St. John's conference was the panel featuring my colleague Lisa Schiltz, Widener law prof Randy Lee, Pepperdine law prof (and ordained rabbi) Sam Levine, and MoJ's own Amy Uelmen. Lisa explored the work of John Paul II through the lens of feminism and dependency theory, particulary the work of Robin West and Alasdair MacIntyre. Noting John Paul's emphasis on the identity-furthering value of care to the caregiver, she suggested that a dependency-based theory of justice that incorporates his work will have important, even radical, implications for our treatment of women in the workplace (and contrary to the caricature, the implications are not that women should be pushed out of the workplace) and our understanding of disability rights. Amy pushed this theme further, relying on John Paul's teaching that the opportunity to love is a gift for the lover.
Randy Lee offered a thoughtful reflection on the difference between God's law, as the young Karol Wojtyla saw it in the lives of his Jewish neighbors, and man's law, as he experienced under the Nazi and communist regimes. One important distinction Randy drew out is that God's law, in embodying a transcendent human dignity, will be founded in significant part on meaningful human community. Sam Levine looked to the Hebrew scriptures relied on in John Paul's work to offer a thoughtful commentary on the relationship between mercy and justice.
For anyone interested in Catholic legal theory, this conference's papers are a must-read once they are published.
Rob
Friday, March 24, 2006
Today St. John's welcomed many MoJ-ers to its conference on the jurisprudential legacy of John Paul II. The opening panel explored several interesting themes, but one common inquiry was the extent to which John Paul modeled a publicly accessible mode of cultural engagement. Situating John Paul against the academic debates on religion's acceptability in public discourse, Greg Sisk emphasized the inseparable religious and political dimensions of the pontiff's prophetic ministry. Robert Araujo, S.J. linked John Paul's embrace of the rule of law with the inherently moral norms underlying international law's expansion beyond the rules of war and peace to a more sustained and aspirational peace-building effort. Rev. Gerald Twomey traced John Paul's evolving approach to the "preferential option for the poor" as evidence of John Paul's willingness to listen and learn from the real-world experiences of those with whom he came into contact.
The question-and-answer session was especially lively: Fordham philosophy prof Joseph Koterski, S.J. and Michael Perry sparred over whether John Paul's message of human dignity was accessible in purely philosophical terms (Koterski says yes; Perry, no), and the panelists offered various takes on whether Catholic social thought is more or less effective, powerful and authentic when its theological foundations (e.g., the Incarnation) are not brought to the surface when its concepts are brought to bear on society.
This synopsis does not even begin to capture the richness of the discussion; I encourage others to chime in with their own perspectives of the day. Other MoJers, including Amy Uelmen and Michael Scaperlanda, are on deck for tomorrow.
Rob
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
William F. Buckley responds to Cardinal Mahony's call to disobey the proposed immigration law:
Now the good cardinal, whose motives we must as a matter of Christian forbearance accept as humanitarian, has got to be sharply rebuked by the Conference of Bishops. Begin with the basic question: The writing of the law is a democratic exercise. To call for disobedience to the law is acceptable behavior when such law transgresses upon the city of God. The laws that called for the annihilation of the Jewish race violated the city of God. Proposed laws that would punish citizens who deliberately help to defeat or to circumvent immigration laws aren't inherently defiant of the prerogatives of a democratic community. Cardinal Mahony's contumacy has to be rejected for what it is, never mind what the Senate ends up doing in the matter of formulating fresh rules to enforce policies that have not been enforced.
President Bush endorsed the House bill and asks the Senate to act on it. He hardly understands himself to be rejecting the canon of Christian behavior toward our fellow men by making the point that free and independent societies have the right to prescribe immigration codes, and need especially to reject such distortions of Christian dogma and practice as invite the wrong kind of attention to appropriate divisions between church and state.
Rob
Cardinal Mahony responds to criticism of his earlier statement that he would encourage his priests to disobey a proposed immigration law:
Current law does not require social service agencies to obtain evidence of legal status before rendering aid, nor should it. Denying aid to a fellow human being violates a law with a higher authority than Congress — the law of God.
Rob
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Loyola (LA) law prof Robin Kar has posted his new article, The Deep Structure of Law and Morality, in which he argues that:
The structure of obligata is the deep structure of morality and law. This suggests that much of the legal literature - including familiar descriptive and normative accounts from law and economics scholars - have been presupposing a psychological picture that is deeply at odds with how we naturally think about obligation. Morality and law do not arise from, and could not be sustained only by, separable beliefs about the world and preferences for states of affairs. The challenge raised here runs deeper, however, than recent empirical work showing we deviate from instrumental rationality in numerous, systematic ways. Our capacities to reason instrumentally may not figure very centrally at all in our moral or legal practices, and we may necessarily misunderstand these normative phenomena if we keep trying to shoehorn them into that model. To understand morality and law, we must instead understand how our distinctive capacities to identify and respond appropriately to obligations function.
(HT: Solum)
Rob
In the current Weekly Standard, Allan Carlson argues that the GOP consistently favors big business over the traditional family.
Rob
Friday, March 17, 2006
In the new First Things, Wheaton College prof Alan Jacobs explores the Joshua Hochschild firing controversy. I hesitate to quote from it because the entire piece offers key insights for our ongoing conversation on Catholic identity and higher education, but here is his bottom line:
The Reformation may not be over, but many of the suspicions and hostilities that accompanied it should be. Wheaton could strike a great blow, not for insipid and vacuous “moral and religious influences,” but for true Christian unity, if it welcomed into its midst Josh Hochschild and other Catholic teacher-scholars who share his passion for Christian truth.
Rob
Jonathan Watson asks some good questions about my praise for the Harvard Lambda students who are, in my view, exercising their marketplace power to make firms accountable for the causes they take on. He asks:
Since the students in question are not hiring Ropes & Gray (and therefore, don't have marketplace power in that sense) do you mean that they are attempting to force Ropes & Gray to reconsider, or else be forced to do without members of the Lambda student organization? That makes no logical sense to me either, since they could simply refuse to interview or apply for positions with R&G. I am curious how you would use this incident to illustrate the need for lawyers to take moral responsibility for their professional decisions? How does this relate to "moral responsibility" versus informed moral responsibility, and (in light of Prof. Araujo's comments about R&G also doing work for Gay and Lesbian groups) irresponsible or illogical moral responsibility?
When I refer to marketplace power, I'm not simply talking about the decision by individual students to seek employment with a firm doing work to which they object. I'm talking about the persuasive power of students banding together to convince their classmates not to seek employment with such a firm. By contrast, if the students were seeking to have Harvard exclude Ropes & Gray from on-campus interviews entirely because of the firm's work for Catholic Charities, I would not consider that to be an exercise of marketplace power so much as shutting the marketplace down.
And to be clear, I believe that Lambda's targeting of Ropes & Gray is misguided in this context given the nature of the legal claims at stake, regardless of one's view on the merits of gay adoption. But the fact that R&G also represents gay and lesbian causes doesn't erase the moral dimension. If a firm agreed to help an anti-Christian employer find creative ways to get rid of Christian employees without incurring liability, I would find that representation objectionable (especially if the firm took it on as a pro bono matter) regardless of the firm's other socially beneficial representations.
And I do not mean to belittle the value of the access to the law afforded by lawyers, a clear benefit of the amoral lawyering paradigm. But we are far from the point where individuals and groups lack access due to the controversial moral nature of their causes (lack of access for financial reasons is another story); the more pressing problem is that lawyers are trained to believe that the moral nature of the cause is irrelevant to the representation. If a firm devoted its pro bono resources to bringing cases that would seek to expand the abortion license through envelope-pushing challenges to parental notification laws and other legislative restrictions, would a pro-life law student be justified in declining an interview with the firm? Of course. But would they also be justified in trying to bring their classmates' attention to the firm's allocation of its limited resources? Absolutely, and that's the exercise of marketplace power I applaud.
Rob
Via Amy Welborn, here's a report on efforts by Protestants in Northern Ireland to claim St. Patrick as their own:
The Protestant majority community in Northern Ireland is staking out as never before a claim to a share of the Patrician heritage. However, the result of this bid for diversity is, ironically, that perceptions of St Patrick are fundamentally changing and the religious dimension of his legacy is being weakened. Steadily his life is being unravelled and re-interpreted, and his reputation as a pastor and harbinger of Catholicism or Christianity in Ireland is being re-assessed. The entire character of St Patrick’s Day is increasingly secular.
Rob
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