Religion & Law

Last week at St. Thomas, the Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy convened a small conference of Catholic law professors to discuss the state of Catholic legal education, focusing in particular on whether there is a need to develop new curricular materials to foster conversations that are more likely to bring a Catholic understanding of law to the surface.  I was unable to participate in every session, but the conversations that I was a part of were fascinating, though challenging.  A few points on which there appeared to be widespread agreement:

• The group came up with a list of topics that students at every Catholic law school should learn about before graduation, grouped under the subject areas of human nature, human action, common life, and state and governance.  Existing materials in general do not do a good job teaching these concepts to students.

• There is probably not a large market for materials that would bring these concepts more centrally into the law school classroom.  Many of the professors who are interested in this sort of integration pull together materials on their own, though some are interested but don't know exactly how to go about finding helpful readings.  This might affect the form in which materials are ultimately provided -- e.g., hard copy or web-based.

• No one suggests that the existing casebooks should be tossed in favor of a new comprehensive set of "Catholic Torts" or "Catholic Contracts" casebooks.  In most of the courses, the bulk of the material should remain the same in Catholic and non-Catholic law schools.  Our students still need to pass the bar exam; it is more of a question of how to raise the bigger questions -- and start tracing some potential answers -- that often go unaddressed in a course.  

On some points, though, there was no consensus:

• Some participants envisioned a set of supplemental readings for a course like Torts that might, for example, address subjects like family-relationship immunities from the perspective of subsidiarity, or critique whether monetary damages as the sole remedy for harm is consistent with human dignity.  Other participants worried that the advocates of this approach were extrinsicists, leading students to think that the Catholic perspective is an add-on to specific topics, rather than inherent in the natural unfolding of reason seen over the course of our legal tradition.  (A personal note: I had never been called an extrinsicit before, at least not to my face, but my temper was kept in check by my confusion over what the word meant.  In the heat of the moment, I opted for the tried and true, "It takes one to know one" retort.  My own, post-dictionary-consulting reaction: if we can content ourselves with studying the legal tradition as an autonomous field, what is the purpose of a Catholic law school in the first place?  Is our Catholic identity only relevant in the classroom in a course like Jurisprudence, where the Catholic perspective arguably can be pervasive throughout the subject matter?)

• A related point: when we talk about curricular materials in Catholic legal education, should we be talking about Catholic or catholic?  That is, there are some good casebooks in Torts and Professional Responsibility, for example, that take seriously the moral and philosophical dimensions of law and legal practice.  Is that enough?  Does there need to be an encyclical thrown in to warrant the label "Catholic?"

There really was never a dull moment.  In the end, we agreed to begin work developing resources that provide students with "big picture," thematic overviews of different core subject areas from a Catholic perspective.  I have no doubt that the conversation will continue.  Other MoJers who attended (Patrick, Russ, Tom B., Lisa, Susan, Greg, Michael S.) can chime in to correct or supplement my observations.