Legal Commentary

I really appreciate the recent posts -- by Paul, Jason, and Gordon -- on religiously affiliated law schools and law schools' "missions" generally.  (For what it's worth, Paul's experience at the religiously affiliated law school at which he recently visited is -- whaddya know! -- very much like my own experience at Notre Dame Law School.)

A few months ago, Madisonian.net hosted a forum on law schools, and I contributed this post, on "institutional pluralism":

. . . 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.