AB INITIO - THE BIRTH OF A LAW SCHOOL

The study on the feasibility of opening a new law school recommended "that St. Thomas proceed with its plans to establish a law school provided it can muster the needed resources and remain[] faithful to the proposed mission." That "proposed mission," the body of the study made clear, is the mission of a "Catholic" law school. The study also said that the University of St. Thomas School of Law would succeed in attracting excellent students and faculty only as long as it remained "Catholic."

All of this was well and good, but, as the feasibility study itself recognized, defining what makes a law school "Catholic" is difficult. Many people attempt to define a Catholic law school in terms of its ownership or management. However, as Thomas Shaffer and other scholars have made clear, law schools founded, owned, and run by a church or religious order can still be secular in all things but name. Other people attempt to define a Catholic law school with reference to the percentage of faculty or students who are "practicing" or "serious" Catholics. Still others point to the presence on the faculty of priests or nuns, or to the fact that the law school employs a chaplain, or to the availability of liturgies and other religious ceremonies.

These and other attributes are indeed important. It is hard to imagine that a law school could be "Catholic" without at least a critical mass of Catholics on its faculty and in its student body — just as it would be hard to imagine that a law school could be "Jewish" or "Mormon" or "Islamic" without a critical mass of Jews, Mormons, or Muslims. But these attributes do not, by themselves, make a law school Catholic. Rather, a law school cannot be Catholic unless its intellectual mission — the very purpose of its teaching, scholarship, and service — is in some way unique.

The intellectual mission of a Catholic law school is distinguished from the intellectual mission of a secular law school by its devotion to the Catholic intellectual tradition — and, in particular, by its focus on the interaction of law and morality. As Margaret Steinfels has written, a Catholic law school provides "a locus for questioning, a framework of ordering inquiry, and standards for preferring some sets of ideas over others."

The purpose of a Catholic law school, like the purpose of a secular law school, is to search for truth. And, like a secular law school, a Catholic law school searches for truth through its teaching and research. But the search for truth in a Catholic law school is marked by two dimensions often absent from the search for truth in a secular law school: moral inquiry and enlightenment from Catholic social teaching. In its concentration on morality, and in the degree to which it is influenced by centuries of Catholic social thought, a Catholic law school differs markedly from its secular counterpart.

The Catholic law school is a place not only of reason, but also of faith. St. Augustine put it simply: "Understand so that you may believe; believe so that you may understand." A secular scholar seeks to discover truth as an end in itself; a Catholic scholar seeks to discover truth in order to know what God wants of us. A secular scholar seeks truth only in secular sources; a Catholic scholar also considers the wisdom of faith — and not only the wisdom reflected in Catholic faith, but in the beliefs of all religious traditions. In short, the raison d'etre of a Catholic law school — and the thing that most distinguishes it from a secular law school — is the integration of faith and reason.

Obviously, then, the faculty and students at a Catholic law school will go about researching contemporary legal and social dilemmas from a different perspective. A legal scholar at a Catholic law school will examine the same constitutions, statutes, regulations, treaties, judicial decisions, administrative rulings, and other sources of positive law as a legal scholar at a secular law school. And, in assessing the merits of those sources of positive law, a legal scholar at a Catholic law school will use some of the same analytical tools — e.g., textual analysis or assessment of economic consequences — that a secular scholar might use. But the scholarship of students and faculty at a Catholic law school will, to a much greater extent than the scholarship of those at a secular law school, focus on the morality of a statute or judicial opinion or other source of law. Is the law consistent with natural law? Does the law respect the sanctity of human life? Does the law recognize the dignity of every human person? Questions like these — questions that might be completely foreign to, say, the work of a law-and-economics scholar at a public university — are the very focus of the scholarship done at a Catholic law school.

The Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities states that the Catholic University should be "an ever more effective instrument of cultural progress for individuals as well as for society. Included among its research activities, therefore, will be a study of serious contemporary problems in areas such as the dignity of human life, the promotion of justice for all, the quality of personal and family life, the protection of nature, the search for peace and political stability, a more just sharing in the world's resources, and a new economic and political order." Without question, many scholars at many secular law schools pursue some or all of these topics. But the pursuit of these topics is the very reason that a Catholic law school exists.

Let me conclude on this note: To be truly Catholic, a law school must be both "Catholic" and "catholic." Just as a secular law school is impaired when it refuses to consider faith-based sources of wisdom, a Catholic law school would be impaired if it refused to consider sources of wisdom based in other faiths. Likewise, a Catholic law school cannot succeed in its mission — nor be taken seriously by the outside world — unless its faculty and student body reflect the diversity of God's creation. St. Thomas will warmly welcome faculty and students who are committed to its mission, even if those faculty and students are not themselves Catholic. The work of the Catholics at St. Thomas will only be strengthened by the presence of people of other faiths. And St. Thomas will strive as hard as any secular school for diversity — and not just for racial, ethnic, and gender diversity, but for intellectual diversity as well. If we are successful, St. Thomas will be a law school that is both great and Catholic.

David T. Link
Dean
University of St. Thomas School of Law

posted August 7, 2000

For more information please contact:

University of St. Thomas School of Law
MPL 440
1000 LaSalle Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55403

E-mail: Lawschool@stthomas.edu
Web: http://www.stthomas.edu/lawschool

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Discussion

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