[USC Political Science professor Howard] Gillman believes that beginning in the 1960s, many conservative Catholics went into the legal profession "because they felt the constitutional jurisprudence of the country was not reflecting their values," particularly on abortion, funding for parochial schools and restrictions on religion in public places. "I think you're seeing the fruits of those efforts now," he said.Interesting. The article also notes that Justice William Brennan, the Court's last passionate liberal, was also Catholic. Liberals are missing something if they lose the sense that rights are real and substantial. As I listen to the attacks on Judge Alito, I hear, relentlessly expressed, the idea that law is political and judges are all ideologues who, given power, will work their will on us. Where are the passionate, Brennanesque liberals of yore, who really believed we have rights? Is that belief becoming solely a conservative notion ?
Bernard Dobranski, dean of Ave Maria School of Law, a Catholic institution founded in 2000 in Ann Arbor, Mich., said the number of highly qualified conservative Catholic lawyers is also a tribute to the strength of Catholic schools, the determination of immigrants to educate their children and a rich tradition of legal scholarship in the Catholic Church.
A hallmark of that tradition is the belief in "natural law," a basic set of moral principles that the church says is written in the hearts of all people and true for all societies. Though long out of favor in secular law schools, the natural law approach is resurgent among conservatives, Dobranski said.
Another reason for the prominence of Catholics in conservative legal circles is that many have graduated from Ivy League colleges and law schools. Attending those schools has practically been a prerequisite for the clerkships that launch high-flying legal careers.
Evangelical Protestants are also becoming more visible on Ivy League campuses and at top law schools. But, said Notre Dame's Bradley, "I do think that there is an important truth in saying that Catholics are the intellectual pillars of social conservatism. Compared to their political allies in that movement, Catholics are heirs to a richer intellectual tradition and . . . are more inclined to believe that reason supplies good grounds for the moral and political positions characteristic of social conservatism. Call it the 'natural law' thing."
७ नोव्हेंबर, २००५
"So many of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament are Catholics."
WaPo's Alan Cooperman explains why, in recent years, so many Catholics have been chosen for the Supreme Court. (Samuel Alito will be the fifth Catholic on the Court.)
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- provocative thought, probably quite true
HaloJones: Funny, but I've still got to emphasize that the notion of constitutional rights as real as things like tables is dying out. It should be what liberals think. The left position sees rights as political constructs. I am dismayed that the leftist position is becoming the norm among mainstream liberals.
Finding rights in the constitution is more difficult than making them up out of the thin air--basically, the way I view natural law. If you ask me, I tend to trust those that flatly say, "this is right (or wrong) because I know it is" rather than "this is right (or wrong) because of the following strained legal analysis...". The latter is usually a cover for the former.
Liberal jurisprudence is just not as easy to swallow, nor does it make for the same type of sound bite as, the conservative jurisprudence. I mean, it's easy to say "I'll follow the strict language of the Constitution" (even when we know that's hardly how it ever works). It's also difficult since the right has politicized the judiciary WAY before the left did by calling liberal judges activist judges, which is beyond ridiculous.
Frankly, I believe the next great liberal judge will be a legal realist and well-schooled in Law and Economics.
I've been saying since -- oh, perhaps the 2000 election -- that liberals need to embrace liberty or they are going to continue to get their asses kicked at the polls. In the ongoing public debate -- the one carried out on talk radio and over coffee, the language of liberty, especially individual liberty, has been usurped by the conservatives.
Jim: Yes, and I criticized those conservatives when they did that. Also, you can believe rights are permanent and still disagree with what other folks who thought rights were permanent thought those rights were.
I have always thought Catholics make the best lawyers. I was raised Catholic in the pre-liberal era. We didn't study the Bible much but instead memorized and analyzed all the various rules and regs for daily living memorialized in the catechism. We rigorously parsed the difference between mortal sins and venial sins (felonies and misdemeanors). How far could you go with your boyfriend before you hit mortal? If you ate a burger on Friday, confessed on Saturday, and died on Sunday, you would certainly go to heaven, according to the law.
It was a system of faith reduced to a very legalistic, reason-based scheme, and we were trained well. I wonder if the new generation of Catholics will change the pattern at all.
I think that patca has a very good point. One of the biggest things that I think that a lot of Protestants had with Catholicism was precisely that it was too legalistic. The idea that you could eat a burger on Friday, confess on Sat., and get to Heaven on Sun. is anathema (good Catholic term) to many Protestants who tend to believe in a totality of one's life being critical when it comes to Salvation. Think of it maybe as the difference between law and equity. Indeed, this, to some extent, was the debate that Martin Luther really got going - that the Catholic Church had gotten overly legal.
But don't forget the Jesuits here - the preeminent parsers of Catholic dogma, and educators of many of these Catholic lawyers.
The point on Jews is also valid. The problem of course is that the bulk of American Jews are still on the left - which is why the two Jewish Justices were appointed by Clinton. Indeed, we will probably soon find ourselves with a Court consisting of 5 Catholics, 2 Jews, and 2 Protestants, in a country that is still tokenly majority Protestant.
Let me add that this distinction between totality of one's life versus obeying set rules for Salvation is one reason that I don't see Fundamental Protestants catching up to the Catholics here. Just a different mindset, one that isn't as much a natural fit for the bench.
I'm not ready to write off liberals as not believing in rights are actual things, and not just relative to culture and time. I love reading Sarah Vowell, for instance, because like me, she's committed to the promise of our founding, that we are endowed by our creator with inalienable rights. I don't think it's necessary to agree on what "creator" means to appreciate that as a human, my rights to life, liberty, and teh pursuit of property, whoops, happiness, are my birthright.
I'm not a lawyer, my only background on law is a single Constitutional law course in undergrad school (poli sci major), and so I speak from the position of naive citizen. But I'm pretty sure the founders were deliberate in omitting women from the constitution and Bill of Rights (see the exchange of letters between Jane Adams and her husband during the Philadelphia convention), and someone already covered the omission of blacks (slave or free). So to believe that the rights themselves are concrete, and that our understanding of how rights work changes, makes sense to me. I wouldn't want to live under the original understanding of those documents, and yet I hold them sacred for the expansive view of human liberty that they introduced.
The liberal legal tradition lives on in Catholocism, so far as I can tell from my local law school, Loyola University in New Orleans. The school is known for emphasizing social justice, particularly with concern to poverty. I have friends who graduated from there, and all are flaming liberals. It may be that conservative Catholics dominate high ranks in the judicial world, but liberalism is alive and well in the world via nuns, priests, lay people and educators.
Good comments on Catholicism and Judaism...
BTW I'm not distinguishing liberal from conservative Catholic legal scholars here. I'm talking about Catholicism's unique approach to thinking about issues, not the issues themselves. And fundamental Protestantism is different--maybe a more emotive approach, or a personal relationship with God, not mediated by institutional law?
The post-Vatican II generation has not yet ripened into SCOTUS nominee material. And the Catholic social justice ethic seems more focused on a boots on the ground approach right now. It's too early to tell, but maybe some of the new generation will ultimately follow the judicial path.
Somross,
Electoral politics differs from scholarly work, though. Kennedy was charismatic. I don't think his appeal had much to do with the way he thought and analyzed.
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