The Role of Law Schools: A Reader Responds

I asked, a few days ago, "about the place of a law school in a university, particularly in a Catholic university that aspires to be 'great.'"  Here is a very interesting "take" -- to which I would welcome responses -- from an MOJ reader:

Apropos your question about the role of a law school in a great Catholic university, I'd have the following observations:

1. [Some other Catholic universities] decided that it was enough to have a law school that aped secular models and had nothing distinctively Catholic about it. . . .  They were content first to provide an avenue of social mobility for the children of the immigrant Church, and later to compete with purely secular law schools on purely secular terms for prestige.

2. This underestimated the importance of law in both public life and intellectual life in the US, where for many reasons it has played an unusually influential role. Law has almost always been the field (or crucible) in which conflicts over Catholic values and perspectives have been played out, from the 19th C battles over education and the status of the Church and Catholics in a hostile environment, to the current culture wars over abortion, sexuality, the family, the nature of the human person and bioethics. To the extent the Church (and the great Catholic university) wants to influence those debates -- or understand them for their own purposes -- there should be Catholic law schools. Also, to the extent the great Catholic university concieves of itself as a place where Catholics can talk to each other critically about the Church and its teachings, and as a countercultural force that can address society critically, it must be able to "talk law", because the focus of criticism will often be the law as an expression of values and a conception of the human person.

3. A great Catholic university thus must have a great Catholic law school: one with plenty of faculty grounded in the Tradition, convinced that their Catholic faith is relevant to the way they think about law, able to imagine connections across the spectrum of law and not just the law of Church and State and the obvious hot button issues such as abortion, and able to integrate their faith into their teaching and scholarship. . . .

4. A great Catholic university seeks to engage in the moral formation of its undergraduates, using the solid platform of Catholic faith and thought as a way of countering the moral skepticism, relativism and indifference that is the conventional ideology of higher ed today. That task is even more urgent in law (and other professional) schools where we are turning out people with great power and responsibilities and no moral touchstones other than a devotion to craft and their ambitions, restrained only by minimalist, rule-bound professional "ethics." Catholic law schools can have the moral framework and confidence to produce very different kinds of lawyers. The Catholic university that makes that happen is indeed doing something great.

5. The Catholic law school an make a Catholic university greater by providing a real (and not made up or forced) locus for genuinely interdisciplinary work. . . . Think of how . . . theological anthropology influences fundamental jurisprudence, moral theology influences the law of bioethics, and Catholic sociual thought influences understanding of everything from immigration law to corporate law. The Catholic law school can be where all olf these strains of Catholic thought can come together in imaginative ways.

Hope this is a helpful answer to your excellent question . . . .

Thoughts?

UPDATE:  Here is a reaction from "Midwestern Mugwump."