Mirror of Justice

Duncan on School Choice and Religious Freedom

Prof. Rick Duncan (Nebraska) has a new paper up called "Why School Choice Is Necessary for Religious Liberty and Freedom of Belief."  Amen!  Here's a bit:

Education is not value-free; indeed, it is value-laden. And in a country as divided as ours, we no longer share common values and common truths. We have competing versions of what is good, what is true, what is fair, what is just, what is morally good, and what is beautiful. Moreover, we are at odds over the most important question in life—whether God exists and whether His Word is relevant to a quality education.  And a one-size-fits-all K–12 curriculum cannot possibly serve all these competing versions of the good life. Although I think competition is always good for the quality and efficiency of any product or service, my argument in this Article is not about higher standardized test scores or better mastery of subjects and skills. My perspective is based on First Amendment values of freedom of religion, thought, and belief formation. In other words, I believe that school choice is necessary for religious liberty and for freedom of thought and belief. If religious and intellectual autonomy are to survive and thrive in a deeply divided, pluralistic nation such as ours, parents must be free to choose an appropriate education for their children, without having to sacrifice the benefit of public funding of education. To put it succinctly, educational funds should be directed to children and their parents, not to strictly secular government schools.

I tried to make a similar argument, a (long!) while back, in this paper, "The Right Questions about School Choice: Education, Religious Freedom, and the Common Good."  Time flies!

Mirror of Justice -- Twenty Years Ago

As Rick Garnett said in his post, we've reached the age of 20 for the Mirror of Justice. The anniversary provoked me to look back on some of the early messages from that period and reminded me that the hottest topic and source of strongest rhetoric of disagreement on posts in the initial months involved the forthcoming 2004 presidential election. Catholics troubled by the strong pro-abortion advocacy of Democratic Senator John Kerry argued he was disqualified from Catholic support. Others were troubled about the ongoing war in Iraq and contended that Catholics should withdraw support from President Bush based on the debacle about never-found weapons of mass destruction while thousands of innocent lives were lost.

In sum, as one writer put it to Mirror of Justice posters at the time, people were feeling rather "anguished" about the upcoming presidential election. Oh, how things change!

20 Years of Mirror of Justice

This weekend, the Mirror of Justice blog turned 20 years old.  Here is a link to our first post (authored not by me, as the link suggests, but by Mark Sargent):

Welcome to Mirror of Justice, a group blog created by a group of Catholic law professors interested in discovering how our Catholic perspective can inform our understanding of the law. Indeed, we ask whether the great wealth of the Catholic intellectual and moral tradition offers a basis for creating a distinctive Catholic legal theory- one distinct from both secular and other religious legal theories. Can Catholic moral theology, Catholic Social Thought and the Catholic natural law tradition offer insights that are both critical and constructive, and which can contribute to the dialogue within both the legal academy and the broader polity? In particular, we ask whether the profoundly counter-cultural elements in Catholicism offer a basis for rethinking the nature of law in our society. The phrase "Mirror of Justice" is one of the traditional appellations of Our Lady, and thus a fitting inspiration for this effort.

A few things about this blog and us:

1. The members of this blog group represent a broad spectrum of Catholic opinion, ranging from the "conservative" to the "liberal", to the extent that those terms make sense in the Catholic context. Some are politically conservative or libertarian, others are on the left politically. Some are highly orthodox on religious matters, some are in a more questioning relationship with the Magisterium on some issues, and with a broad view of the legitimate range of dissent within the Church. Some of us are "Commonweal Catholics"; others read and publish in First Things or Crisis. We are likely to disagree with each other as often as we agree. For more info about us, see the bios linked in the sidebar.

2. We all believe that faith-based discourse is entirely legitimate in the academy and in the public square, and that religious values need not be bracketed in academic or public conversation. We may differ on how such values should be expressed or considered in those conversations or in public decisionmaking.

3. This blog will not focus primarily on the classic constitutional questions of Church and State, although some of our members are interested in those questions and may post on them from time to time. We are more interested in tackiling the larger jurisprudential questions and in discussing how Catholic thought and belief should influence the way we think about corporate law, products liability or capital punishment or any other problem in or area of the law.

4, We are resolutely ecumenical about this blog. We do not want to converse only among ourselves or with other Catholics. We are eager to hear from those of other faith traditions or with no religious beliefs at all. We will post responses (at our editorial discretion, of course.) See "Contact Us" in the sidebar.

5. While this blog will be highly focused on our main topic, we may occasionally blog on other legal/theoretical matters, or on non-legal developments in Catholicism (or on baseball, the other church to which I belong.)

6. We will be linking to relevant papers by the bloggers in the sidebar. Comments welcome!

It is, I suppose, cringe-inducingly obvious to note that a lot has changed since February of 2004. (There were a lot of back-and-forth postings about the Bush v. Kerry election!) A fair bit of the conversation among law-types has migrated to Twitter, Substack, etc. And yet, blogs survive (and, in some well-known cases, continue to thrive). 

It continues to be my view -- as I tried to express in this very early post of mine, and in a lot of posts since -- that at the heart of any "Catholic legal theory" has to be the Christian proposal about moral anthropology, that is, about what it means and why it matters to be human.  As I said in this short essay, "persons" are "the point of the law."

Ad multos annos!

 

 

"Freedom, Moral Purpose, and Self-Limitation: The Enduring Wisdom of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn"

The Center for Law and the Human Person is delighted to host Professor Daniel Mahoney this coming Wednesday, February 7, from 5:15-6:15 in the Slowinski Courtroom of the Columbus School of Law. Professor Mahoney is the author most recently of "The Statesman as Thinker" and "The Idol of Our Age," as well as other insightful work in the history of political ideas. He is one of the world's foremost experts on the thought of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and what it has to tell us today. 

Please join us for his lecture, Freedom, Moral Purpose, and Self-Limitation: The Enduring Wisdom of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.