John T. Noonan, Jr.
United States Circuit Judge
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
John Noonan has served on the Ninth Circuit Court since 1986. Prior to
his appointment by Ronald Reagan, he was a law professor at the University
of California at Berkeley and the University of Notre Dame. He has a long
and distinguished history of public service and served on the staff of
the National Security Council during the Eisenhower administration. His
published writings revolve around the relation between religion and government
and include a number of magisterial studies of the history of moral thought--most
notably, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury and Contraception: A History
of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists. His most
recent works are The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience
of Religious Freedom, The Believer and the Powers that Are:
Cases, History, and Other Data Bearing on the Relation of Religion and
Government, Narrowing the Nation's Power: The Supreme Court Sides with the States and A Church that Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching. He has a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic
University of America, and, in 1995, received the Aquinas Medal from the
American Catholic Philosophical Association. He has been a member of the
editorial boards of the American Journal of Jurisprudence, the
Human Life Review, the Law and Society Review, and the
Harvard Law Review.
Judge Noonan joined the Center during his tenure as a visiting professor at the Notre Dame Law School as a Visiting Research Fellow. He gave a plenary presentation at the Center's "Culture of Death" conference in October 2000. In 1998, he delivered the J. Philip Clarke Family Lecture on Medical Ethics for the annual Notre Dame Medical Ethics Conference.
