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Professor
Vincent Rougeau
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Notre
Dame Law School is distinctive among nationally regarded
law schools because of the School's and the University's
Catholic heritage and mission. A select group of law
faculty describe, from their perspectives, the distinctive
qualities of a Notre Dame legal education.
"As
a Notre Dame law student in the 1980s, I experienced
first-hand the cooperative and nurturing environment
that Notre Dame Law School offers. Many of my professors,
some of whom are now my colleagues, taught me much more
than the law as they ably combined their professional
careers, personal lives and religious beliefs, and encouraged
us by word and example to do the same. Serving as a
faculty member offers me a unique opportunity to combine
my chosen profession with my religious beliefs and to
contribute to a community that has enriched my life
in so many ways. I hope that I can encourage future
generations of law students to grow in faith and knowledge
during their time at Notre Dame Law School. Whether
in or out of the classroom, I strive to challenge these
Notre Dame lawyers to keep a healthy balance among their
careers, family and faith, and to use their legal training
to serve others."
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Professor
Matthew Barrett
"Notre
Dame Law School aims high. It strives continually to
be a premiere Catholic law school. It is a community
of faith and friendship, engaged in critical inquiry
and reflection about law and justice. It is a school
with a sense of mission, one that animates our work,
our study, and our hopes for the future. It is a place
where a life in the law is held up as more than a job,
but as a vocation; a place where the study of law involves
the formation of character as much as the absorption
of data and memorization of rules; a place where the
person you become matters as much as the jargon you
retain. Our goal is not only that you graduate, and
go on to do good work, but also that you succeed in
the much harder task of integrating work, family, community,
faith, passion, and soul.
As
a member of the faculty, I consider myself blessed with
the chance to share in the task of teaching, forming,
and encouraging "a different kind of lawyer."
Supported by my colleagues and students, I try through
my work to engage and challenge the academy; to make
more accessible to others the riches of the Catholic
intellectual, moral, and legal traditions; and to speak
in a (sometimes) counter-cultural voice-a voice that
affirms the dignity of the human person, the complementary
relation between faith and reason, and a vision of lawyering
rooted in vocation, intellectual rigor, and service.
Notre Dame is a wonderful place-indeed, it may be the
only place-to pursue these goals.
Now,
why might this vision, and these aspirations, appeal
to students considering a life in the law? Let me suggest,
briefly, three answers:
First-ND's
Catholic identity fosters a degree of intellectual freedom
that is, sadly, lacking at many other nationally regarded
law schools. That is, it is precisely because we are,
among other things, a community of faith, that those
"big questions" about Truth and Justice-questions
that are too often "pushed off the table"
elsewhere-are welcome here. Religious commitment also
is welcome. Our students are not told to "bracket"
or leave at home their faith; at Notre Dame, the whole
person is welcome. Now, none of this is to say that
the Law School is a seminary (it isn't), or to suggest
for a moment that only Catholic, or Christian, or religious
students are welcome (far from it). Instead, the point
is simply that if your faith is important to you, Notre
Dame Law School will not ask you to pretend that it's
not.
Second,
I believe that we can all be encouraged here, in our
study of the law, by this community's commitment to
the belief that law is a worthy enterprise, one that
is blessed and loved by God. It means a lot, I think,
when you're pulling yet another all-nighter, to know
that law, if it's done right, is not merely "interesting,"
"useful," or lucrative. It reflects, after
all, the creative activity of the Mind of God. A life
in the law offers the chance to participate in this
creative activity through the pursuit of justice and
the common good.
Third, Notre Dame's mission, and its rootedness in the
Catholic tradition, provides a basis for us to evaluate
our laws and the work of lawyers. We have a foundation-something
besides mere utility, efficiency, or social control
- for our criticisms. When we invoke notions like "justice,"
"freedom," and "human dignity" (terms
that too often suffer from sloppy and uncritical use),
we can know that we are building on the work of centuries.
It
has been an honor and a joy for me to teach, work, and
think here at Notre Dame for the past three years. Just
a few years ago, practicing law in Washington, D.C.,
I am not sure I could have imagined doing what I now
do; today, I have a hard time imagining doing anything
else."
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Professor
Richard Garnett
"When
I was a college sophomore, I took a course called "Christian
Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems." We wrestled
with issues like abortion, euthanasia, and war and peace.
I was captured by the discipline of ethics, because
it calls those who study it both to great precision
of thought and to greatness of heart, a willingness
to put oneself in the shoes of other persons, particularly
those who are suffering. I also began thinking about
the law, because it didn't seem to be enough to come
to some sort of tentative conclusion about any of these
issues in the abstract, it was necessary to figure out
what to do about them concretely, in our complex, pluralistic
society. That involved thinking about legislatures and
courts.
So
I went at Yale, trying to integrate the study of law
and morality, by getting a Ph.D. in ethics and a J.D.
I clerked for Judge John T. Noonan, who embodied my
hope that law, morality, and religion could be integrated
in one's intellectual life. But I still didn't know
whether there was a place for me once I was done my
training-- a place where I could bring these fields
together, contributing to and drawing upon the work
of other scholars. I feared that I would have to choose:
I could be a lawyer or I could be a moralist, but I
could not be both at once.
I
was practicing health care law in Boston, not on the
academic market yet, when Bob Blakey called me out of
the blue and asked me to interview at Notre Dame. And
so I did. I got the job. I came. And in my six years
here, I have found more support than I ever could have
dreamed of. I cannot imagine a law school more concerned
to integrate, at every level, ethical and religious
concerns into the training of students who will one
day become members of one of the most powerful professions
in this country. I cannot imagine a university more
open to interdisciplinary work of the sort that I am
trying to pursue. Most importantly, Notre Dame refuses
to acknowledge any ultimate divide between academic
knowledge and service to other persons, particularly
the most vulnerable among us. All are made in the image
and likeness of God. The three "transcendentals"
should not be separated. Truth and beauty cannot exist
without goodness."
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Professor
M. Cathleen Kaveny
"Notre
Dame Law School, perhaps more so than any other law
school, is characterized by a sense of community. This
community consists of many invaluable people, including
our students, administrators, and staff who all excel
in their parts of our common enterprise. . In particular,
I am deeply impressed by the sense of community among
our students and our faculty. My colleagues routinely
provide terrific insights for my scholarship and allow
me to try to reciprocate. I benefit from Joe Bauer's
comments on my essay about the 2000 presidential election
even as I enjoy reviewing Nicole Garnett's article critiquing
growth control initiatives. Together, we all participate
in the ongoing dialog that seeks to sharpen, deepen,
and extend the way in which NDLS addresses the rest
of the legal academy and the students whom we are privileged
to teach.
The
source of our community, and the source of the Law School's
distinctiveness, is its Catholic character. As an evangelical
Presbyterian, I am more comfortable at NDLS than any
other school that I can imagine. NDLS encourages the
integration of faith into teaching, scholarship, and
our community life; that enables me to study biblical
perspectives on land and ownership in my property class;
to write about John Calvin's references to "spiritual
pollution" in my book comparing environmental,
cultural, and other kinds of pollution; and to accept
the prayers of my colleagues and students as my family
confronts a serious illness. I am so grateful for each
of the remarkable opportunities that NDLS affords."
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Professor
John Nagle
"When
I walk into a classroom full of first year students
here at the Notre Dame Law School, two thoughts are
uppermost in my mind. The first is that American law
today is incredibly complex and is getting more so by
the year. The second is that lawyering in America today
is more perilous morally than it ever has been, and
it too is getting more so by the year. I handle the
complexity problem pretty much as I suspect profs at
any other top flight law school do - - helping students
to discover the principles and ideals that underlie
the dizzying array of rules and exceptions that they'll
have to master in order to serve their clients effectively,
and urging them to think creatively about how those
rules could be changed to bring them into fuller accord
with the principles and ideals that lie beneath them.
I
suspect, however, that I handle the moral peril issue
in a way that may differ substantially from the way
in which profs elsewhere handle it. It's not that I
see the problems differently from them. We all realize
that at the heart of lawyering is a relationship to
clients that makes exceptional intellectual and moral
demands on lawyers, and we all know that the legal profession
has, by virtue of its monopoly on so much of the legal
system, a special obligation to see that our laws really
do serve the common good. We all recognize that the
work environment in many law firms can stifle the spirit
of young lawyers, giving bottom-line considerations
an unmerited priority over income-independent considerations,
and we all worry that competence, loyalty, honesty,
and civility -- necessary features of good lawyering
-- may be getting short shrift in the current legal
culture.
It's when we move from problem-spotting to thinking
about solutions that the Notre Dame difference kicks
in. A crisis in our legal culture is bound to reflect
a crisis in our general culture. To see our way out
of a crisis of that sort, we need to gain some critical
distance from that culture, to identify its weaknesses,
and to develop ways of revealing those weaknesses to
others who are caught up in it. Does American culture
consign moral issues to a private sphere where naked
preferences reign? Does it conceive of the common good
in crass cost/benefit terms? Does it teach us to see
ourselves as rootless individuals, and does it present
the dependence in which we all begin our lives and most
of us will end them as a kind of short-coming or worse?
Does it undervalue such non-governmental institutions
as the family and the church, and does it endorse forms
of tolerance that take neither belief nor truth seriously?
Does it encourage us to regard the law positivistically,
ignoring law's role as a civic educator? If so, these
may all be cultural weaknesses that lawyers, law students,
and law professors need to address as they take on the
moral perils incident to lawyering today.
My
claim is that Notre Dame's religious orientation frees
me and my colleagues to take on these questions, and
it offers us resources that help us to answer them.
It's not that it provides the Catholic answers to them
and treats other answers as simply wrong. No, what Notre
Dame's orientation does is to make it possible for a
wide range of professedly counter-cultural takes on
money, power, work, politics, and life to be taken seriously
and argued about intelligently. Odd as it may sound
to someone thinking about going to law school, this
intellectual freedom is a real boon to his or her legal
education."
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Professor
John Robinson
"As
an institution rooted in the belief that a person is
created in the image and likeness of God, we take seriously
those aspects of a legal education that touch people
most directly. Thus, our faculty work hard to become
excellent teachers, because it is in the classroom where
faculty and students regularly come together in community
with one another. Each individual brings something unique
and special to the classroom experience, and at Notre
Dame, we believe that rigorous learning involves an
ongoing dialogue between student and teacher, and among
students themselves.
As
faculty, we attempt to foster this dialogue by being
available for conversations with our students in both
formal and informal settings. Furthermore, we structure
the learning environment in a way that values the "whole
person." We recognize that academic development
does not occur in a vacuum, and we strive to provide
resources that allow students to broaden their social,
spiritual, and emotional lives along with honing their
intellectual and professional skills. When we talk about
"educating a different kind of lawyer," we
are describing men and women of character and skill
who recognize the significant power lawyers wield in
society and the responsibilities that power imposes
upon them. Our goal is for the "Notre Dame lawyer"
to exemplify the legal profession at its best."
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Associate
Professor, Vincent Rougeau
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