We aspire to be a premier law school, as well as an integral part of a great university which claims the Catholic tradition as part of its intellectual heritage. As a scholarly community, we seek to become key participants in the most important academic conversations in our fields. As a professional school, we aim to bridge the worlds of theory and practice, facilitating the interchange of information between the academy and the corridors of political and legal power. Our Catholic tradition, which spans the globe and embraces believers from all races, cultures, and levels of economic development, leads us to strive to broaden and deepen our academic and practical understanding by drawing upon the unique resources of our religious tradition and the traditions of other faiths. Committed to the most demanding standards of scholarly inquiry, we seek to illustrate the possibilities of dialogue between and integration of reason and faith.

We view ourselves as engaged in a single integrated mission that combines research, teaching, and service.

In our research and writing, we aspire to engage the legal academy at the highest level, to bring legal scholarship into conversation with other disciplines, and to engage insights and challenges drawn from other legal systems. Given our unique mission, questions that will always have a central place here include the relationship between law and morality, the distribution of power between the state and other social institutions, and the importance of identifying universal norms of justice and exploring the approaches of diverse cultures in implementing those norms.

Through our teaching, we seek to prepare our students to practice law with competence and compassion and to contribute, as leaders in the bar, the academy, and government, to the development and reform of an increasingly complex and internationalized legal and regulatory framework.

Through our service, we strive to assist the University and the other communities to which we belong in understanding how law enables and limits the achievement of individual and social goals, as well as to facilitate greater understanding of and commitment to the relationship between law and social justice.