The Thinness of Catholic Legal Education, A Review of Robert J. Kaczorowski, Fordham University Law School: A History

In his recent book, Fordham University Law School: A History, Robert J. Kaczorowski has authored an informative and scholarly history of Fordham Law School.In this Review of the book, we first briefly summarize the overall history that Kaczorowski conveys. It is the story of an urban law school founded in 1905 to serve the professional aspirations of the children of New York’s Catholic immigrants — a school that rose from modest beginnings to be among the nation’s finest, but then languished in mediocrity for decades due to the syphoning off of revenue by university administrators. This period of unfulfilled potential came to an end in the 1990s, when Fordham Law School returned to elite status.After describing Kaczorowski’s history, we then explain how the narrative Kaczorowski sets forth exemplifies the gradual attenuation of Catholic identity in Catholic legal education. Professor Kaczorowski’s account of Fordham Law School provides evidence of this attenuation of Catholic identity in legal education over time, and is itself proof of the thinness of this identity in the present day. Thus, while Fordham Law School’s Catholic and Jesuit identity feature prominently in the early chapters of Kaczorowski’s book, by the end of the story, this identity is an afterthought — a passing descriptive attached as a kind of certification of continuity with the past. Although this loss of identity is part of the history of Fordham Law School, Kaczorowski’s book does not address it directly, nor does it reflect upon the significance of this change

A Light Unseen: The History of Catholic Legal Education in the United States: A Response to Our Colleagues and Critics

(Excerpt) We are enormously grateful to the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies for hosting the conference on February 14, 2020, dedicated to a review of our book manuscript, A Light Unseen: The History of Catholic Legal Education in the United States, and for publishing the papers of the conference participants. We are also grateful for the opportunity to offer some reply in the pages of the Journal. A Light Unseen sets forth a comprehensive history of the book’s subject matter. The book describes the purposes for which Catholic law schools were founded, the schools maturation and success in achieving accreditation and some measure of respectability, and their search for meaning since the 1960s-1970s when the prior unreflective cultural Catholicism of these schools dissipated and in some cases disappeared almost entirely. A Light Unseen’s last chapter provides a blueprint for the creation of authentically Catholic legal education grounded in the Catholic intellectual tradition. In particular, we argue that Catholic law schools reach their fullest expression when their teaching, scholarship, and student formation—their intellectual hearts—employ the Catholic intellectual tradition and its moral anthropology

The History of Religious Hiring at American Catholic Law Schools

A mission-driven institution requires personnel who are competent for the realization of the mission. The following article examines the practice of Catholic law schools hiring Catholics as law professors throughout the over 150-year history of Catholic legal education in the United States. This history shows that Catholic law schools alternately sought to hire Catholics as law professors or to hire individuals without regard to their religious affiliation as these schools’ self-understanding of mission changed over time

Academic Freedom and the Catholic University: An Historical Review, a Conceptual Analysis, and a Prescriptive Proposal

This Essay is composed of four parts. In Part I, we sketch the origins of the concept of academic freedom in colleges and universities in the United States. We then examine the contemporary understanding of the concept as set forth in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Next, we provide a brief history of the experience of academic freedom in Catholic universities in the United States. This history includes a series of pivotal controversies in the 1950s-1960s at four Catholic universities: the University of Notre Dame, St. John’s University, the University of Dayton, and the Catholic University of America. It also includes a brief review of two transformative documents — the Land O’Lakes Statement (1967) and The Catholic University in the Modern World (1972) — in which leading Catholic educators endeavored to articulate a conception of a modern Catholic university that included a robust role for academic freedom. In light of these developments, Catholic universities revised their policies on academic freedom. In Part II of the Essay, we offer a conceptual critique of academic freedom as defined in the 1940 Statement. We argue that this widely accepted articulation of the concept is question begging at best, and at worst internally incoherent. The AAUP definition of academic freedom is question begging because it assumes a particular conception of the university as normative and then draws its definition of academic freedom from that conception. There are, however, other reasonable conceptions of what constitutes a “university” with their own entailed conceptions of academic freedom, such that the AAUP’s implicit assumption stands undefended. Furthermore, the AAUP definition is internally incoherent. The AAUP conception of academic freedom declares that every idea must be subject to challenge and possible refutation while, at the same time, harboring certain ideas as unassailable and immune from criticism. All rational thought, including the 1940 Statement, must proceed by assuming the truth of certain presuppositions. Yet, without argument, the 1940 Statement singles out religious propositions as uniquely obnoxious to the academic enterprise. In Part III of the Essay, we argue that the many striking contradictions between the conception of academic freedom (as articulated in the 1940 Statement and typically defended in academic circles) and the actual practice of academic freedom in American universities (private and public, secular and religious) indicates that few people actually believe in the AAUP version of the principle. This disconnect also suggests that the 1940 Statement is not so much the articulation of a foundational principle of academic life as an ideology that serves ends other than those it purports to advance. Of course, some version of academic freedom is necessary for universities to fulfill their mission as conveyors of knowledge and centers of inquiry. This is no less true of Catholic universities. In Part IV of the Essay, we offer some practical suggestions for how Catholic universities can remain faithful to the truth professed by the Church, while giving their faculty members the freedom necessary to raise questions, conduct research, and participate in the great conversation that is the essence of the scholarly enterprise

Statistical correlation of structural mode shapes from test measurements and NASTRAN analytical values

The software and procedures of a system of programs used to generate a report of the statistical correlation between NASTRAN modal analysis results and physical tests results from modal surveys are described. Topics discussed include: a mathematical description of statistical correlation, a user's guide for generating a statistical correlation report, a programmer's guide describing the organization and functions of individual programs leading to a statistical correlation report, and a set of examples including complete listings of programs, and input and output data

THE EFFECT OF EXHAUSTIVE RUNNING ON POSTURAL DYNAMICS

Recently, researchers have begun to use nonlinear measures such as the Lyapunovexponent (LyE) and Approximate Entropy (ApEn) to examine temporal structure in the continuous behavior of biological systems. When using these measures a higher score indicates lesser periodicity and greater chaotic behavior. A decrease in LyE and ApEn values have been shown in some cases to indicate pathological conditions. Studies of postural control have found that after a cerebral concussion, an athlete’s center of pressure oscillations measured by ApEn are significantly decreased even up to 96 hours post-injury as compared with their preseason ApEn scores, even when the athlete appears steady (Cavanaugh, 2006). In regards to walking gate, local dynamic stability showed decreased variability when assessed amongst ACL reconstruction patients (Stergiou, 2004). The purpose of the current experiment ıs to use ApEn versus a set of traditional postural measure to evaluate a postural sway during upright stance prior to and following a bout of exhaustive running. In published balance studies only about 50% report significant improvements, possibly because traditional measures aren’t capturing the improvements in postural control. Promising results from the above cited studies indicate that nonlinear measures may be measuring elements that the traditional measures don’t detect

Twelve experiments in restorative justice: the Jerry Lee program of randomized trials of restorative justice conferences

Objectives: We conducted and measured outcomes from the Jerry Lee Program of 12 randomized trials over two decades in Australia and the United Kingdom (UK), testing an identical method of restorative justice taught by the same trainers to hundreds of police officers and others who delivered it to 2231 offenders and 1179 victims in 1995–2004. The article provides a review of the scientific progress and policy effects of the program, as described in 75 publications and papers arising from it, including previously unpublished results of our ongoing analyses. Methods: After random assignment in four Australian tests diverting criminal or juvenile cases from prosecution to restorative justice conferences (RJCs), and eight UK tests of supplementing criminal or juvenile proceedings with RJCs, we followed intention-to-treat group differences between offenders for up to 18 years, and for victims up to 10 years. Results: We distil and modify prior research reports into 18 updated evidence-based conclusions about the effects of RJCs on both victims and offenders. Initial reductions in repeat offending among offenders assigned to RJCs (compared to controls) were found in 10 of our 12 tests. Nine of the ten successes were for crimes with personal victims who participated in the RJCs, with clear benefits in both short- and long-term measures, including less prevalence of post-traumatic stress symptoms. Moderator effects across and within experiments showed that RJCs work best for the most frequent and serious offenders for repeat offending outcomes, with other clear moderator effects for poly-drug use and offense seriousness. Conclusions: RJ conferences organized and led (most often) by specially-trained police produced substantial short-term, and some long-term, benefits for both crime victims and their offenders, across a range of offense types and stages of the criminal justice processes on two continents, but with important moderator effects. These conclusions are made possible by testing a new kind of justice on a programmatic basis that would allow prospective meta-analysis, rather than doing one experiment at a time. This finding provides evidence that funding agencies could get far more evidence for the same cost from programs of identical, but multiple, RCTs of the identical innovative methods, rather than funding one RCT at a time

BALANCE TRAINING ALTERS POSTURAL DYNAMICS UNIQUELY FOR STANCE ON COMPLIANT VS. NON-COMPLIANT SURFACES

Balance training is a common clinical modality used for improving postural control and preventing injury during sports training and participation. However, a number of empirical studies have failed to support the efficacy of balance training. One factor that may have limited the previous empirical studies is a lack of sensitivity with regard to the traditional descriptive statistics used to characterize postural control. Recent developments in non-linear dynamic analyses have led researchers to revaluate the way in which postural control is measured and understood. The advantage of nonlinear analyses for assessing postural behavior is their sensitivity to changes in the time-dependent structures of continuous postural sway. Lyapunov Exponent (LyE) is defined as the slope of the average logarithmic divergence of neighboring trajectories in a state space (Wolf, 1985). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of balance training on postural control in a healthy population using both a traditional (position variability; as measured by standard deviation) and non-linear (Lyapunov Exponent; LyE) measure of postural sway variability