Shaffer, Thomas L.

English

ValpoScholar

Valparaiso University Law Review 
Volume 22 
Number 3 Spring 1988 pp.669-674 
Spring 1988 
Symposium: Mission of a church-Related Law School - The 
Catholic Tradition 
Thomas L. Shaffer 
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr 
 Part of the Law Commons 
Recommended Citation 
Thomas L. Shaffer, Symposium: Mission of a church-Related Law School - The Catholic Tradition, 22 Val. 
U. L. Rev. 669 (1988). 
Available at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr/vol22/iss3/9 
This Symposium is brought to you for free and open 
access by the Valparaiso University Law School at 
ValpoScholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in 
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please contact a ValpoScholar staff member at 
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THE CATHOLIC TRADITION
THOMAS L. SHAFFER*
If you stand in the road near one of the on-campus Roman Catholic
university law schools in the United States, you can probably see a church
spire. You can squint past whatever fire wall or battlement or gothic tower
there is on the law building and see the campus church. You can do this at
Notre Dame, St. Louis, Creighton, San Francisco, Boston College, and San
Diego. If you go inside one of these law buildings, you may find crucifixes,
chapels, holy-water fonts, or a statute of Thomas More. But none of these
things will tell you what those law schools are about and have been about
- not any more than chaste Protestant crosses at Boston University, Mer-
cer, Duke, Richmond, Denver, Southern California, or Southern Methodist
will tell you about the law schools at those universities.
What is needed for an understanding of Catholic legal education is
another and more ironic picture, an altogether prosaic picture, the picture
of a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn, working in the Woolworth Building in
New York City: Fanny Holtzmann, twenty-year-old middle daughter in a
large immigrant family, is going to law school. She will be a celebrated
American lawyer, one of the first women lawyers in New York City, a sen-
sitive, compassionate leader in the causes of American Jewry, a faithful
daughter, and a professional model to other lawyers.
But this is a picture taken in 1920, and Fanny is going to law school,
on the twenty-eighth floor of the Woolworth Building. This is where one of
the busiest of America's Roman Catholic schools is doing business: the law
school of Fordham University, one of a network of colleges and universities
set up in the United States by the Green Berets of the Catholic Reforma-
tion, the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.
Fanny is poor. Both of her parents are Eastern European immigrants;
their house is full of children; her maternal grandfather, a Hasidic rabbi,
lives with the family. He conducts his bet din court in the kitchen. Fanny
works all day in a law office on one of the lower floors of the Woolworth
Building. She takes the elevator to law school at the end of the day. The
* B.A., J.D., LL.D.; member of the Indiana Bar; Robert E.R. Huntley Professor of
Law, Washington and Lee University. The author is a graduate of the Notre Dame Law
School (1961); he was a member of the Notre Dame Law Faculty from 1963 to 1980, and
dean of the law school, 1971-1975; he expects to return to that faculty in the fall of 1988.
Shaffer: Symposium:  Mission of a church-Related Law School - The Catholic
Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 1988
670 VALPARAISO UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW
elevator is a symbol of what she is doing - going up, going up to law
school, and through law school, going up in America. If she used the stairs,
she would be, in W.H. Auden's phrase, trudging on time to a tidy fortune.'
There were at the time twenty-some American law schools under Ro-
man Catholic auspices. Most of them were doing what Fordham was doing
- providing a vehicle of vertical mobility for the children of the late immi-
grants: the Irish, Italians, Poles, Slavs, and Eastern European Jews. They
had evening divisions (a mark of low status among law schools, then and
now). Their physical facilities were removed from their liberal-arts cam-
puses; their libraries were minimal; most of their faculty were part-time.
They were sending graduates not only into practice but also into the urban
political machines the immigrants supported - to share in the power being
assembled by Mayor Curley in Boston, by the immigrants' political ma-
chine in New York, and by the predecessors of Mayor Richard Daley in
Chicago.
I am talking about the three Loyolas, Santa Clara, Seton Hall,
DePaul, Georgetown, Marquette, St. John's, Duquesne, Villanova, Detroit,
and Catholic University. Fanny Holtzmann went to such a school, not be-
cause it was run by Roman Catholics, but because she had to work her way
through law school. That would not have been easy to do in day-division
schools at Columbia or Harvard or Yale - even if those schools would
have accepted an under-educated Jewish woman.
These were Catholic law schools in the sense that Catholics went to
them, and went with a sense of being involved in the common enterprise of
getting a share of the aristocratic power that American lawyers enjoy. Stu-
dents in them were not learning about their faith; they were getting ahead.
They were not studying Aquinas or Augustine or Pope Leo's encyclical on
social justice; they were studying casebooks, written at Harvard, Yale, and
Columbia, just like everybody else. If these educational communities were
religious, it was because they sometimes provided convenient religious ser-
vices for their Catholic students and, occasionally, a chaplain to talk to.
They prospered and held themselves together in the 1930s and during
World War II. They were ready and waiting in 1945 when the grandsons of
the late immigrants had government help and came to law school full time.
The G.I. Bill had more economic effect on Catholics in America than any
other event in our history: what it did, in reference to the Catholic families
that supported Mayor Daley and had supported Mayor Curley and their
counterparts in other cities, was to move Catholics from being among the
poor to being in the suburbs, to join those who look out (or down) and see
1. T. BERKMAN, THE LADY AND THE LAW (1976); Harriman, Miss Fixit, THE NEW
YORKER, Jan. 30, 1937, at 21; Feb. 6, 1937, at 22, in T. SHAFFER, AMERICAN LEGAL ETHICS
624 (1985).
[Vol. 22
Valparaiso University Law Review, Vol. 22, No. 3 [1988], Art. 9
https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr/vol22/iss3/9
THE CATHOLIC TRADITION
the poor.
After the G.I. Bill ran out, Catholic law schools again held themselves
together and were ready for the flood of law students who came to us in the
1960s and 1970s, when all law schools expanded in size, evening divisions
filled the classrooms, new buildings were put up, and private law schools
began making money for their universities. Our clerical masters began to
notice in those years that legal education is cheap; it is, for one example,
operated on student-faculty ratios that are three or four times those in Ro-
man Catholic liberal arts colleges and ten times those in church-related
medical schools.
American Catholic law schools did not seriously look at themselves as
religious in any of these three generations. Nor did they self-consciously
consider the fact that their sponsorship and most of their enrollment repre-
sented an American Roman Catholic (largely immigrant) culture that was
worth study, explication, and preservation.
In retrospect, you would have to say that Roman Catholic law schools
in America have an important, interesting, and even unique story, but that
story has not been about Roman Catholicism and the law or about being a
Catholic and a lawyer in America. There are exceptions, and they are in-
dicative of what might have been and of what might come to be: I think of
my friend and mentor, Robert E. Rodes, of Notre Dame, whose scholarship
and teaching has included a rendition of traditional natural law that is
faithfully Catholic, and deep, and creative.2 Rodes' historical scholarship
explicates the medieval Catholic roots of the relationship between church
and state as that has been formulated by English-speaking lawyers;' his
most recent work is an American lawyer's attempt to understand and make
a jurisprudence out of the insights of Latin American liberation theology
(largely, although not exclusively, an enterprise of Roman Catholics)."
Rodes has done and is doing what few scholars in law schools in Catholic
universities have done. Among scholars and teachers in Roman Catholic
law faculties, Rodes is an exception.
There is also an impressive and American body of Roman Catholic
thought about the law, a cultural deposit that is interesting and well disci-
plined, that is tended to by scholars in non-Catholic schools. I think of John
T. Noonan, Jr., who, before he ascended to the bench, had done monumen-
tal work on the history of moral and legal issues in Catholicism.' He had
2. R. RODES, JR., THE LEGAL ENTERPRISE (1976).
3. R. RODES, JR., ECCLESIASTICAL ADMINISTRATION IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND (1977); R.
RODES, JR., LAY AUTHORITY AND REFORMATION IN THE ENGLISH CHURCH (1982). A third
volume is in process.
4. R. RODES, JR., LAW AND LIBERATION (1986).
5. J. NOONAN, JR., THE SCHOLASTIC ANALYSIS OF USURY (1957); J. NOONAN, JR.,
19881
Shaffer: Symposium:  Mission of a church-Related Law School - The Catholic
Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 1988
672 VALPARAISO UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW
developed an influential personalist jurisprudence.6 He made steady explo-
rations in canon law and in procedure in the church courts - the sort of
thing a good lawyer can do well.1 He made promising inquiry into legal
ethics - not much of it published8 - that I hope his judicial duties will
not keep him from completing. Noonan, a Boston Irish Catholic, did his
early work on usury at Catholic University. He wrote one of his books at
Notre Dame.' But - and this just has to be significant - he did most of
his work at the University of California.
A Roman Catholic law school might now provide a place for the new
Noonans and Rodeses. It might provide them more than a tolerant secular
university can provide; it might honor and promote and even glory in their
work, more than secular or nominally church-affiliated law schools can do.
The law schools in this country that have been identified as following a
Roman Catholic tradition now give about the same amount of encourage-
ment to such work as they give to scholarship on the rule against
perpetuities.
I am fond of an example I mentioned earlier - the phenomenon of the
late immigrants. I see them as an opportunity for legal scholars in Roman
Catholic universities, an opportunity to exploit the special heritage that
American Catholic law schools have and ought to claim: the way Eastern
and Southern European immigrants have affected law and lawyering in
America. I mean the peculiar, enduring, vital sense of community that the
Italians, Irish, Jews, and Poles have had since they settled into American
cities - and that they still have. You can find some tentative, preliminary
description of this moral force in the sociology of religion - notably in a
couple of essays by Michael Novak.' 0 You can find it in some of our law-
yers' stories; I think particularly of George V. Higgins' Jerry Kennedy sto-
ries," which have in them a poignant sense of Irish Catholicism in a mod-
CONTRACEPTION: A HISTORY OF ITS TREATMENT BY THE CATHOLIC THEOLOGIANS AND CAN-
ONISTS (1965 & reprint 1986) [hereinafter J. NOONAN, JR., CONTRACEPTION]; J. NOONAN,
JR., A PRIVATE CHOICE: ABORTION IN AMERICA IN THE SEVENTIES (1979); J. NOONAN, JR.,
BRIBES (1984).
6. J. NOONAN, JR., PERSONS AND MASKS OF THE LAW (1976).
7. E.g., J. NOONAN, JR., POWER TO DISSOLVE: LAWYERS AND MARRIAGES IN THE
COURTS OF THE ROMAN CURIA (1972).
8. E.g., Noonan, The Purposes of Advocacy and the Limits of Confidentiality, 64
MICH. L. REV. 1485 (1966); Noonan, Other People's Morals: The Lawyer's Conscience, 48
TENN. L. REV. 227 (1981).
9. J. NOONAN, JR., CONTRACEPTION, supra note 5.
10. M. NOVAK, IN PRAISE OF CYNICISM (OR) WHEN THE SAINTS Go MARCHING OUT
(1977); Novak, Churches and Power, NOTRE DAME MAG., Feb. 1980, at 12. Both of these are
excerpted in T. SHAFFER, supra note 1, at 594. See also Shaffer, The Legal Ethics of Belong-
ing, forthcoming in OHIO ST. L.J. [hereinafter Shaffer, Belonging].
11. G. HIGGINS, KENNEDY FOR THE DEFENSE (1980); G. HIGGINS, PENANCE FOR JERRY
KENNEDY (1985). Both of these are discussed in T. SHAFFER, FAITH AND THE PROFESSIONS,
[Vol. 22
Valparaiso University Law Review, Vol. 22, No. 3 [1988], Art. 9
https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr/vol22/iss3/9
THE CATHOLIC TRADITION
ern criminal-defense practice in Boston. Louis Auchincloss, who is the
principal legal story teller of our day, wrote one story about an Italian-
American lawyer in New York. 2 And you can make guesses about law and
lawyers from biographical material on the immigrant political bosses
(Curley, Daley, and the others); from stories about American Jewish law-
yers - the Fanny Holtzmanns - who stayed close to their families, and
who were often educated in Catholic schools; and from social histories of
immigrant groups.
I have played with this material a bit and I think I find in it an ethic
and a jurisprudence that is entirely alternative to the WASP ethic that has
dominated both our codes of legal ethics and our discussions of law and
morality. Our standard American scholarship treats the world of these im-
migrant lawyers as shabby and inferior, because our dominant professional
world is measured by the Calvinist standards that have governed the Bar in
America. I think of the way Ephraim Tutt compared his law practice with
what he called the "philanthropy" of John D. Rockefeller. "I'm a retailer,"
Mr. Tutt said."
In this way, or by tending to the implications of Rodes' scholarship in
liberation theology, or in some other way, the future in Catholic law schools
might be a future that tends to the immediate issues of social justice in
which the Catholic tradition is recently prominent. I think particularly of
the pastoral letter on the American economy, issued in November, 1985, by
the United States Catholic Conference and called Economic Justice for
All."' That project drew on an impressive array of materials in my tradition
- from papal statements that date from the 1890s; from a Catholic politi-
cal theology fashioned by American scholars who were careful to honor the
liberal-democratic tradition in America; and from liberation-theology econ-
omists who claim a radical loyalty to the Gospel as seen through the partic-
ular memory of Roman Catholicism.
The story of Roman Catholic law schools in America tells about a re-
spectable mission those schools no longer have. The church no longer needs
to furnish a ladder for Poles and Italians. America does not need any more
law schools, and particularly does not need any more that are like all the
rest; but American Roman Catholics have a specific theological memory,
some of it legal, much of it legalistic, which informs, explains, and gives
ch. 5 (1987).
12. Auchincloss, The Fabbri Tape, in T. SHAFFER, supra note 1, at 599. See Shaffer,
Belonging, supra note 10.
13. A. TRAIN, YANKEE LAWYER: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF EPHRAIM TuTT (1943).
14. United States Catholic Conference, Economic Justice For All, 16 ORIGINs 409
(1986).
1988]
Shaffer: Symposium:  Mission of a church-Related Law School - The Catholic
Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 1988
674 VALPARAISO UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 22
warning to a modern legal practitioner. My religious tradition bears witness
in and before the law; our bishops are doing that, and our lawyers could: we
could use a Roman Catholic university law school.
Valparaiso University Law Review, Vol. 22, No. 3 [1988], Art. 9
https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr/vol22/iss3/9


Symposium:  Mission of a church-Related Law School - The Catholic Tradition

Valparaiso University

Valparaiso University Law Review Volume 22 Number 3 Spring 1988 pp.669-674 Spring 1988 Symposium: Mission of a church-Related Law School - The Catholic Tradition Thomas L. Shaffer Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr  Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Thomas L. Shaffer, Symposium: Mission of a church-Related Law School - The Catholic Tradition, 22 Val. U. L. Rev. 669 (1988). Available at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr/vol22/iss3/9 This Symposium is brought to you for free and open access by the Valparaiso University Law School at ValpoScholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Valparaiso University Law Review by an authorized administrator of ValpoScholar. For more information, please contact a ValpoScholar staff member at scholar@valpo.edu. THE CATHOLIC TRADITIONTHOMAS L. SHAFFER*If you stand in the road near one of the on-campus Roman Catholicuniversity law schools in the United States, you can probably see a churchspire. You can squint past whatever fire wall or battlement or gothic towerthere is on the law building and see the campus church. You can do this atNotre Dame, St. Louis, Creighton, San Francisco, Boston College, and SanDiego. If you go inside one of these law buildings, you may find crucifixes,chapels, holy-water fonts, or a statute of Thomas More. But none of thesethings will tell you what those law schools are about and have been about- not any more than chaste Protestant crosses at Boston University, Mer-cer, Duke, Richmond, Denver, Southern California, or Southern Methodistwill tell you about the law schools at those universities.What is needed for an understanding of Catholic legal education isanother and more ironic picture, an altogether prosaic picture, the pictureof a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn, working in the Woolworth Building inNew York City: Fanny Holtzmann, twenty-year-old middle daughter in alarge immigrant family, is going to law school. She will be a celebratedAmerican lawyer, one of the first women lawyers in New York City, a sen-sitive, compassionate leader in the causes of American Jewry, a faithfuldaughter, and a professional model to other lawyers.But this is a picture taken in 1920, and Fanny is going to law school,on the twenty-eighth floor of the Woolworth Building. This is where one ofthe busiest of America's Roman Catholic schools is doing business: the lawschool of Fordham University, one of a network of colleges and universitiesset up in the United States by the Green Berets of the Catholic Reforma-tion, the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.Fanny is poor. Both of her parents are Eastern European immigrants;their house is full of children; her maternal grandfather, a Hasidic rabbi,lives with the family. He conducts his bet din court in the kitchen. Fannyworks all day in a law office on one of the lower floors of the WoolworthBuilding. She takes the elevator to law school at the end of the day. The* B.A., J.D., LL.D.; member of the Indiana Bar; Robert E.R. Huntley Professor ofLaw, Washington and Lee University. The author is a graduate of the Notre Dame LawSchool (1961); he was a member of the Notre Dame Law Faculty from 1963 to 1980, anddean of the law school, 1971-1975; he expects to return to that faculty in the fall of 1988.Shaffer: Symposium:  Mission of a church-Related Law School - The CatholicProduced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 1988670 VALPARAISO UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEWelevator is a symbol of what she is doing - going up, going up to lawschool, and through law school, going up in America. If she used the stairs,she would be, in W.H. Auden's phrase, trudging on time to a tidy fortune.'There were at the time twenty-some American law schools under Ro-man Catholic auspices. Most of them were doing what Fordham was doing- providing a vehicle of vertical mobility for the children of the late immi-grants: the Irish, Italians, Poles, Slavs, and Eastern European Jews. Theyhad evening divisions (a mark of low status among law schools, then andnow). Their physical facilities were removed from their liberal-arts cam-puses; their libraries were minimal; most of their faculty were part-time.They were sending graduates not only into practice but also into the urbanpolitical machines the immigrants supported - to share in the power beingassembled by Mayor Curley in Boston, by the immigrants' political ma-chine in New York, and by the predecessors of Mayor Richard Daley inChicago.I am talking about the three Loyolas, Santa Clara, Seton Hall,DePaul, Georgetown, Marquette, St. John's, Duquesne, Villanova, Detroit,and Catholic University. Fanny Holtzmann went to such a school, not be-cause it was run by Roman Catholics, but because she had to work her waythrough law school. That would not have been easy to do in day-divisionschools at Columbia or Harvard or Yale - even if those schools wouldhave accepted an under-educated Jewish woman.These were Catholic law schools in the sense that Catholics went tothem, and went with a sense of being involved in the common enterprise ofgetting a share of the aristocratic power that American lawyers enjoy. Stu-dents in them were not learning about their faith; they were getting ahead.They were not studying Aquinas or Augustine or Pope Leo's encyclical onsocial justice; they were studying casebooks, written at Harvard, Yale, andColumbia, just like everybody else. If these educational communities werereligious, it was because they sometimes provided convenient religious ser-vices for their Catholic students and, occasionally, a chaplain to talk to.They prospered and held themselves together in the 1930s and duringWorld War II. They were ready and waiting in 1945 when the grandsons ofthe late immigrants had government help and came to law school full time.The G.I. Bill had more economic effect on Catholics in America than anyother event in our history: what it did, in reference to the Catholic familiesthat supported Mayor Daley and had supported Mayor Curley and theircounterparts in other cities, was to move Catholics from being among thepoor to being in the suburbs, to join those who look out (or down) and see1. T. BERKMAN, THE LADY AND THE LAW (1976); Harriman, Miss Fixit, THE NEWYORKER, Jan. 30, 1937, at 21; Feb. 6, 1937, at 22, in T. SHAFFER, AMERICAN LEGAL ETHICS624 (1985).[Vol. 22Valparaiso University Law Review, Vol. 22, No. 3 [1988], Art. 9https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr/vol22/iss3/9THE CATHOLIC TRADITIONthe poor.After the G.I. Bill ran out, Catholic law schools again held themselvestogether and were ready for the flood of law students who came to us in the1960s and 1970s, when all law schools expanded in size, evening divisionsfilled the classrooms, new buildings were put up, and private law schoolsbegan making money for their universities. Our clerical masters began tonotice in those years that legal education is cheap; it is, for one example,operated on student-faculty ratios that are three or four times those in Ro-man Catholic liberal arts colleges and ten times those in church-relatedmedical schools.American Catholic law schools did not seriously look at themselves asreligious in any of these three generations. Nor did they self-consciouslyconsider the fact that their sponsorship and most of their enrollment repre-sented an American Roman Catholic (largely immigrant) culture that wasworth study, explication, and preservation.In retrospect, you would have to say that Roman Catholic law schoolsin America have an important, interesting, and even unique story, but thatstory has not been about Roman Catholicism and the law or about being aCatholic and a lawyer in America. There are exceptions, and they are in-dicative of what might have been and of what might come to be: I think ofmy friend and mentor, Robert E. Rodes, of Notre Dame, whose scholarshipand teaching has included a rendition of traditional natural law that isfaithfully Catholic, and deep, and creative.2 Rodes' historical scholarshipexplicates the medieval Catholic roots of the relationship between churchand state as that has been formulated by English-speaking lawyers;' hismost recent work is an American lawyer's attempt to understand and makea jurisprudence out of the insights of Latin American liberation theology(largely, although not exclusively, an enterprise of Roman Catholics)."Rodes has done and is doing what few scholars in law schools in Catholicuniversities have done. Among scholars and teachers in Roman Catholiclaw faculties, Rodes is an exception.There is also an impressive and American body of Roman Catholicthought about the law, a cultural deposit that is interesting and well disci-plined, that is tended to by scholars in non-Catholic schools. I think of JohnT. Noonan, Jr., who, before he ascended to the bench, had done monumen-tal work on the history of moral and legal issues in Catholicism.' He had2. R. RODES, JR., THE LEGAL ENTERPRISE (1976).3. R. RODES, JR., ECCLESIASTICAL ADMINISTRATION IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND (1977); R.RODES, JR., LAY AUTHORITY AND REFORMATION IN THE ENGLISH CHURCH (1982). A thirdvolume is in process.4. R. RODES, JR., LAW AND LIBERATION (1986).5. J. NOONAN, JR., THE SCHOLASTIC ANALYSIS OF USURY (1957); J. NOONAN, JR.,19881Shaffer: Symposium:  Mission of a church-Related Law School - The CatholicProduced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 1988672 VALPARAISO UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEWdeveloped an influential personalist jurisprudence.6 He made steady explo-rations in canon law and in procedure in the church courts - the sort ofthing a good lawyer can do well.1 He made promising inquiry into legalethics - not much of it published8 - that I hope his judicial duties willnot keep him from completing. Noonan, a Boston Irish Catholic, did hisearly work on usury at Catholic University. He wrote one of his books atNotre Dame.' But - and this just has to be significant - he did most ofhis work at the University of California.A Roman Catholic law school might now provide a place for the newNoonans and Rodeses. It might provide them more than a tolerant secularuniversity can provide; it might honor and promote and even glory in theirwork, more than secular or nominally church-affiliated law schools can do.The law schools in this country that have been identified as following aRoman Catholic tradition now give about the same amount of encourage-ment to such work as they give to scholarship on the rule againstperpetuities.I am fond of an example I mentioned earlier - the phenomenon of thelate immigrants. I see them as an opportunity for legal scholars in RomanCatholic universities, an opportunity to exploit the special heritage thatAmerican Catholic law schools have and ought to claim: the way Easternand Southern European immigrants have affected law and lawyering inAmerica. I mean the peculiar, enduring, vital sense of community that theItalians, Irish, Jews, and Poles have had since they settled into Americancities - and that they still have. You can find some tentative, preliminarydescription of this moral force in the sociology of religion - notably in acouple of essays by Michael Novak.' 0 You can find it in some of our law-yers' stories; I think particularly of George V. Higgins' Jerry Kennedy sto-ries," which have in them a poignant sense of Irish Catholicism in a mod-CONTRACEPTION: A HISTORY OF ITS TREATMENT BY THE CATHOLIC THEOLOGIANS AND CAN-ONISTS (1965 & reprint 1986) [hereinafter J. NOONAN, JR., CONTRACEPTION]; J. NOONAN,JR., A PRIVATE CHOICE: ABORTION IN AMERICA IN THE SEVENTIES (1979); J. NOONAN, JR.,BRIBES (1984).6. J. NOONAN, JR., PERSONS AND MASKS OF THE LAW (1976).7. E.g., J. NOONAN, JR., POWER TO DISSOLVE: LAWYERS AND MARRIAGES IN THECOURTS OF THE ROMAN CURIA (1972).8. E.g., Noonan, The Purposes of Advocacy and the Limits of Confidentiality, 64MICH. L. REV. 1485 (1966); Noonan, Other People's Morals: The Lawyer's Conscience, 48TENN. L. REV. 227 (1981).9. J. NOONAN, JR., CONTRACEPTION, supra note 5.10. M. NOVAK, IN PRAISE OF CYNICISM (OR) WHEN THE SAINTS Go MARCHING OUT(1977); Novak, Churches and Power, NOTRE DAME MAG., Feb. 1980, at 12. Both of these areexcerpted in T. SHAFFER, supra note 1, at 594. See also Shaffer, The Legal Ethics of Belong-ing, forthcoming in OHIO ST. L.J. [hereinafter Shaffer, Belonging].11. G. HIGGINS, KENNEDY FOR THE DEFENSE (1980); G. HIGGINS, PENANCE FOR JERRYKENNEDY (1985). Both of these are discussed in T. SHAFFER, FAITH AND THE PROFESSIONS,[Vol. 22Valparaiso University Law Review, Vol. 22, No. 3 [1988], Art. 9https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr/vol22/iss3/9THE CATHOLIC TRADITIONern criminal-defense practice in Boston. Louis Auchincloss, who is theprincipal legal story teller of our day, wrote one story about an Italian-American lawyer in New York. 2 And you can make guesses about law andlawyers from biographical material on the immigrant political bosses(Curley, Daley, and the others); from stories about American Jewish law-yers - the Fanny Holtzmanns - who stayed close to their families, andwho were often educated in Catholic schools; and from social histories ofimmigrant groups.I have played with this material a bit and I think I find in it an ethicand a jurisprudence that is entirely alternative to the WASP ethic that hasdominated both our codes of legal ethics and our discussions of law andmorality. Our standard American scholarship treats the world of these im-migrant lawyers as shabby and inferior, because our dominant professionalworld is measured by the Calvinist standards that have governed the Bar inAmerica. I think of the way Ephraim Tutt compared his law practice withwhat he called the "philanthropy" of John D. Rockefeller. "I'm a retailer,"Mr. Tutt said."In this way, or by tending to the implications of Rodes' scholarship inliberation theology, or in some other way, the future in Catholic law schoolsmight be a future that tends to the immediate issues of social justice inwhich the Catholic tradition is recently prominent. I think particularly ofthe pastoral letter on the American economy, issued in November, 1985, bythe United States Catholic Conference and called Economic Justice forAll."' That project drew on an impressive array of materials in my tradition- from papal statements that date from the 1890s; from a Catholic politi-cal theology fashioned by American scholars who were careful to honor theliberal-democratic tradition in America; and from liberation-theology econ-omists who claim a radical loyalty to the Gospel as seen through the partic-ular memory of Roman Catholicism.The story of Roman Catholic law schools in America tells about a re-spectable mission those schools no longer have. The church no longer needsto furnish a ladder for Poles and Italians. America does not need any morelaw schools, and particularly does not need any more that are like all therest; but American Roman Catholics have a specific theological memory,some of it legal, much of it legalistic, which informs, explains, and givesch. 5 (1987).12. Auchincloss, The Fabbri Tape, in T. SHAFFER, supra note 1, at 599. See Shaffer,Belonging, supra note 10.13. A. TRAIN, YANKEE LAWYER: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF EPHRAIM TuTT (1943).14. United States Catholic Conference, Economic Justice For All, 16 ORIGINs 409(1986).1988]Shaffer: Symposium:  Mission of a church-Related Law School - The CatholicProduced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 1988674 VALPARAISO UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 22warning to a modern legal practitioner. My religious tradition bears witnessin and before the law; our bishops are doing that, and our lawyers could: wecould use a Roman Catholic university law school.Valparaiso University Law Review, Vol. 22, No. 3 [1988], Art. 9https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr/vol22/iss3/9

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Symposium: Mission of a church-Related Law School - The Catholic Tradition

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