Patrick McKinley Brennan

Michael Kinsley’s recent Bloomberg View column, which appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer as “Bishops are not exactly oppressed” (Nov. 23), makes a number of basic mistakes concerning law as it relates to religious freedom that we, as lawyers and law professors, wish to correct. Kinsley begins by usefully calling attention to the recent warnings by Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York and Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia that there is a drive by some to marginalize religion. … Continue Reading »

Ministers of the Law by Jean Porter Eerdmans, 368 pages, $30 Some years ago, the acclaimed legal theorist Ronald Dworkin volunteered that “no one wants to be called a natural lawyer.” In Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority , Jean Porter gives the lie to . . . . Continue Reading »

What is the mission of a Catholic law school, and how do we achieve it? Fr. Michael Buckley’s book The Catholic University as Promise and Project sets out”very artfully, to my mind”the ecclesial context in which lawyers in Catholic universities should think about the religious dimensions of the institutions they are, willy-nilly, building up, tearing down, or neglecting, as the case may be. The title of the book also helpfully suggests the proper method in exploring this vital issue. “Promise and Project”: The promise must be specified before the project can have a chance of succeeding… . Continue Reading »

Regardless of what each of you has come to law school to do, allow me to suggest a complementary or perhaps an alternative aspiration: take these three years to learn how to do law well; even more, learn that the point of doing law well is to do good; still more, learn that doing good through law . . . . Continue Reading »