I’ve always thought of natural law and law and economics as opposing schools of thought. Like Rick in Casablanca, I must have been misinformed. On March 21, law and economics scholar Richard Epstein will deliver the Spring 2013 Natural Law Colloquium Lecture at Fordham. Details are here.
Panel: Law and Freedom Put to the Test of Experience (Jan 20)
The Crossroads Cultural Center in New York will host a panel discussion, “Law and Freedom Put to the Test of Experience,” in New York on January 20:
What is the relationship between law, rights, and freedom? When is freedom realized by law? When is it, instead, suffocated or suppressed? The speakers will address these questions in light of the irreducible need for justice and freedom as they emerge in human experience. Does human experience reveal an objective yet inherently personal criteria that enables the individual (regardless of any social, cultural or religious background) to judge both the fairness of a rule and its ability to realize greater freedom? The discussion will relate to a recently published book titled “Elementary Experience and Law” in which four legal scholars apply an innovative take on the concept of “elementary experience” – which is at the basis of Msgr. Luigi Giussani’s fundamental work “The Religious Sense” – to the legal system and the issue of justice.
Details are here.
Conference on Christian Legal Thought (Jan 5)
For CLR Forum readers attending the AALS Meeting in New Orleans this weekend, the annual Lumen Christi Conference on Christian Legal Thought will take place on Saturday, January 5. This year’s meeting will focus on a recent statement on the nature of law by Evangelical and Catholic scholars and will include speakers from non-Christian perspectives as well. Details are here.
Ross on Mosaic Law in Early Protestant Jurisprudence
From the beginning, Christian jurisprudence has tried to distinguish the “moral” elements of the Mosaic Law, which continue to bind Christians, from the “ceremonial,” which do not. Richard Ross (University of Illinois) has written what looks to be a fascinating essay, Distinguishing Eternal from Transient Law: Natural Law and the Judicial Law of Moses, on the efforts of Protestants in early modern Europe and New England to grapple with this distinction. He ties their work to similar efforts by natural law theorists of the period to differentiate between eternal and merely local principles. The abstract follows.
This essay examines two interlinked efforts in early modern Europe and New England to distinguish legal provisions valid across different societies and time periods from those that were local and transitory and therefore not compulsory in the present. Consider, first, the judicial laws of Moses. A minority of Protestants, whom I will call the “Mosaic legalists,” tried to ascertain which Old Testament judicial ordinances were no longer obligatory because they were particular to the Jewish commonwealth, and which were eternally-valid “appendices” to the natural law and Decalogue. The challenge of differentiating the perpetual from the local also occupied early modern students of the law of nature. Whether one believed that God impressed natural law upon the world or that people deduced natural law Read more
Upcoming Lectures on Catholic Jurisprudence
For East Coast CLR Forum readers interested in Catholic jurisprudence, here are a couple of events to put on your fall calendar. Next Friday, September 14, Villanova Law School will host the seventh annual Scarpa Conference on Law, Politics, and Culture. This year’s theme is “Living the Catholic Faith in Public Life.” Speakers include Helen Alvaré (George Mason), Gerard Bradley (Notre Dame), Patrick Brennan (Villanova), and Peter Steinfels (Fordham). The following Friday, September 21, the Thomistic Institute NYC will kick off a series at NYU’s Catholic Center, “A Public Right to the Truth: A Series on the Natural Right to Religious Freedom,” with a lecture by Russell Hittinger (Tulsa) on “The Catholic Magisterium and Religious Freedom.” The series will continue throughout the fall. Details are here.
The Paradox of Catholic Social Thought
Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate has thrust Catholic Social Thought into the American presidential campaign. A practicing Catholic, Ryan argues that Tea Party economics are compatible with the Church’s social teaching. This pleases many on the Catholic Right, but greatly displeases many on the Catholic Left; when Ryan gave a speech at Georgetown last April, 90 faculty members and priests signed a letter in protest. The disagreement was evident in the media this week. In the Wall Street Journal, William McGurn defended Ryan’s free-market views as consistent with Catholicism. In the New York Times, by contrast, Maureen Dowd cited Catholic bishops who have termed Ryan’s proposed federal budget “immoral.”
As an outsider, I’m not in the best position to comment on an internal Catholic debate. The best analysis I’ve seen so far, though, is this very powerful essay by Fr. Robert Barron, which Marc noted yesterday. Barron writes that Catholic Social Thought equally embraces two conflicting principles, solidarity and subsidiarity. Solidarity emphasizes the collective. It teaches that people have responsibility for one another, that society’s rich have a moral obligation to share their wealth with society’s poor. (“We are all members of one another,” St. Paul wrote). Subsidiarity, by contrast, emphasizes the local and individual. It allows private property and suspects concentrated, centralized power. Somehow, Barron writes, Catholic Social Thought must affirm both these principles, without compromise.
Barron’s essay seems to pose an an impossible intellectual task. The reason the essay seems so compelling to me, though, is that it embraces what I understand to be the essentially paradoxical nature of Christianity. As Ross Douthat recently has written, Christianity always asks the believer to accept seemingly incompatible assertions: Christ is at once God and Man; the world is at once good and evil; the Christian must at once care for the world and focus on eternity. For non-Christians, these are nonsensical pairings; but for Christians, they help define the mystery of faith. If there is to be a Catholic — or, more broadly, Christian –social theory, it must somehow endorse community and individuality, in Barron’s words, “with equal vigor.” It must embrace the paradox that Christians are called to be in the world but not of it — an undoable something that somehow must be done.
McCrudden on Religion and Human Rights
Christopher McCrudden (Queen’s University Belfast/University of Michigan) has posted a very interesting looking piece on religion and human rights, Catholicism, Human Rights and the Public Sphere. Here’s the abstract:
This article suggests that the scope and meaning of human rights, and its relationship to religion, is anything but settled, and that this gives an opportunity to those who support a role for religion in public life to intervene. Such intervention should address four main issues. First, it should ensure that judges engage in attempting to understand religious issues from a cognitively internal viewpoint. Secondly, it should articulate a justification for freedom of religion that fully captures the core of the significance of religious belief, and the importance of the religious principles in the public sphere. Thirdly, it should ensure engagement and dialogue between the churches and others on the meaning of human dignity, given its centrality to religious and secular perspectives on rights. Lastly, the churches should consider more carefully what it means to give ‘public reasons’ in the political and cultural context, and how it can engage in the process of ‘public reasoning’ regarding human rights.
Justifying Religious Freedom: Three Observations
I’ve been mulling over Steve’s very thoughtful posts (here and here) on the need to find persuasive justifications for religious freedom in America today. Although the Constitution expressly singles out religious freedom for protection, a new movement in the academy denies that religion merits such protection. The theological notions that support religious freedom do not have a place in contemporary liberal politics, the argument goes; religious freedom is thus a kind of anachronism. Although Steve doesn’t agree, he suggests that those of us who value religious freedom develop new, secular justifications to respond to this movement, and he offers one such justification, a “social contract” argument that I find very persuasive, as a start.
Steve, Marc, and others who have commented here and on other sites know more about this than I, and I hesitate a bit to offer my own thoughts. But I do co-host this website, so here are three observations: one optimistic, one (I hope) constructive, and one pessimistic.
First, notwithstanding the fact that some very serious scholars, and the Obama Justice Department, have argued that religious freedom no longer merits special protection, I doubt the American public shares that view. There’s going to be a fight, no question, and we may as well be ready. But the idea that religious freedom has special importance, and merits special protection, is deeply rooted in America’s self-image. (In recent surveys, large majorities even of secular Americans agree that religion has had a good influence on American life). As Steve says, the commitment to religious freedom is part of our social contract and I don’t think it’s going to fade away. If p0liticians try to make the “religious freedom is an anachronism” argument, I suspect they will fail. When the Obama Adminstration argued in Hosanna-Tabor that religious freedom deserved no special protection, the Court unanimously disagreed.
Second, if one were looking for a secular justification for religious freedom, it seems to me that providing a check on state power is a pretty good one. Pluralism is the best guarantor of political freedom, and pluralism requires that the state have competitors. In Western history, nothing has proved a stronger competitor for the state than religion and, specifically, Christianity. Because of its unique capacity to encourage commitment, religion has provided a counterweight to state power since – well, since the late Roman Empire. Even people of no faith — in fact, even people who are hostile to religious belief as such — should be able to see this benefit of religion.
My third observation is the pessimistic one. This summer, I’ve been reading Ross Douthat’s great new book, Bad Religion, on the state of American Christianity. I’ll be writing more about Douthat’s book shortly, but, briefly, he argues that the consensus, “mere Christianity” that traditionally provided the vocabulary for public debate in America has all but disappeared. Propositions that until recently would have been seen as just “common sense” are easily dismissed today, by more and more people, as “sectarian.” As I say, I don’t think that most Americans view religious freedom as “sectarian,” and I don’t think they will anytime soon. But I’ll admit that Douthat’s book has made me a little more doubtful about this.
Panel: The Original Source of Law (May 9)
The Crossroads Cultural Center will host a panel discussion, “The Original Source of Law: The Individual? The State? God?”, at NYU on May 9. The panel will address natural law, both as a general concept and in its practical implications. Speakers include Robert George (Princeton) and Andrea Simoncini (Florence). Details are here.
Piatt, “Catholic Legal Perspectives”
Robert William Piatt, Jr. (St. Mary’s) has published Catholic Legal 
Perspectives (Carolina Academic Press 2012), designed for classes on jurisprudence and Catholic legal theory. The publisher’s description follows.
This book examines our system of justice by identifying, in several critical areas, how Catholic principles and legal principles overlap and diverge. While it is not expected or required that the reader agree, in every instance, with either the law or the Catholic perspectives, the reader of this work will come away with an understanding of both. Critiques and responses are included throughout. Topics include family issues (marriage, same sex marriage, divorce, and annulment), immigration, public assistance, and matters of life and death (including abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty).