Religiously Affiliated Law Schools

September 12, 2024

I am so happy to welcome you to Fordham, and to revel in a growing trend of hiring law professors and lawyers to serve as presidents of universities. There are about five of us at Jesuit schools alone. 

And I am grateful to our hosts, the Fordham Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s Work. They seed the courses and the conferences that embody our mission in the work of the law school, and everything I am about to talk about today. 

What does it mean to be a religiously-affiliated law school? 

That question feels particularly tricky in a country that celebrates a wall between church and state. 

Don’t get me wrong --we glory in religious freedom. We wouldn’t exist without it. The colony of New York passed statutes banning Jesuits by name -- until the new Constitution and its first amendment were adopted. 

But of late – and I mean this more culturally than legally – we have built a very high wall indeed between church and state. A general attitude that faith must be hidden from public life – as a hobby, exercised in private on Sunday morning, or Friday night. 

Certainly not a topic to be mentioned in law school!

I’ll let you in on a secret – I did not go to a religiously-affiliated law school. In a fit of rebellion from my family full of Jesuits, I turned down Georgetown Law and went to Harvard, which long ago dropped its religious affiliation. (Though my mentor, the great Lindy Boggs, still referred to Harvard as that “Yankee protestant school.”) I was only 20, coming from New Orleans where I’d gone to school my whole life within one square mile. I was pretty nervous. 

I often wore a crucifix to school – because it brought me courage. But also because I realized I was at risk of feeling embarrassed to wear it. I am not sure how much I was projecting and how much was real. But I worried that people would think they knew my politics because of that 

cross, though they would be wrong. I worried that people would think I was dumb or anti-intellectual because I wore that cross, which surprised me, because in my family, religion was so intensely intellectual. My mother is a biblical scholar who believes you should learn Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Greek, and Arabic so you could read the texts in the original. Which she did. 

I wore my crucifix and navigated my secular spaces, deciding whether it was ok that I came to my fiercely progressive beliefs from a place of faith rather than politics. 

I understood that faith in all institutions, including organized religion, was cratering. I watched my own Catholic Church face roiling scandals that shook my faith in organized religion too. I tried to untangle my feelings about faith, about God, and my feelings about the flawed

human beings who run any enormous institution and so often let you down. 

What does it mean to be a religiously-affiliated law school? It’s a very complicated subject. 

We teach students who come to us because of our affiliation and others who come despite that affiliation. The growing plurality has no idea what it means at all. We hire faculty on national markets with the same variety of feelings. 

As a leader of one of these religiously-affiliated institutions, I have been thinking about this question intensely. 

Fordham, like many of your schools, was founded less to provide a beacon for Catholic legal education than to provide a law school that would welcome Catholics. Because those immigrants streaming off the ships here in New York in the 19th century were desperate for opportunity. 

From the beginning, Fordham also welcomed the Jewish students turned away from elite protestant law schools. Together, our graduates founded law firms that would rewrite the history of big law, with Jewish and Italian and Irish names linked. Full of determination. 

Our origin in religious exclusion is a great strength. Because those who would presume that we stand for exclusion do not know us. We stand for the opposite – for welcoming people of every faith in an intensely

ecumenical way. Not just in the check-listy, diluted version of inclusion, but the kind that teaches the value of each faith, teaches the powerful overlap of our faiths. 

In our academic world that so passionately believes in inclusion, this has been a gaping hole. 

Bias against religion as such does not sit on the front line of oppression, but it does matter. This petty embarrassment about religion expresses an ugly sense of superiority. It intersects with our other biases – against immigrants, the poor, and those who disagree with us ideologically. It is insidious and wrong. 

Worse, it denies vast parts of the human experience. 

Those who presume our religious affiliations stand in opposition to intellectual reasoning really do not know us. Because they have erased so much of history, they forget that organized religion created higher education as we know it. 

Jesuits. 

In legal education, when we feel skittish about any mention of religion as such, we risk denying the origins of law. The moral, philosophical and religious reasoning. And whether we approach this work with anthropological fascination, with an accurate understanding of legal history, or with deep faith, we tell a broader truth.

But I am preaching to the choir here. Let me talk about something more subtle that struck me when I was a law student. 

I think there is another hidden cultural risk in how our students see the law. With all of their earnestness and idealism, they project so much of broader moral reasoning onto law itself, a weight that law cannot hold up. 

In many ways in this country, we worship the U.S. Constitution as our sacred text. Not just as a remarkably resilient structuring of government – flawed but impressive – or as a creation of certain rights that limit state action. We conflate the Constitution and moral law. 

How many times have you heard someone hurl the ultimate insult – that’s unconstitutional! When they just mean, that’s unfair! 

Of course, we correct that sloppy reasoning in law schools. We teach students state action doctrine, and the strict limits of what the Bill of Rights purports to govern. We teach students the twisted path of constitutional interpretation. The glory of Brown, yes, but also the horrors of Plessy and Dred Scott. 

What we sometimes forget to mention, however, is that morality is neither defined by, nor limited to, law. We hold the Constitution up high, but it will never blot out the light of the sun. Our moral responsibilities to each other are so much broader than what the law will require of us.

Let me slide into political science for a moment. 

Balance of individualism and community – or civic republicanism. Rights, but also responsibility. 

Individualism, unfettered libertarianism. COVID sped it up. Going back to smallpox, epidemics and vaccines have triggered understandable terror and conspiracy theories. On the one hand, there is never a better argument for prioritizing the good of the whole. On the other, we engage in unusual limitations of freedom. 

Catholic doctrine is, roughly speaking, the opposite of libertarianism. It does not match our political divide. 

Catholic social teaching prioritizes human dignity and a common good. It glories in the diversity of humans loved equally by God, but rooted in community. A culture of empathy rather than a culture of grievance. All of which overlap heavily with the other faiths represented here. 

And it offers an antidote to the cultural and legal reasoning that provides such a thin notion of moral responsibility. I don’t mean that we hoist a catechism on our students. I mean something more subtle, but still profound. 

It is a worldview, a sense of hope and purpose, that our students desperately crave right now.

They are so very lonely -- they yearn for community. They’ve grown up with intense and superficial connectedness, but have lost so much of the skill of real human connection. 

They feel deeply cynical about the broken world they inherit, but are determined to make a difference. 

What does it mean to be a religious-affiliated law school? 

At our best, we bring our students an increasingly countercultural sense of hope, of empathy, or purpose and meaning. 

We allow them to be their full selves. We model what it means to talk about values and faith without embarrassment. 

And because we are preparing them for a profession with enormous power, we talk about ethics with a different sense of urgency. 

Ethics is not just about that which will get you into trouble, or fail the MPRE. 

We talk to students about who they want to be as human beings. When they look back on their lives, what will they be proud of? Will they have found purpose and meaning? 

We will teach them that lawyers have deep responsibilities to clients beyond avoiding malpractice.

We will teach them lawyers have enormous power, and thus responsibility to the legal system, to the rule of law, and to a functioning democracy. 

And even more than that – as you discuss here today – we will teach them that lawyers are stewards. 

You have chosen three themes that embody all of our collective faiths – the places where they overlap with such power. 

Each of the world’s great religions takes as a central commandment to welcome the stranger – and so we imagine what that means in the context of our immigration laws. 

Each of our faiths teaches us to care for the earth as our common home. 

Each of our faiths contains principles of criminal law, and the balance of justice with mercy. The need to protect, but also to forgive. 

I am so grateful for the work you do here together, for the community you have created, and most of all – for the work you go back to your schools to send forth.