Cultural Change and Catholic Lawyers

If there is anything that America definitely does not need, it would seem, it is more lawyers. Over the last thirty years or so, the number of lawyers practicing in the United States has almost tripled to current levels of roughly 900,000 practicing attorneys. To this number, our nation\u27s law schools add another 35,000 attorneys annually. In spite of this, the purpose of this special inaugural law review issue is to commemorate the founding of a new school, the Ave Maria School of Law. It is an honor for me to be able to share in the joy and pride that everyone associated with Ave Maria understandably feels on this important occasion. Even so, it is worth asking why: why start a new law school, of all things, given the figures quoted above? Ave Maria seeks to produce a different kind of lawyer, the Catholic lawyer. This type of lawyer sees a connection between his religious faith and his legal training. For him, being a lawyer is a kind of lay vocation, in which legal training is either used in direct service of the Church or consistently with notions of Catholic ethics and social responsibility. I should concede at the outset that the central concept of this comment, the Catholic Lawyer, may seem rather anomalous to some. Lawyers, we know, are essential players in the administration of justice, and the administration of justice, in turn, is a governmental function. Ever since the time of Thomas Jefferson, however, we have been led to believe that, in his words, there is a wall of separation between church and state. In a separationist regime, as ours purportedly is, how can there possibly be such a thing as a Catholic lawyer ? I would like to challenge Ave Maria students to take a markedly different (dare I say, more Catholic?) view of themselves and of our common identity and vocation in the Church. Our Catholic beliefs not only may properly influence and guide our professional activities as lawyers; they must do so. Otherwise, we cannot perform our vocation in the Church, not to mention our ethical duties as lawyers to work for the improvement of the administration of justice. In short, the term Catholic lawyer is not anomalous at all; instead, as Francis Cardinal George has suggested, it reflects a moral imperative binding on each of us