Natural Law at WaPo
WaPo has run a piece this morning about the potential 5-Catholic Supreme Court. The first half is ho-hum: the composition reflects tolerance toward Catholics, but does it reflect America's demographics? But the second half made some interesting statements and raised issues I haven't seen discussed much. Excerpts:
[Political scientist Howard] Gillman believes that beginning in the 1960s, many conservative Catholics went into the legal profession "because they felt the constitutional jurisprudence of the country was not reflecting their values," particularly on abortion, funding for parochial schools and restrictions on religion in public places. "I think you're seeing the fruits of those efforts now," he said.
Bernard Dobranski, dean of Ave Maria School of Law, a Catholic institution founded in 2000 in Ann Arbor, Mich., said the number of highly qualified conservative Catholic lawyers is also a tribute to the strength of Catholic schools, the determination of immigrants to educate their children and a rich tradition of legal scholarship in the Catholic Church.
A hallmark of that tradition is the belief in "natural law," a basic set of moral principles that the church says is written in the hearts of all people and true for all societies. Though long out of favor in secular law schools, the natural law approach is resurgent among conservatives, Dobranski said. . .
[S]aid Notre Dame's Bradley, "I do think that there is an important truth in saying that Catholics are the intellectual pillars of social conservatism. Compared to their political allies in that movement, Catholics are heirs to a richer intellectual tradition and . . . are more inclined to believe that reason supplies good grounds for the moral and political positions characteristic of social conservatism. Call it the 'natural law' thing."
I'm not sure I've ever heard the phrase "natural law" in a mainstream publication without a sneer. Maybe it's poised to make a comeback. Though the natural law never left (it can't, by definition), our legal culture has largely ignored it lately. Right now, I don't think the phrase is on anyone's radar screen, so WaPo can mention it without an outcry. But let that phrase get used approvingly during the confirmation hearings or in a Supreme Court decision, and the secular multi-culturalists will start howling "Papists!" The rhetoric will be more respectful than that, but that's what it'll boil down to. It may be time to start a natural law blog, so when the secularists yell "Papists," we'll be ready to yell, "The Stoics! Cicero! Hooker! MLK Jr.!"
