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Where Catholicism and law intersect
By PAMELA sCHAEFFER
NCR Staff
Notre Dame is a special place, I
think, says M. Kathleen Kaveny, referring to the law school where she
teaches. It is a great place to explore what it means to be a Catholic, a
smart person and a lawyer at the end of the 20th century.
Kaveny, associate professor at the Notre Dame Law School, says she
cant imagine having as much freedom at other law schools to think and
write about questions at the intersection of Catholicism and law.
Notre Dames longtime dean, David T. Link, plans to carry the
principles of Notre Dames success to the University of St. Thomas in St.
Paul, Minn., where he has been appointed founding law school dean.
Kaveny graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1984, then
earned a law degree and a Ph.D. in ethics from Yale. She worked as law clerk
for John T. Noonan Jr., Catholic historian and U.S. appeals court judge in San
Francisco. She also worked from 1992 to 1995 as an associate lawyer for Ropes
& Gray in Boston, a firm specializing in health care law.
Now, Kaveny writes and speaks often on such legal-moral issues as
assisted suicide, genetics and cloning. Besides bringing a Catholic
sensibility to questions already under debate, Kaveny likes to raise new
ones. For example, in Cleveland in March, she critiqued the concept of
billable hours at a conference sponsored by the Cardinal Suenens
Program in Theology and Church Life. Kaveny compared Catholicisms
liturgical sense of time with the legal professions practice of tracking
time, even small units of time, and billing them to clients.
Kaveny sees widespread dissatisfaction expressed by young lawyers
in surveys as the result not only of the long, isolating hours of work -- an
average today in large firms of 10 hours a day, six days a week, Kaveny said --
but also of the way time is perceived and used in law offices.
Because the pressures of large firm life force most lawyers
to internalize a monetary understanding of their time, they find themselves
increasingly alienated from aspects of their lives that characteristically do
not value time in this way, such as family birthdays, holidays, volunteer
work, she wrote. A major reason lawyers are willing to work so hard,
besides their competitive natures, is that they have forgotten what it is
like to view time in a way that would make any other endeavors seem
worthwhile.
In contrast, Kaveny wrote, the Christian community witnesses to a
radically different understanding of time, not time as an
endless, colorless extension, much as it can appear to be in modern law
firms, but as rhythmic, cyclical, related to the life, death and
resurrection of Jesus, and therefore intrinsically valuable.
The rhythm of the alternating feasts and fasts punctuate the
time of a Christian, as do the sacraments, which call attention to
markers within it, she wrote.
More broadly, she said religion and law are related because
law is the structure we hang our community on. From a Catholic
perspective, law is not just about building negative fences or maximizing
economic efficiency, she said. Its about creating a positive
context that will allow us to live together in a society and to further the
common good.
National Catholic Reporter, August 13,
1999
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