American Law from a Catholic Perspective

Edited by Ronald J. Rychlak, American Law from a Catholic Perspective is one of the most comprehensive surveys of American legal topics by major Catholic legal scholars. Contributors explore bankruptcy, corporate law, environmental law, family law, immigration, labor law, military law, property, torts, and several different aspects of constitutional law, among other subjects. Readers will find probing arguments that bring to bear the critical perspective of Catholic social thought on American legal jurisprudence. Essays include Michael Ariens’s account of Catholicism in the intellectual discipline of legal history, William Saunders’s assessment of human rights and Catholic social teaching, Hadley Arkes’s look at the place of Catholic social thought with respect to bioethics, and many others on major legal topics and their intersection with Catholic social teaching. American Law from a Catholic Perspective is essential reading for all Catholic lawyers, judges, and law students, as well as an important contribution to non-Catholic readers seeking guidance from a faith tradition on questions of legal jurisprudence. Based on well-developed and established ideas in Catholic social thought, the evaluations, suggestions, and remedies offer ample food for thought and a basis for action in the realm of legal scholarship.

Ronald Rychlack has put together a highly useful series of articles on the relationship between American law and the teachings of the Catholic Church. In twenty-two chapters this volume discusses areas of law from torts (the law of civil wrongs), to marriage, to the relationship between church and state. Chapters also discuss law-related issues, including the failures of Catholic law schools and the legal implications of the Catholic conception of the person. Sometimes the message is one of congruence, sometimes of disappointment and critique, most often a bit of both. The reader generally is given a helpful summary of central issues of law as seen through the lens of Catholic thought…. Richard Myers provides an impressively succinct and accurate summary of the law of church and state in America…. [This is] a highly useful sourcebook, especially for non-specialists seeking greater understanding of American law from a Catholic perspective., The contributors to American Law from a Catholic Perspective are well acquainted with the nuance and sophistication of Catholic social teaching. In this fine collection of essays, they evaluate the American legal system against the values that animate the Church’s vision of a just and humane society. The result, to quote Notre Dame law professor Gerry Bradley’s forward, is a primer that is 'relentlessly critical,' but not 'full of criticism.' The authors closely scrutinize American laws on moral grounds, and find much to commend. . . . Because the justifying aims of law are moral, legal pronouncements may be evaluated as to whether or not they are, in fact, good or just. Anyone interested in that endeavor will be well served by consulting American Law from a Catholic Perspective., American Law from a Catholic Perspective helps to remind readers where their allegiances must lie. The attentive reader can begin to see the ways in which he must work to change American law at its very roots to help it conform to the truth proclaimed by the Church., American Law from a Catholic Perspective is just what its title promises and so much more: a brilliant collection of essays from some of the country’s best legal thinkers. This work reveals how practically every area of the law can be illuminated and enriched through a deep grounding in the Catholic faith. It’s a treasure-house of insights and an inspiring demonstration of what it can mean for a jurist to respond wholeheartedly to the call of Vatican II for the laity to bring the social teachings of the Church to life in the professional, social, cultural, and political spheres., Precisely because I am not a lawyer, I really liked this book. For an outsider, it provides a crisp guide to the history of American Catholics under American law—a fairly friendly and yet often antagonistic encounter. I hadn’t known that there are 29 Catholic law schools in the United States today, not even that the first of them opened at Notre Dame in 1869. I hadn’t been walked through some main currents of American law, from the long-contested meaning of 'law' among philosophers of law to the current relation of law to bioethics. Catholic legal thinkers have awakened only slowly to the task of bringing new horizons into the national dialogue on law, and are only at the beginnings of doing so. . . . This book provides an invaluable overview, to which I shall want to return for references.

Professor Ronald J. Rychlak is the Jamie L. Whitten Chair of Law and Government at the University of Mississippi School of Law. In addition to serving as an advisor to the Holy See’s mission to the United Nations, he has authored or coauthored eight books on law and modern Catholic history.