U.S. News has dropped Notre Dame Law School from 21st to 26th. So what?

There are more important measures of a law school. For example, Notre Dame has earned preeminence for decades as a law school which encourages students to integrate the study of law with morality and faith. And now vindication of that effort can be seen in the emergence of three new Catholic law schools, two with a Notre Dame connection. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Barry University took over Orlando School of Law and held its first graduation this past January.

The University of St. Thomas will open a law school in St. Paul, Minn., in August 2001. The founding dean is David Link, who retired in 1999 after 24 years as dean of Notre Dame Law School.

Ave Maria School of Law, which will open in Ann Arbor this August, is practically a Notre Dame outreach. Dean Bernard Dobranski is a Notre Dame grad who taught at Notre Dame from 1977 to 1983. Five of the founding faculty are grads of Notre Dame Law School. Professor Gerard Bradley and I are on the Board of Governors.

The new schools make sense in light of the failure of most of the 24 existing Catholic law schools to offer an effective response to the secular American legal culture. In 1978, Dean Roger Cramton described "the ordinary religion of the law school classroom," as "a moral relativism tending toward nihilism, a pragmatism tending toward an amoral instrumentalism, a realism tending toward cynicism, an individualism tending toward atomism and a faith in reason and democratic processes tending toward mere credulity and idolatry."

Over the past two decades the situation has worsened. A utilitarian positivism recognizes no moral limits on what the law can do. The implicit dogma of American legal education is that reason is incapable of knowing objective moral norms. Affirmations of objective morality and especially of God are considered nonrational and irrelevant to academic discussion.

The patron saint of this denial of the intellect is Oliver Wendell Holmes who wrote, "I wonder if cosmically an idea is any more important than the bowels." Holmes defined truth as "the majority vote of the nation that could lick all others. I see no reason," he wrote, "for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand."

Notre Dame Law School, of course, offers a different view. Notre Dame, however, has room for only a relative few of those who want a legal education which integrates morality and law in light of the Catholic tradition. The new schools can fill that need.

"What does Ave Maria mean for Notre Dame?" asked Dean Link. "I can think of nothing but good. The attention being paid to the opening of Ave Maria will help all religiously based law schools (including ours) to maintain their ... mission. We don't all need to do this in the same way, but each of us needs to remain true to ... fundamental principles including (in the case of Catholic law schools) the natural law. The presence of former and current NDLS faculty members in leadership roles at other law schools will help expand the influence of our different kind of law school ... The competition and the interaction of faculty and deans will make all religiously oriented law schools stronger."

As Ave Maria Dean Dobranski put it, the new schools "are not competitors with each other or with other Catholic law schools. The more of us who are trying to offer an education that integrates law and morality, the better."

Judge Robert Bork, an Ave Maria faculty member, said its founding "is a great thing for legal education in general." Ave Maria, he said, "will be more like the law schools of 30 years ago, before they became so highly politicized."

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who delivered the school's first Ave Maria Lecture last November, said the school is "trying to bring back what's lost. That's very important."

In keeping with its motto, Fides et Ratio, Ave Maria will integrate the law with faith and reason. Ave Maria fully accepts Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the Apostolic Constitution on Catholic universities. Its curriculum will focus on the "nuts and bolts" of the law.

But it will move to a new and higher level that no other law school even attempts. It will combine openness to free inquiry with a systematic study each year of the moral and social teachings of the Church as they relate to law and policy. Ave Maria aims to produce warriors, not bystanders, in the cultural war.

The answer to the "culture of death" lies in the moral and social teachings of the Catholic Church. America needs lawyers who are technically competent, who are solidly formed in those teachings and who live their faith in Christ. Notre Dame Law School continues to serve the nation uniquely and well in encouraging its students to fill that need.

And the idea is catching on. Maybe somebody will tell the editors of U.S. News about it.

Professor Rice is on the Law School faculty. His column appears every other Tuesday.

The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.

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