This quote near the end struck me:

Amongst the professoriate of the land diversity is supposedly a desirable value. Well, certainly a law school that teaches the law based on Christian values adds to the diversity of the nation's law programs.

Those who preach diversity don't think like this. They think each institution has to have an identical cross-array of diversity. They don't understand taht diversity needs to exist at a macro level as well as the micro to have any positive effect.

"many leaders of conservative thinking today"

I thought the article was R. Emmett Tyrell. I wasn't aware that he qualified for that category.

Yep, leaders of liberal thinking don't react this way. Witness this very quote, for example.

Yes, to point out that someone is making an ad hominen argument is itself an ad hominen argument.

Therefore, ad hominen arguments must be good, because we can't help but make them.

I agree with PathMV: Tryell's piece tells us about his position in the political spectrum but nothing at all about the situation at Ave Maria.

Certainly I am brain dead this afternoon and am certainly too certain of the need to use the word "certain" in certain blog comments.

As I recall, the dissenting faculty were hardly moral relativists and took jobs at the school precisely because they wanted to approach the law as having a firm basis in morality.

As evidence, I submit Charlie Rice. He is very upset about the policies at Ave, from what I hear.

Andrew J. Lazarus,

Talk about your ad hominem attacks.

Mmmm... thirty-some years ago, Tyrell was young and conservative and cranky. That had, at least, a sort of novelty to it, which was momentarily interesting.

Now, he's old and conservative and cranky, "things were better", he says, in the old days, before young people got corrupt and lazy. His (even older, even more conservative, even crankier) buddy Judge Bork agrees. (The fact that Tyrell's fellow conservatives have held the White House for 19 of those years has had nothing to do with it.)

Oh yeah, and he thinks lawyers these days are mostly immoral.

. . . and I should find his view of the ABA, or Ave Maria interesting? Why?

I half expected Tyrell to talk about how he walked three miles in the snow to get to school.

DAvid: " it doesn't sound like it could have bothered her too much) and the entire evidence for the claim of the relationship is the uncorroborated claim of a suicidal woman."

so of course it must be untrue. Who you gonna believe? A suicidal woman, or a conservative male leader? Men who preach about family values are always to be believed over younger sluts.

"after all, the alleged affair went on for 20 years; it doesn't sound like it could have bothered her too much."

of course not. We all know that people only commit suicide within days of some emotionally troubling incident happens.

George Roche III of Hillsdale was a libertarian not a conservative.

I'm glad to see the left wing commentators on this blog are familiar with the Table of Kindred and Affinity from the Book of Common Payer.

Since the modern left wing position is that one can shtupp anything that moves, I would have thought that such refined moral understandings had been neglected. Guess I was wrong.

Here are the links:

American Bar finds Ave Maria law school in compliance

Incense

Concerning the quote from the Ave Maria student that Randy R found: It's like we've got more of the basics than other schools require, then we've got courses that deal with the integration of morality with the law," he said

I went to a "secular" (i.e. normal) law school. How can morality not be integrated into the study of law? Criminal law, to choose the most obvious example, is completely intertwined with concerns about morality - what is moral and immoral, what is the place of the state in penalizing immoral conduct, when is something immoral but not illegal, whose definition of morality applies, when does punishment itself become immoral, etc. Murder, rape, and theft are immoral acts, hence criminal law. Punishing an innocent man or violating a defendant's human rights are immoral acts, hence criminal procedure. I can't imagine studying criminal law and not addressing morality, both explicitly and implicitly.

But this is really true for any field of law. For a buyer to take unfair advantage of a seller (or vice-versa) is immoral, hence contract law. For an employer to take unfair advantage of an employee (or vice-versa) is immoral, hence employment law. For an artist or inventer to take credit for another's work is immoral, hence copyright and patent law. For a landlord to take unfair advantage of a renter (or vice-versa) is immoral, hence property law. Obviously this is very simplistic, and these legal specialties are much broader than these examples. The law involves many issues that are detached from moral concerns. And it's possible to study and teach legal issues without talking about them in terms of "morality."

But I suspect that this Ave Maria student quoted here really doesn't know what he is talking about, and is giving his school much more credit than it deserves.

"Secular ideals mandate that NO moral standard can exist.
Morality is what each person wishes it to be - changing with the tides. "

If you really think that is what is taught in all or many secular schools, you really have no idea what you are talking about.

"At Ave Maria, the ideal presumes that there is in fact objective morality, and discusses the same things you mention but with the presumption of that objecitve anchor."

And how is that any different?

There seems to be this strange thought among people that moral relativism means no morals, so that I can think murder is okay, and therefore murder should be legal. If you think that is what is moral relativism, then you are dead wrong (excust the pun).

I know of no law school that says there are no morals in law, so I have no idea what you are talking about.

And Randy, abortion was considered "murder" for centuries (see the ancient Didache, the ancient Hippocratic Oath before it was edited in the 1980's, and the cicil laws on the books for over a century in the West) before moral relativism made it tantamount to having a mole removed in the eyes of some. So your example does not lend much help to your idea.

"When the only objective anchor is what the law happens to be today (the positive law), then you have no objective anchor, because the law can change tomorrow."

Perhaps, but it doesn't follow that morals change. However, laws do change, quite often. We used to have laws that made slavery legal. And in fact, slavery was legal since the dawn of time. Good thing that one changed, but I guess slavery is one of those morals that you believe shouldn't change, right?

Or how about the rights of women? According to tradition and the Bible, wives are little more than chattle to their husbands. All their assets are taken under the control of the husband, and she has few rights. I would argue that the moral thing is to allow women the same rights as men, and I wouldn't give a damn what the Bible, the Church, or tradition has to say about the matter. It's a good thing those laws were changed.

"Please explain what objective anchor is embraced at secular schools"

The Constitution, and common law.

"And Randy, abortion was considered "murder" for centuries (see the ancient Didache, the ancient Hippocratic Oath before it was edited in the 1980's, and the cicil laws on the books for over a century in the West) before moral relativism made it tantamount to having a mole removed in the eyes of some. So your example does not lend much help to your idea."

Neither does yours, actually. For centuries, abortion was allowed up until the point a woman was showing, and the Church agreed to that. Additionally, in ancient Greece, it was common practice to throw unwanted children, usually female, over a cliff or left to die to 'exposure', and it was perfectly legal.

But I get your point. You basically believe that secular schools do not teach wrong or right. That simply isn't true. As was mentioned earlier, secular schools certainly teach that we have laws against theft, for instance, because not only is it immoral to take something that isn't yours, but it would destroy a well ordered society. But then we get to talk a little more -- is it immoral if a man is starving to steal bread to feed his family? Maybe yes, maybe no. Perhaps you would view that as 'moral relativism' but it's nothing of the sort. It's a basic philisophical question that we have been wrestling with since Plato.

I think that's a good thing, to explore these questions, but apparently, you do not.

Randy,

You are clearly unfamiliar with the Great Doctor, Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophical writings influenced the law in the West for centuries. He treats the stealing example you give in his magnum opus Summa Theologica: Theft and robbery (Secunda Secundae Partis, Q. 66).

Discussing such things is the hallmark of Catholic academic discourse, and has been for milennia. It is not some novel precept invented by secular academics. The novel precept invented by secular academics is that there is no absolute boundary - no unchanging moral anchor - that a positive law cannot rightly exceed. Another novel precept is that Christian thought must be treated with suspicion or derision and given no real credence when discussing morality (except of course when it might lend support to end slavery, assist the poor, aid immigrants, stop nuclear proliferation, or halt executions).

Interestingly enough, the whole world embraced the Natural Law at the Nuremburg trials, by the way. So there is hope, and Man does understand and embrace the concept when it is presented so clearly as it was with the Nazi regime and their duly promulgated laws of tyranny.

As for the Constitution being the anchor, sadly that is not true. The discovery of the invisible-to-all-but-the-learned-justices-of-the-majority penumbras emanating from the actual objective content of the Constitution, which allegedly guarantee a woman the right to a dead baby based as much on her whim as on any real dilemma, is hardly a testament to this being the anchor you wish it to be.

Tomorrow the Constituion could be duly amended to allow slavery again - as you rightly point out it once did. Such an amorphous anchor is no true anchor at all.

as long as we can get abortions and marry our gay lovers, who cares about morality and the law?

Um, most European universities were not founded by churches, but were founded by kings. Some universities were affiliated with the church, and some were little more than schools for theologians, that is true. However, it was with the work of Francis Bacon, who specifically called for the separation of theology and natural philosophy (what we today call science) that got the whole Enlightenment thing going. The church had little to do with the pursuit of science since his time, which was the early 1600s.

So I suggest you do a little learning yourself before you try to make cheap shots.

Randy,

You are rather unschooled in the objective facts about academia and its history.

But one example: Galileo's research was funded by, and lauded by, the Church at the highest levels. Although his CONCLUSION about the movement of the planets was correct, the silly old Church insisted that he teach his ideas as theory until it was proven true. And his theory that he claimed supported his conclusion was actually proven to be quite wrong. He refused and presented his eventually disproven theory as scientific truth. So the Church was actually quite right to disallow the researcher they were funding to spread unproven specualtive theory as if it were scientific fact. Of course none of this matters to agenda-minded people like you.

If you would look a little further, you would notice that many Catherdrals were intentionally designed as scientific instuments that could be used to precisely track the movement of the sun.

And you would recall that devout priests were among the foremost scientists from the 13th through the 19th and even the 20th century.

The forerunners of the great universities were the cathedral and monastery schools, which Pope Gregory VII regularized in his papal mandate issued in 1079 that each cathedral form such a school. The universities in Bologna, Paris, Oxford, etc. all trace their origins to such schools and eventually had papl charters. And it was Pope Gregory IX who firmed up the idea that a the privileges of a teaching degree issued by one univesity were portable to any other university.

About 81 universities had been established by the time of the Reformation: 33 with a papal charter, 15 with charter from king or emperor, 20 had both papal and royal charters, and 13 had no charter. So actually, 53 of the 81 universities had papal charters. The stirrings and intellectual curiosity of the Enlightenment were fostered by and sprang forward from the very heart of the Church.

Also, you are completely wrong about Galileo. you make is sound as though the church were just holding him to higher standards. That simply isn't true. He was tried and convicted of heresy. Why? Because his Copernican views were considered heretical, ie, contrary to the teachings of the church. They placed him under house arrest for the rest of his life. That doesn't sound like a very enlightened church just looking for the truth, does it?

In fact, Pope John Paul II finally got around to retrying Galileo recently and they finally apoligized for the trial and conviction, and reversed it. Now, if the church did nothing wrong, as you contend, why was it necessary for an apology and reversal?

Sounds to me like your agenda is to whitewash the church's failings. Fortunately, there are too many history books that have the real facts in them.