Fifth Annual Spring Symposium
“Restoring Legal Education”: The Role of the State Judiciary
About the Event
6:30 pm – 7:30 pm – Reception in the Atrium
- Our project, “A New Humanism in Legal Education: The State Judiciary,” focuses explicitly on the education of the state judiciary. The state judiciary is a large and vital contingent of American judges, but for too long it has been neglected by the academy, the media, and most legal commentators. Now, as the Supreme Court has steadily withdrawn from several hot-button constitutional issues involving matters closest to the human person, ceding authority to the states in many controversial areas, the state judiciary has assumed greater importance than ever. We can no longer afford to ignore it. To address this gap, the project focuses on a “new humanism” in judicial education. Like the fifteenth-century Italian humanists, we live in a fractured polity in which a “loquax ignorantia”—a talkative ignorance—prevails. Also like them, we believe we need a project in “soulcraft,” a movement of thought and action to rebuild depleted reserves of character, practical wisdom, and virtue. The need for judicial training in the virtues of law is particularly acute. In the law, words are supposed to be instruments of justice. Judges need to know the virtues of personal and professional character that are essential in law, so that they might be not only good judges in the new range of issues they will confront, but also good judges who will help to form good citizens.
Date
Time
Location
- Walter A. Slowinski Courtroom & The Atrium
Speakers
Speaker
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John GarveyClynes Distinguished Visiting Professor, Notre Dame Law SchoolJohn Garvey is the Clynes Distinguished Visiting Professor at Notre Dame Law School. He was President of The Catholic University of America from 2010 to 2022. For eleven years he was the Dean of the Boston College Law School. He is a past President of the Association of American Law Schools. Mr. Garvey has practiced law with Morrison & Foerster, and taught at Notre Dame, Michigan, and Kentucky. He is a life member of the American Law Institute. From 1981-1984 he was Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, most recently The Virtues (Catholic University Press 2022). He has written columns for the Wall Street Journal, Washington
Post, Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He has appeared on major news networks including ABC, CBS, Fox, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, National Public Radio, and the BBC. For his writings about law and religion he has won the Catholic Press Association award and the Alpha Sigma Nu Jesuit book award.
