William H. Rooney is the Lumen Legis Fellow of the Center for Law and the Human Person and a Lecturer at the Columbus School of Law at The Catholic University of America. His primary areas of scholarship and teaching are law in the Catholic intellectual tradition and antitrust law.
Mr. Rooney aspires to contribute to the Center in collaboration with students, scholars, and practitioners and through his experience in philosophy, law, and economics. He is especially interested in studying the human person as the imago Dei who receives the light of all law from God, the Eternal Light, Creator, and Lawgiver.
Mr. Rooney has been a lifelong student of the Catholic intellectual tradition and its intersection with law and economics. He has an M.A. in Philosophy from Holy Apostles College and Seminary (concentration in metaphysics in the Thomistic tradition; thesis on the role of the Catholic intellectual tradition in defining a Catholic university; summa cum laude); a J.D. from Yale Law School (a senior editor on the Yale Law Journal); a Diploma in Law from the University of Oxford (research and thesis on constitutional interpretation); and a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame (majors in Great Books and in economics; summa cum laude).
Mr. Rooney has published essays on the websites of First Things and The University Bookman, served as a faculty member in Collegium’s Legal Humanities program, and presented lectures at the Portsmouth Institute’s Summer Conferences. Mr. Rooney is also a Trustee of the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project
Mr. Rooney is a former partner of Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP and former co-head of Willkie’s Antitrust Practice Group. He practiced antitrust law for over 30 years and handled many domestic and European cross-border litigations, merger reviews, and investigations.
Mr. Rooney has published numerous articles on antitrust in law reviews and received the Lifland Award from the New York State Bar Association for his contributions to the antitrust bar.