Teaching "Catholic Social Thought and the Law" at UCLA School of Law: First of a Series

This year I'm again teaching a seminar at UCLAW on "Catholic Social Thought, the Law, and Public Policy." Here's the course description:

In contemporary American culture there is a widespread assumption that religion is something private, something one does with one's leisure time, and that it ought not to affect the way one acts in the public square or market place. Catholic social teaching, however, explicitly claims a place in the public square. As the National Conference of Catholic Bishops explained in their Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy (1986), they wrote that letter not merely to instruct the faithful but also “to add our voice to the public debate” over economic justice. Likewise, many Papal encyclicals are not mere theological documents, but also serve as position paper addressed to policymakers.

Catholic social thought is particularly relevant to law and the practice of law. As Avery Cardinal Dulles observed, law “cannot be adequately taught without reference to the purposes of society and the nature of justice, which law is intended to serve.” In turn, as he also argued, “the role of law and its place in a well-ordered society has been studied in depth for many centuries in Catholic social theory.” Accordingly, the premise of this seminar is that whether one is a follower of Catholicism, some other religion, or no religion, Catholic social thought provides important insights for making and practicing law.

Students of all religions—or of no religion—are invited and welcome to engage with the material respectfully, thoughtfully, and critically.

The course will focus on the primary documents of Catholic social thought, principally Papal Encyclicals, rather than secondary sources. The goal is for students to directly engage the source material.

We're using Catholic Social Thought: Encyclicals and Documents from Pope Leo XIII to Pope Francis as our text. It's a solid collection of the primary documents with a modest amount of helpful commentary to contextualize the readings.

Why have I structured the seminar this way?

There are three ways of studying Catholic Social Thought (CST), a.k.a. Catholic Social Teaching. First, we might approach it thematically, by which I mean emphasizing the major themes that run through the entire body of encyclicals and other documents that make up CST’s corpus. Scholars have identified seven such major themes or principles:

1. Life and the Dignity of the Human Person.
2. The Call to Family, Community, and Participation.
3. Human Rights and Responsibilities.
4. The Preferential Option for the Poor.
5. The Dignity of Work and the Rights of Workers.
6. Solidarity with Others Across Racial, National, Social, and Other Borders.
7. Care for God’s Creation.

Second, we might seek to operationalize CST by focusing on how it speaks to specific issues. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church takes this approach, expounding the social doctrine across numerous distinct issues of modern life.

Third, we might directly engage the primary documents, especially the critical papal encyclical. This is the approach I’ve chosen. The other approaches are useful, but only if you have a foundation on which to build them. Attempting them without first knowing the foundational documents would be like trying to decide constitutional law questions without ever having read the Constitution.  Put another way, focusing on the primary documents gives us a perspective that has not been filtered through someone else’s biases and priorities.

Another important reason for focusing on primary documents is that CST rarely offers specific policy proposals. Instead, it offers broad principles and precepts, which often prove to be blunt instruments when making fine legal or policy distinctions. If you ask, “should the law require corporate disclosure quarterly or semi-annually,” CST will give you only broad statements about the economy in reply. But broad principles laid out in the primary documents do provide a moral and ethical foundation upon which to build. Put another way, a house built on sand will not stand. Before you can do high level reasoning you must have a firm foundation on which to build.

I'll be posting about this course a lot, so I have set up a new posts category CST & The Law Seminar. I hope you'll find them of interest.