“Sources of Meaning, Sources of Truth, Sources of Authority” ft. Catholic University of America’s Marc O. DeGirolami I Saturdays at Seven Ep. 46 (The Legal Vocation: Part Three of a Six Part Series)

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In the forty-sixth episode of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Marc O. DeGirolami, the St. John Henry Newman Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Law and the Human Person at Catholic University of America. DeGirolami opens by addressing the current state of conversations concerning human flourishing, what those conversations offer yet also where those conversations may fail due to a lack of theological and philosophical depth. Ream and DeGirolami then talk through how DeGirolami came to appreciate the ways the education he received and the experiences he encountered fostered his calling to study and practice law. They talk through DeGirolami’s eventual appointment to Catholic University of America as well as his short-term and long-term plans as the Co-Director of the Center for Law and the Human Person. They then close their conversation by discussing how DeGirolami has come to define the academic vocation as a legal scholar and what he believes the university and the Church owe the next generation of legal practitioners and scholars as they prepare for lives of service.

• Marc O. DeGiorlami’s The Tragedy of Religious Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2013)

Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.

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Our guest is Marc O. DeGirolami, the St. John Henry Newman Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Law and the Human Person at Catholic University of America. Thank you for joining us.

Marc DeGirolami: I’m delighted to be here. Thank you for having me, Todd.

Todd Ream: Human flourishing has a long and rich theological history. While arguably neglected during at least the latter half of the 20th century, I’m of the mounting belief that a preponderance of the conversations now taking place concerning flourishing border on the trendy, the fashionable, and in a few cases, even perhaps the vapid. A search of titles concerning flourishing that were released in the first six months of 2024, for example, return ones promising success in a succinct number of steps, as well as guides to reflection found in the form of workbooks, journals, and even artistic expression. What is your assessment of the current state of conversations concerning human flourishing?

Marc DeGirolami: Well, it’s a wonderful question, Todd, and I guess I would answer it this way: a few weeks ago, in an issue of The Lamp, which is a wonderful new periodical that I recommend to your listeners, there was a very nice set of somewhat contrarian reflections that included pieces titled “Against Human Rights,” “Against Human Resources,” even “Against Humanity.” And one of these pieces was by the eminent theologian and former Duke Divinity professor, Paul Griffiths, and it was called “Against Human Flourishing.” And as you might expect, Professor Griffiths was highly critical of what human flourishing has come to represent today. There seems to be a new center for human flourishing or human well-being or something like this opening up on university campuses. Every week or so, you see a new one. 

But one of Griffith’s criticisms of human flourishing that seems to me to hit the mark concerns the desire for a relatively neutral way of speaking about what is good for us and what is not good for us that can kind of paper over deeper disagreements among us concerning things like political philosophy, and as you suggest, especially anthropology. Because the idea might be, well, in the midst of all of our other disagreements, at least we can agree that we’re all part of the same species and maybe, you know, if we focus on the fact of our humanness, we can ignore or even bridge the gulfs that separate us. 

And you do hear this. We have a planned vacation in a couple of weeks to an undisclosed Caribbean island. I won’t tell you where it is, but you see the language of wellness and health and self care and safety and so on. And the focus seems to be on how we feel, what makes us as humans feel good, right? Because you might think, you know, after all, who doesn’t want to be healthy and safe? Like a flower that flourishes when conditions for its health are maximized and it dies off. Maybe we could say human beings can similarly either flourish or wither. 

But I think that notwithstanding all of this, these problems with the idea of human flourishing today, the idea of human flourishing, if it’s grounded in the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition, by the way, I would say not Neo-Aristotelian but the Aristotelian tradition actually does offer something of a challenge to the contemporary view of well-being understood in the terms that, that, that I’m, that I’m talking about. 

And I can talk a little bit about if it might help, but it’s a view that actually in a jurisprudence course that I teach, I try to emphasize to students that there’s something distinctive or distinctively valuable about an Aristotelian Thomistic understanding of well-being because it offers, in sort of summation or in quick form, an action-based or a practice-based account of what well-being is that incorporates something that’s missing from contemporary accounts of human flourishing.

Todd Ream: Yeah, no, thank you. That’s very helpful. 

In what ways do our conversations about human flourishing then relate to our conversations about what it means to be human? You mentioned anthropology a few minutes ago and in particular, perhaps you meant philosophical anthropology. What ways do those relate? Is it possible to separate the two or do they inherently relate to one another and dictate what, you know, the convictions of one another?

Marc DeGirolami: Just as sort of to connect to, as you’re talking, Todd, you know, it reminds me perhaps a little bit afield of, of the question, which I’ll get to in a moment. The trendiness of human flourishing reminds me of another trend, what I consider a kind of unaccountable popularity of Stoicism today, a philosophy quite distant in time and spirit from the prevailing currents of our own time. And yet I think Stoicism also taps into the desire to find some kind of anodyne moral philosophy that can bridge our divides. 

Because in the modern telling, Stoicism is about, let’s say, you know, the power of the individual to withstand and overcome the forces arrayed against it. I was actually told recently by somebody that the United States military academies have taken up Stoicism in some of their classes, and moral philosophy that they require of officers—this sort of living in harmony with divine reason without complaining about it or something like this. 

But to get back to your specific question about anthropology, yes, I am of the view that the human good can only be found in an account of what it means to be human, of human anthropology. And in, and in, and in the tradition, the more ancient tradition that I mentioned, we can do the good things that we can do because we possess what has been called the virtues. Or put another way, and I think a way that might challenge today’s human flourishing talk, human beings have a function and well-being doesn’t consist in feeling a certain way, but in doing certain things. 

What things? Well, you can see what human excellence is if you look at what a human being can do only through being excellent, through having the virtues that allow human beings to do things well. You know, that argument is going to presuppose some variety, but one way that it’s really in tension with some of the contemporary trends concerning human flourishing is that the excellences are fixed. There are fixed excellences toward which human beings strive as the goals of their lives. 

And of course, you know, Aquinas famously incorporates and synthesizes this understanding of what human beings are to a Christian anthropology. He has an extensive discussion of the virtues in the Summa, but it seems to me, again, just to sort of, to answer your question, these questions of human anthropology cannot be resolved by vague appeals to human well-being. They presuppose that human anthropology, it presupposes some account of what it means to be well.

Todd Ream: Thank you. In terms of the virtues then and what they compel one to be and to do, what if anything do human beings owe one another when it comes to human flourishing?

Marc DeGirolami: So I think the question of obligation of what human beings owe one another is a very complicated one. In the law, which is the area that I’m most familiar with, the law incorporates ideas of obligation, of what we owe one another in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of interesting ways. 

So just as a quick example, one of the courses that I teach is tort law. And the primary or one of the central causes of action in tort law is the negligence cause of action and that cause of action when you sue someone in negligence, you have to prove four things. You have to prove that you were injured. You have to prove that the other party breached, that they caused your injury. And then finally, that they breached what? That they breached some obligation, that they breached a duty that they owed to you. 

And the framing the discussion of what it means to owe someone something, I think is an incredibly important part of understanding what tort law and what law is all about, that at least in one tradition, the tradition that we were talking about, incorporates various kinds of human attributes, human qualities, dispositions, behaviors, ways of acting, which are, at least in American law in many jurisdictions, given the term to act with ordinary prudence, to act with ordinary prudence.

It’s not often observed, actually, that, of course, prudence is one of the key sets of virtues that Aristotle describes, right? The fronimos is the person that acts with prudence, that knows how to act in the appropriate way and practical way in a number of situations. 

But I think that there’s a lot in American law, that concept of ordinary prudence, isn’t really spelled out with great particularity. But my own view is that there’s a lot in the ancient tradition of thinking about the virtues that can help contemporary Americans think about just what it is that they owe one another, as a legal matter and as a moral matter.

Todd Ream: Along these lines, then I would appreciate, you know, the opportunity to talk with you at length about what the ramifications are for this way of thinking for any number of sort of relationships that define our society. If I may, though since both of us are teachers and a good number of those, you know, that we try to reach through this conversation are teachers, let’s focus then, if we could, on what do teachers, if anything, owe their students? So when we think about this way of thinking, then, what do teachers perhaps owe their students?

Marc DeGirolami: Well, I think, you’re right, Todd, to emphasize the sort of particularity of relationships, of the relational account of obligation, because obligation presupposes at least a me and a you, right? Some kind of relational account in which both parties might owe obligations to the other.

I think teachers owe students the obligation to open up realms of knowledge to them that have previously remained uncovered. Fundamentally, the teacher-student relationship is about knowledge. It’s about the good of knowledge and the transmission of knowledge, whatever form that takes. And it can take a number of different forms. 

The obligation of the teacher is to make a student’s mind receptive to the transmission of the knowledge in the world and of the past. How to do that, of course, is very complicated. The other thing that I would say is the teacher owes the student the obligation to fire the student’s mind, fire up and excite the student. So whatever it is that the teacher does and whatever sphere of learning the teacher is involved in, the teacher owes the student the obligation to do his or her best to excite the student about the acquisition of knowledge, that there’s a world out there of which the student is not aware and that the student, even if the student doesn’t acquire it in that class, that the student is fired up, excited, you know? 

Firing on all cylinders with a desire, burning with a desire to know. That, I think, if teachers could do that, if they could do that for their students, they would fulfill what I think is the primary obligation of teachers to students and sort of set to the side, anything else, right? If they could do that it would be an achievement in and of itself.

Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask you now about your own calling as a legal scholar. You earned an undergraduate degree from Duke University and then a master’s degree from Harvard University in Romance languages and literature. You earned a JD from Boston University and then an LLM and JSD from Columbia University. So through those experiences, when and how were you called to study the law?

Marc DeGirolami: Yeah, it’s a lot of schooling, Todd.

Todd Ream: Well, I counted up the degrees there.

Marc DeGirolami: It requires some explanation, so I guess what happened to me was that after college, I thought that I was going to be a professor of literature. And I was especially interested in medieval political theory, as manifested or as discussed in the medieval and humanistic tradition. So what I was in line for was a PhD in Dante and Petrarch, in particular, Dante and Petrarch and not so much literary but political. 

And so I went through my general exams in my PhD program. And I was all ready to go with my dissertation, which was going to be on, you know, some issue with respect to Petrarch. And I kind of looked at my future as a number of years in the library alone and not of the world, and I said, I don’t want to do that. I want to be more of the world than what this future looks like. 

And so I took a year off and I was a bartender for that year, an experience that I greatly enjoyed and applied to law school and I went to law school. And I went through my years of law school and I became a practicing lawyer at that point. And as I practiced, I thought, well, I kind of miss this other part of my life. I miss the more scholarly part of my life. It’s the part that even in law school, I was always good at and enjoyed.

And so having tilted in the practical direction, I was kind of moved back slowly to the scholarly direction and over the next few years, I did things in law that I thought might help me professionally with an end or with an end goal in mind. If I got lucky and if I was blessed, to make it into the legal academy and that ended up happening for me, you know, maybe six or seven years after I had made that, that second decision to return to academic life. 

Todd Ream: I want to ask you, in particular, in terms of two experiences and where they fit into this and what impact they may have had. You clerked for William Smith with the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island, and then clerked in Seattle for Jerome Farris with the Ninth District Court of the United States Court of Appeals. Where do they fit into, you know, this unfolding of your calling and what impact did they have on it?

Marc DeGirolami: A very deep impact. I think in our work for lawyers, the chance to clerk for a judge gives a person, a young person, his or her first professional father or mother. So your judge, the person that you work for, doesn’t mean that you worship the person or something like this, but the person is your champion, is your supporter, if the relationship goes well, in a very special kind of way.

And the other thing that it allows a person to do is see the workings of the legal system up close and from the inside on a number of different fronts. So I think for me, it served that professional formation function in both of those judges in different ways.

It’s interesting. My district court judge, the judge that I clerked for, Judge Smith, was at the very, very beginning of his judicial career when he hired me. So he had never been a judge before. He had been a labor lawyer. And so everything was new. Everything was fresh, from the setting up of the office to the, you know, he had never done any criminal cases, so he didn’t know what, for example, sentencing was all about. And so everything had to be arranged. 

And then when I went to Seattle, to clerk for Judge Farris, it was just the opposite kind of experience. Judge Farris is actually a civil rights lawyer, who was a very important lawyer in Seattle for the integration of Seattle schools and a number of those kinds of extremely important questions for the moral transformation of that world, but he was already what we call a senior judge at that point. So he had a very well-established system of doing things. And, and that was another kind of wisdom that I learned, that I got from the experience of working for that judge which I greatly appreciated.

But one last thing that, that these experiences, at least in my case, really helped with or made clear to me that I was just interested in very many kinds of law. So one, a nice thing about clerking is that you are exposed to a very broad variety of cases, all manner of, of federal, as well as, sometimes state issues come across your desk. And that was those two, two and a half years were the time when I realized it’s just, just so interesting. There’s so many interesting things in the law across its variety.

Todd Ream: I want to now ask you about one of those areas that has become of critical interest to you. You mentioned when you started your teaching career and in particular, that was in Queens at St. John’s University. And then you were appointed to your current position there at Catholic University of America.

But over the course of your career, you’ve authored numerous articles and law reviews and popular periodicals, as well as, published the book, The Tragedy of Religious Freedom by Harvard University Press. To start, would you summarize the argument that you make in that book, and then who are you trying to reach with the publication of that book?

Marc DeGirolami: Sure. And maybe I’ll even zoom a little bit further back before I get to the book, which is, I can’t believe it even to say it now, it’s more than, it’s 11 years old. I still feel like I’m, gee, I feel like I’m pretty young, Todd, but I guess maybe not, right? A person that wrote a book 11 years ago maybe isn’t so young.

Anyways, I would say across my work, I would say that there are sort of three themes that run or that connect all of my work. A first theme is the theme of tradition. The idea of tradition and its hold on the popular imagination and on law, on the legal imagination. That’s one.

A second theme concerns the way that I might put this is the ties that bind us. What, what connects us as a country, as a people? What are our foundational commitments? What are the areas of reasonable disagreement that we tolerate and what are areas of disagreement that we don’t tolerate, right? The things that are non-compromisable. 

And then I would say the third overarching theme would be something like the value and limits of theory. What it is the theory that can do for law and what it is that it can never do for law? Because only practice can show us what is really important or true. And I, and I think probably that last theme is the one that I explored most in that book, The Tragedy of Religious Freedom.

I argued there that what I called single value theories of the religion clauses, ones that emphasize, for example, equality or liberty to the exclusion of all other interests, values, traditions, ways of doing and being. Those kinds of theories were incapable of explaining the worth of religion across time and that they inevitably led to large tragic remainders.

And so instead in that book, I argued for a historically informed and particularist decisional method as the approach least likely to sort of flatten or misunderstand these what I call inevitable conflicts between religious freedom and the interests opposing it. And, as I say, that mood or that kind of register of arguing also influences other, other kinds of writing that I’ve done in criminal law and tort law and in other areas.

Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to return now to talk about some of the themes that we talked about at the opening of our conversation in terms of what it means to be human and human flourishing, and in particular, through the experience that you have as the Co-director of the Center for Law and the Human Person.

What led to the formation of the center, and then what led to your appointment as its co-director? 

Marc DeGirolami: So the center was formed in the sort of 2019, 2020, period by the current dean, who was then a very new dean of the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America. And his name was Dean Stephen Payne. As its inaugural director, Dean Payne selected and, and she agreed, Professor Elizabeth Kirk. And so the center was started at that point, I think as part of a set of projects and programs that the new dean had in mind to emphasize, to make central the impact of the Catholic intellectual tradition on the law, to sort of foreground that very broad and rich set of questions as the central questions to which the law school ought to be turning in the new decade and for the foreseeable future.

So that center together with another one called, it was then called the Program on Constitutional Originalism in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, which was focused as a little bit more constitutional, that one, together with the center directed by Professor Kirk, these were all part of the sea change of programmatic changes being made by the university. You know, then COVID hit. And as a result, the launching of the center, the activities of the center, were delayed by a year or two that the center exists as an academic center to host conferences, create programs in student formation for students interested in the relationship of the Catholic intellectual tradition to American law. 

Last year, it so happened that a position became available at the Catholic University. The dean and I had discussions about what that might look like for me and, and included in those discussions was the possibility of co-directing the Center for Law and the Human Person. And that worked out. Professor Kirk was generous enough to permit an interloper to be part of her center and to co-direct it with her and I’ve greatly enjoyed that. 

But I think that the primary remit of the center is one that concerns the unity of knowledge across the university’s domains and that the center really brings together philosophers, theologians, historians, sociologists, many, many people from the main university to discuss together with legal scholars the impact of Catholic thought across all of these domains with the law school as its center. 

So the law school is sort the center is the hub for thinking about these questions concerning human anthropology, epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, the sort of big four, philosophical big four, in a global and unified way, both programmatically with respect to scholarship and with respect to student formation as a particular, a distinctive kind of lawyer that the Catholic University wants to cultivate and graduate.

Todd Ream: What are some of your near and then long-term goals then for the center?

Marc DeGirolami: So the nearest term goal is a conference we have in the works concerning—the title of the conference is St. John Henry Newman, Tradition, and Law. And that conference we are going to be putting on in the fall, it’s a conference that is occurring in connection with the chair, whose name I have, the St. John Henry Newman Professor of Law. And so I’ll be giving my chair lecture then. 

But the, the overarching aim of the conference is again, to bring together theologians, philosophers, and legal academics to discuss the contributions of Cardinal Newman, this brilliant polymath of the Church, who’s a scholar, poet, historian, a theologian, and so on, to think together about what he might have to say concerning law.

So just as an example, Todd, if one thinks about the idea of doctrine, just the notion that doctrine exists, and that it has some kind of binding power over us. You know, there are very few disciplines that speak in this way. Theology does and law does. And Newman had this wonderful treatise on the development of doctrine in which he talked about what were authentic doctrinal developments on the one hand, and then corruptions of doctrine on the other.

And so the idea there is to think about, well, what could we learn from the way that Newman discusses an idea like, like doctrinal development in theology? What could we learn about it for legal purposes? So that’s going to be one kind of immediate short-term project which connects to something that I think a lot about, which is, as I mentioned before, tradition, the influence of tradition and traditional ways of thinking in the law, which has become something of an important issue with respect to the Supreme Court these days, but is in general one of these perennial enduring kinds of questions. So that’s a short-term project. 

Over the longer term, I think that we hope to continue the tradition that we’ve developed of conferences that unite the university departments in thinking about some deep enduring question that cuts across a number of disciplinary areas. And in particular, we hope to revive the tradition of thinking about Catholic intellectual contributions for our students but also for the world of professors, law professors, and others across the country, across the world who are interested in these questions and who don’t necessarily have so many outlets to manifest their interest. So we want to become a kind of center of Catholic intellectual thought, accessible to the world.

Todd Ream: Yeah, very exciting initiatives coming up this fall, but then also what you hope to accomplish in the long-term through the efforts of the center. 

We talked about your calling to the law and to be a legal scholar. And I want to ask you about how you define that sense of vocation and then how it works itself out in various sort of spaces and places. As a legal scholar, just to start, how have you come to define the academic vocation?

Marc DeGirolami: So I would say that the vision of what a Catholic university is and aspires to informs all aspects of the scholarship, the teaching, the university service, that has been a part of my life even before I was at the Catholic University of America. So I was at St. John’s University, which is a Catholic university.

The text that I go to in thinking about these kinds of questions, the kind of questions that you ask is Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the apostolic letter by Pope John Paul II. And what he says is this, I, in preparation for this, for this question, I, I look back at the text and, and permit me just to read a little portion of it to you and your listeners.

He says, “A Catholic university must become more attentive to the cultures of the world of today and to the various cultural traditions existing within the Church in a way that will promote a continuous and profitable dialogue between the Gospel and modern society. Among the criteria that characterize the values of a culture are, above all, the meaning of the human person.” This is what we just, just discussed in anthropology. “His or her liberty, dignity, sense of responsibility.” Again, you had asked about obligation, Todd, before. “And openness to the transcendent.” 

So I would say my vocation as a teacher and scholar, I hope, will be able to come to full flower, to flourish in the evangelizing and teaching mission of the Church. And I think that I can contribute something from all of the themes in my work and from others that I hope will develop in a life of, of loving service to my students, to the law school, to the university, to the Church, and to Christ.

Todd Ream: In what ways then do you believe those commitments as exercised by the academic vocation to the university and to the Church relate to one another? We often think of themselves, them as being in separate spheres, but it sounds like you argue that in some ways, they’re inextricable from each other or at certain points they become inextricable.

Marc DeGirolami: Yes, I do believe that, and I think even in the questions that we have batted around together that you have asked me, even questions about obligation, what we owe one another, or how we think about anthropology, or how we think about any one of the relationship of freedom to truth, for example. These are questions that come up regularly in the teaching of law and they come up in the teaching of everything, most likely, but I know about the teaching of law. And oftentimes, they are simply ignored or there isn’t time for them because there are other requirements. Doctrine has to be passed on. Students have to learn what they need to know in order to pass tests, become competent lawyers.

But part of becoming not just a competent lawyer, but a good lawyer is and must be at some point to connect to some of those deep questions because they are there. They’re there in virtually everything that we do and everything that we teach and everything that we think about and they cannot be disaggregated, separated out without great damage to the human psyche and to one’s understanding, the correspondence of what one knows to the truth.

Todd Ream: Thank you. When you think about how you express your vocation in terms of the practice of scholarship and service, how do you determine the audiences, then, you’re seeking to serve and nuance, perhaps, the message accordingly for them?

Marc DeGirolami: So I think this is a very difficult and important question. And I would say for students, students are coming from different kinds of places with different sorts of assumptions and backgrounds and knowledge bases. And so the approach toward incorporating some of this learning, some of this knowledge that we’ve been talking about, I take inspiration from C. S. Lewis and his, some of his books on, for example, his Mere Christianity, where he will introduce a quite deep and provocative point of, let’s say, theology or morality through a simple example and one that can connect that, to which students can, through which students can connect from a variety of backgrounds.

Here’s one, one quick example. Oftentimes in law, people will say, don’t impose your morality on me through law. That’s not an appropriate thing for the law to do. Well, in order to think well about that question and what kinds of laws are and are not appropriate, one has to have a fairly strong account of what morality is, and getting at that question is something I think Lewis was particularly able to do in some of his writing and when we talked together with my students, about things like what morality means—some of his insights are ways to bring students into a conversation that they might not otherwise have realized that they actually had access to. 

I think that has been the style or the model that I’ve tried to use in teaching. In scholarship, you know, my primary area of scholarship is as a law and religion scholar. So I think it’s probably fair to say that my approach to law and religion issues has been one of integration of these fields, to show how much these disciplines have to say to one another, how many connections there are. 

So, you know, in American law and religion, there was for many years, a strong separationist, not just law, but mood or disposition that these fields are distinct, that they shouldn’t be integrated. And I think, since you ask, as a scholar, my work has consistently been about trying to show the connections. And even more than that, in many ways, the unity of these two disciplines as sources of meaning, sources of truth, sources of authority in our world today.

Todd Ream: Thank you. When sharing these ideas, there’s a myriad of ways and means, really, to go about sharing them. How do you determine how to match the message, then, with the means of sharing the message when there’s so many options today?

Marc DeGirolami: I think this is another excellent question, and one that I’ve been struggling with a little bit because to this point, my own academic work has largely been for other academics so the audience that I have been speaking to, you know, the primary audience, if not the exclusive audience, other than of course, you know, my mother or something like this for my first book, was academics—academics deeply invested in an already knowledgeable about religion-clause doctrine, the operations of the Supreme Court, and so on. 

I’m now writing a new book on tradition, the idea of tradition and the law, and I’m trying something new. I don’t know whether it will work, but I’m trying to reach a broader audience. And I’m incorporating ideas and speaking in a register that I hope will be more accessible, more accessible to people who are interested in legal questions, but are also interested in questions like, why do we continue to do the same things that we’ve always done in areas like cooking or carpentry or winemaking or the crafting of beer and on and on and on.

 And I don’t know if I’m going to be able to carry it off because that’s a hard transformation for academics. But I do think that I have the privilege, I have the blessing to be able to work in a kind of work that allows for that kind of thing, to reach a broader audience. And so I’ll do my best.

Todd Ream: Thank you. As we close our conversation today, I want to ask you, then, about, again, about students and the next generation of legal scholars and their cultivation of their sense of the academic vocation. What do you believe the university owes them and what do you believe the Church owes them in terms of their formation?

Marc DeGirolami: Well, it’s easier to answer what the university owes them than what the Church owes them but in my view as to the university and as to what my university owes them, maybe I can answer with a specific anecdote. 

One of the unusual things about teaching in a law school is that it is possible to teach a great variety of different subjects. So I had mentioned that I teach and have taught tort law. I’ve taught criminal law. I’ve taught legal ethics. I’ve taught constitutional law. I’ve taught First Amendment law, a very broad array in some public law areas, some private law areas. And one of the things that I started to notice about five or six years ago, is that my students had the same kinds of questions, deep questions, going to the roots, or the deep places in the law. 

Questions like, what do we mean by duty? What is intention or state of mind? What does it mean to say that something is objective as opposed to subjective? What’s the nature of morality? How do we balance equality and freedom? What does it mean when we say someone has a right to do something? All of these occur across the curriculum. They occur in different ways. They’re elicited, these questions are elicited by different materials, but they are universals. 

And one of the things that I think that a university owes law students is a course or more going to the deep places in the law so that students, at least the ones that are interested but even the ones that don’t know that they’re interested yet, have a place to go to explore these kinds of matters. 

I think, at the very least, the Church, with respect to the university, a Catholic university or a Christian university, owes it, in addition to students, to answer, to explore questions about God. What is the relationship of God, of the transcendent, of the Christian transcendent, to my life? How will I be able to integrate my life in service to God, in service to the Church, in service to Jesus Christ, within a professional discipline that demands so much of me that seems to be or might be at odds with, or at least in tension with these other kinds of commitments. I think if a Catholic university can do that for its students, it will be offering them a great, great help and a great, great service. 

Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been Marc O. DeGirolami, the St. John Henry Newman Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Law and the Human Person at Catholic University of America. Thank you for sharing your insights and wisdom with us.

Marc DeGirolami: Todd, it was a great pleasure to be with you. Thank you so much for having me. 

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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.