Religion & Law

Should Torts class look different at a Catholic law school than at Big State U Law School?  In the ideal world, there may not be much of a difference, assuming that Big State U is willing to spend time getting students to explore deeper issues about the relationship between tort liability and human dignity, the common good, etc.  I'm not sure that requires much time spent with explicitly "Catholic" sources, but it probably does require spending more time with moral and political theory than most Torts profs (including me) do.  For example, Georgia law prof Jason Solomon has posted a new paper, Equal Accountability Through Tort Law.  The paper has nothing to say about Catholic legal theory explicitly, but at the same time, it is a perfect example of the type of questions that Catholic legal theory should be asking.  Here's a bit from the text:

To act against another who has carelessly harmed you is to object to the violation of the terms of social interaction, to complain about someone who has taken too much of his share of liberty in violation of your security. And by responding, one reinforces the obligation that others have to moderate the pursuit of their ends in recognition of your right to pursue your own. A lack of response, one might say, could be a signal that the terms of social interaction are not important, or at least not worth upholding when applied to you. That's why people often encourage us to act against one who was wronged us. "You should call him out on that," a friend or colleague might advise us. By acting against the wrongdoer, one demands respect.

This is what [Stephen] Darwall refers to as ?recognition respect? -- respect not for one's good character or a job well done, but simply respect for another as an equal in a moral community. Indeed, in interviews after Carol Ernst's trial, jurors voiced anger at the lack of "respect" Merck showed for its customers by not disclosing all of Vioxx?s risks. Richard Epstein, who wrote a scornful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal after the Ernst verdict called "Ambush in Angleton," referenced these comments by jurors as if it was self-evident that such a lack of respect -- whatever it meant -- could not possibly have anything to do with tort law. But he might be wrong.

UPDATE:  Eric Brauer comments:

In my first year torts class, we used Epstein's book for the text. As you can imagine, it had a heavily libertarian and law and economics tilt. Our professor said his reasoning for this was because using such a perspective, as you can imagine, really helped students "make a choice."

Law and economics, as well as legal realism, have both had a large influence on our legal system. To some extent, I think both philosophies are incomplete from a Catholic perspective. So with regard to a torts class, perhaps a good project would be to deal with whether economics, or utility, is really all there is in formulating the law.