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A Quandary In Law? A (Qualified) Catholic Denial, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
A Quandary In Law? A (Qualified) Catholic Denial, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
Patrick McKinley Brennan
A contribution to the second law review symposium dedicated to Steven Smith’s Law’s Quandary (Harvard 2004), this paper asks whether the “quandary” in which Smith finds modern law and jurisprudence is not, at least in part, the consequence of misunderstanding the classical natural law jurisprudence. The paper advances an interpretation of natural law according to which the natural law is the human person’s “participation” in the eternal law itself, with literally cosmic consequences for how we understand the ends and measures of human lawmaking. Mounting an argument against Justice Scalia’s thesis that “God applies the natural law,” the paper goes …
The Decreasing Ontological Density Of The State In Catholic Social Doctrine, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
The Decreasing Ontological Density Of The State In Catholic Social Doctrine, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
Patrick McKinley Brennan
Over the last century-plus, Catholic social thought has gradually reduced the ontological density of the state, to the point that the state now appears to have only a tentative grasp on the natural law basis of its legitimacy. During the first part of the twentieth century, Catholic social doctrine tended to view the legitimate state as a participant in the divine rule; although draped in a sacred mantle, the state was subject to the limits imposed by the divine and natural law. In response to the totalitarian states’ transgressing of those limits at mid-century, Catholic thinkers reduced the scope and …