{"id":5157,"date":"2009-05-15T10:27:19","date_gmt":"2009-05-15T15:27:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=5157"},"modified":"2009-05-18T10:57:14","modified_gmt":"2009-05-18T15:57:14","slug":"empathy-and-catholic-legal-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2009\/05\/empathy-and-catholic-legal-theory\/","title":{"rendered":"Empathy and Catholic Legal Theory"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Mirror of Justice<\/a>, Rob Vischer of St. Thomas wonders about the role of empathy in Catholic legal theory. After referring to Orin Kerr’s <\/a>summation of different responses to legal ambiguity, Rob asks:<\/p>\n

Wasn’t Brown v. Board of Education<\/em> driven by empathy, not just the weighing of legal merits?\u00a0 How about Meyer<\/em> and Pierce<\/em>?\u00a0 Is the recognition that “the child is not the mere creature of the state” as a rationale for a judicial decision\u00a0driven solely by legal merit, or something else?\u00a0 And what about abortion?\u00a0 There are lots of Supreme Court decisions that reflect weak constitutional interpretation, but calls for the Court to overturn Roe v. Wade<\/em> are not just about remedying bad interpretation, are they?\u00a0 Aren’t we also asking judges to empathize with the unborn in recognizing the need to overturn Roe<\/em>?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Putting aside Roe <\/em>(which I think is all about weak constitutional interpretation), Rob’s point goes to the idea that I was trying to explore yesterday about cabined empathy. It can be, to borrow Ed Fallone’s phrase again, useful in reasoning from undisputed (or at least a judge’s accepted) first principles. It isn’t that empathy creates an obligation of equal protection, but it does help us see the flaw in Justice Henry Billings Brown’s (who remembers that name?)\u00a0assertion in Plessy<\/em> that the badge of inferiority arising from\u00a0Jim Crow exists “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Although I have argued against Justice O’Connor’s endorsement test in Establishment Clause cases, empathy might help us see that the harms stemming from government endorsement of religious principles flow as well from the government’s disapproval of those\u00a0principles.<\/p>\n

The endorsement test is a useful example, I think, because it also demonstrates the danger in interpretive methods that do not sufficiently bound empathy and the predilections of the judge. As was true of so much of Justice O’Connor’s jurisprudence, the test maximizes judicial discretion. It tells the judge to prohibit endorsement but then defines\u00a0the concept in a way that alows the judge to completely contruct its\u00a0presence or absence.\u00a0The court is\u00a0not to look\u00a0at whether real people\u00a0perceive the endorsement of religion but whether a person of the judge’s imagining – someone who is familar with the\u00a0text of the first amendment and the history and purpose of the challenged practive – ought to perceive. Not surprisingly the test came to be\u00a0known by the acronym of WWSD – What Would Sandra Do?<\/p>\n

Maybe Catholic legal thought has something to tell us about this as well. Subsidiarity can be a maddeningly elastic notion, but doesn’t it remind us that the courts are only one of the institutions ordained to create justice and that they ought to\u00a0operate within their sphere of authority. If that’s so, then using, in Orin’s phrase,\u00a0any “appreciable\u00a0legal ambiguity” to rule in a way that “furthers whatever normative vision of the law that the judge happens to like” is problematic from the perspective of Catholic legal theory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Mirror of Justice, Rob Vischer of St. Thomas wonders about the role of empathy in Catholic legal theory. After referring to Orin Kerr’s summation of different responses to legal ambiguity, Rob asks: Wasn’t Brown v. Board of Education driven by empathy, not just the weighing of legal merits?\u00a0 How about Meyer and Pierce?\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,67,68,31,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-constitutional-interpretation","category-first-amendment","category-judges-judicial-process","category-religion-law","category-us-supreme-court","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}