Featured Faculty: Anthony J. Bellia Jr.
At first glance, what most impresses about Professor A.J. Bellia is his stellar résumé. In law school, he was a top student and editor-in-chief of the Notre Dame Law Review. After graduation, he clerked for judges at all three levels of the federal court system—including a U.S. Supreme Court justice. He practiced with a private firm in Washington D.C. before returning to Notre Dame to join the Law School faculty in 2000.
Since then, law students have voted him Professor of the Year not once, but twice. And if you talk to Bellia’s students, they’ll tell you it isn’t the credentials but the man that most impresses them.
“The first thing that strikes you about A.J. is his personal decency, and his ability to give anyone who’s in front of him attention and time,” says Conor Dugan ’03, an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice whose three years of law school coincided with Bellia’s first three years of teaching. “Something that my classmates and I saw in him from day one was his personal integrity. Here was a guy who was thinking about the big questions and trying to live out the answers himself.”
In the classroom, Bellia often helped students tease out the moral implications of their positions, Dugan remembers. “He did a very good job of drawing out the different strands of a discussion, hearing people out fairly and letting ideas bubble up. That’s not to say that he doesn’t have strong views—I think he does. But it’s combined with an ability to see the best in people and engage them where they’re coming from.”
Bellia’s enthusiasm makes topics like contracts, civil procedure and federalism come alive, according to students. “I walked in to law school with an idea of what classes I was going to like and what classes I was going to hate,” says Krista Yee ’08. To her surprise, Yee enjoyed her first-year contracts course with Bellia so much that she took a job as his research assistant, examining the roots of federalism in 18th-century U.S. and English law. “It was interesting,” she says. “I’ve learned so much from him and I’m so grateful. He taught me a lot about legal research.”
Bellia pursues teaching and research with equal passion, but tries to balance professional and personal commitments in a healthy way. He urges Notre Dame graduates to do the same. “The legal profession is a challenging one and it imposes great demands,” says Bellia. “I hope that as my former students pursue careers in law, they do not overlook their other primary responsibilities in life—to family, church, community—but remember that performing those well may generate the most significant contributions they will make.”
To learn more about Professor Bellia, visit his faculty profile page.
