Featured Faculty: Richard Garnett
Notre Dame Professor of Law Richard Garnett reflects on why he chooses to teach and pursue scholarship at NDLS.
“Since joining the faculty of the Notre Dame Law School, I have been blessed with inspiring mentors, stimulating colleagues, and gifted students. With their help, I have pursued the goals of enriching and shaping those conversations of which I am a part, contributing to the administration of justice and my fellow citizens’ understanding of the nature of the legal enterprise, and helping this University become what the world needs it to be.
“It is worth remembering that, at the end of the day, most law schools and most universities – indeed, most institutions – don’t really matter. Many do very good work, of course, but they are, for the most part, fungible and replaceable. The University of Notre Dame, though, is different; it does matter, and it matters because it aspires to do and be something interesting and distinctive: a University that is engaged, open, critical, and great precisely by being Catholic. It is a good thing for the academy, for society, for the Church, and for the legal profession that Notre Dame has taken on the challenge of mattering.
“Among my goals as a scholar and teacher is to encourage my students to value and to live not only a ‘balanced’ life but also an integrated life. As we all know, there are many unhappy lawyers. And while there’s no silver-bullet solution to the problem, surely one cause is a tendency – or, perhaps, the pressure – to disintegrate our lives in the law, to separate too sharply what we do from what we care about. It seems to me, though, that a ‘Notre Dame lawyer’ should try to hold together, in a rich and reinforcing way, his or her work, neighborhood, polity, family, and faith community. And so, I try to challenge my students to live their lives in the law as whole persons. Inspired by the work of my colleague, Tom Shaffer, I urge them to resist the temptation to ‘check at the door’ their commitments, histories, ideals, relationships, and identities. I propose to my students that they regard being a lawyer as a vocation, and not merely as a well-paid occupation. This way of framing the legal enterprise has, I believe, profound implications: Students are pushed to evaluate their own practices and goals in light of the common good, not just their own status or advancement; to regard the law’s substantive content not simply as a given set of tools, but as the manifestation of the larger and continuing human project of trying to order well our lives together; and to take up the challenge of being teachers themselves, by instructing their friends, families, and fellow citizens about those principles and values that are essential to the health of a community that aspires to live under the rule of law.
“Where better to do all this than at Notre Dame?”
