Featured Faculty: Nicole Stelle Garnett
Notre Dame tells prospective students that we educate a “different kind of lawyer.” Given the reputation of the bar these days, I hope that we hold true to our promise. But, I think that it might be more accurate to say that Notre Dame strives to be different kind of law school. We begin, as all great law schools, with a commitment to providing the high caliber legal education that our students need to excel professionally. And, we aim for excellence in scholarship. We have assembled a great group of scholars here who are productive, energetic and who really enrich and enliven our intellectual environment. Interacting with my colleagues makes me a better teacher and scholar.
But these things are, at Notre Dame, only the beginning. Here, I hope, we are different at the core: Notre Dame Law School is striving to be truly unique. Our faculty cares intensely about the mission and identity of Notre Dame—that is to be both truly great and distinctively Catholic. For us, excellence in teaching is research is necessary, but not sufficient. For example, imparting the knowledge that my students will need to be good lawyers is only the beginning of my job as a teacher. Notre Dame’s unique mission demands that I do more – asking me to engage difficult, first-order questions with my students: What are its moral foundations? Is it just? Does it serve the common good? It also asks me to do what I can, inside and outside of the classroom, to encourage my students to view the law as a vocation, and not just a career, and also to exceed their own expectations for themselves, as students, as lawyers, and—most importantly—as people.
At Notre Dame, we also are called to understand scholarly excellence as the beginning, not the end, of our academic aspirations. I am a better scholar because I interact each day with colleagues who share my commitment to the University’s mission. We seek to build a distinctive scholarly community where intellectual inquiry is truly open to all questions, and our shared commitments form a foundation of understanding that enable us to engage important issues more completely than we might elsewhere.
For more information about Professor Garnett, visit her faculty profile page.
