"Notre Dame Law School is the perfect place to explore the issues that capture the hearts and minds of our society, churches and families. At the center of these issues are fundamental questions about the place of religion in culture, and the relationship of law and morality. Teaching seminars on these issues, I find that I learn as much from my students as they do from me."

M. Cathleen Kaveny

John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law

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Office Number: 325 Law School
Telephone: 574.631.7844
Fax: 574.631.4197
Email: M.Cathleen.Kaveny.1@nd.edu
Staff Assistant: LuAnn Nate

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Professor M. Cathleen Kaveny, a scholar who focuses on the relationship of law and morality, joined the Notre Dame Law School faculty as an associate professor in 1995 and was named the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law in 2001. She earned her A.B. summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1984, and holds four graduate degrees from Yale University including her M.A. (1986), M.Phil (1990), J.D. (1990) and Ph.D. (1991). A member of the Massachusetts Bar since 1993, Professor Kaveny clerked for the Honorable John T. Noonan Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and worked as an associate at the Boston law firm of Ropes & Gray in its health-law group.

Professor Kaveny teaches contract law to first-year law students. She also teaches a number of seminars which explore the relationship between theology, philosophy, and law. One seminar, “Mercy and Justice,” explores those concepts using texts drawn from caselaw, analytic philosophy, Byzantine history, as well as both medieval and contemporary theology. Another seminar, “Ethics and Law at the End of Life,” looks at the issues of assisted suicide and euthanasia from an interdisciplinary perspective. She regularly teaches both undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of Theology.

Professor Kaveny has published over forty articles and essays, in journals and books specializing in law, ethics, and medical ethics. She has served on a number of editorial boards including The American Journal of Jurisprudence, The Journal of Religious Ethics, the Journal of Law and Religion, and The Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. She has been a Senior Fellow at the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago (2002-2003) and the Royden B. Davis Visiting Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University (1998). Professor Kaveny is a member of the Steering Committee of the Catholic Common Ground Initiative, which was founded by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin to help overcome polarization within the Catholic Church). She also serves on the advisory board of the University’s Erasmus Institute, created in 1997 to focus on reinvigorating the role of religiously-based intellectual traditions in contemporary scholarship.

LAW60105, Contracts

LAW70844, Faith, Morality & Law Seminar

LAW73827, Mercy & Justice Seminar

LAW73829, Ethics & Law at the End of Life

LAW73830, Complicity Seminar

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Faculty Expertise Areas

• Contracts

Books in Progress

Casuistry and Prophesy: A Case Study in Medical Ethics

Other People’s Wrongdoing: The Problem of Complicity

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Representative Articles

The NBAC Report on Cloning: A Case Study in Religion, Public Policy, and Bioethics, forthcoming in Faith at the Frontiers, David Guinn, ed., forthcoming Oxford University Press.

Erastian and High Church Approaches to the Law: The Jurisprudential Categories of Robert E. Rodes, Jr., 22 Journal of Law and Religion 405-32 (2007).

Prophecy and Casuistry: Abortion, Torture and Moral Discourse, 51 Villanova Law Review 499 (2006).

Inferring Intention from Foresight, Law Quarterly Review 120 (January 2004) 81-107.

Autonomy, Solidarity and Law’s Pedagogy, Louvain Studies 27:4 (winter 2002) 339-58).

Conjoined Twins and Catholic Moral Analysis: Extraordinary Means and Casuistical Consistency, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 12:2 (June 2002) 115-40.

Billable Hours In Ordinary Time: A Theological Critique of the Instrumentalization of Time in Professional Life (the Baker-McKenzie Lecture in Ethics at Loyola University Chicago Law School), Loyola University Chicago Law Journal 33 (Fall 2001) 173-220.

Religious Claims and the Dynamics of Argument, Wake Forrest Law Review 36:2 (2001) 423-48 (part of a symposium“Religiously Grounded Morality: Its Proper Role in American Law and Public Policy”).

Appropriation of Evil: Cooperation’s Mirror Image, Theological Studies 61 (June 2000) 280-313.

Commodifying the Polyvalent Good of Health Care, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 24:3 (1999) 207-23.

Managed Care, Assisted Suicide, and Vulnerable Populations, Notre Dame Law Review 73:5 (July 1998) 1275-1310 (part of a symposium honoring Mary Ann Glendon).

Assisted Suicide, the Supreme Court, and the Constitutive Function of the Law, Hastings Center Report (September/October 1997).