Osler's Razor

I've devoted Wednesdays on the blog to profiling my classmates in the Yale Law class of '90. It's been a great adventure tracking them down and finding out the fascinating paths they have followed!

One thing I learned pretty quickly at Yale Law was that the loudest people were not always (or even often) the smartest.  Once you got to know them, the quieter people sometimes had the insights that would really change your mind about something. Lucia Silecchia was one of those people.

She came to Yale law from Queens College, which is part of the City College of New York. (Queens was also the alma mater of my legal writing instructor TA at Yale, Raymond Paretzky, who was also a Rhodes Scholar).  Lucia was someone who had a connection to me; we both saw a deep link between law and faith. In fact, we still travel in the same circles and see each other every few years at conferences.

Just a year after our graduation, in 1991, Lucia began teaching at Catholic University's law school. She is still there-- a professional stability that is unique amongst our class!  One of her specialties is Catholic social thought and the law, and her writing in the area is fascinating. Recently, she has started a bi-weekly column in Catholic newspapers titled "In Ordinary Times." You can see the most recent column here, and previous columns are available here. I love the way that she writes, using simple lines that cut deeply into complicated issues. Because I work at a Catholic school, too, many of my colleagues follow her work with a certain understandable reverence.

There were a few of us in the class (including Rich Sullivan and Cornell William Brooks) who were conscious of our own faith as we navigated law school. Lucia, though, has had a through-line in her life and career that stands out like a beam of light. People like her offer moral guideposts to the rest of us, rooted in a thoughtful tradition that is two millennia old.

Maybe it shouldn't be surprising that she did not end up wandering around as much as the rest of us.