Osler's Razor

I am devoting Wednesdays to profiling my classmates in the Yale Law class of 1990. I remember some more than others, but they are all pretty fascinating now!

Prof. Cathleen Kaveny of Boston College was one of my classmates who was pursuing two degrees at once. She got her law degree from Yale in 1990, and a Ph.D. in ethics a year later. Her dissertation was titled "Neutrality about the Good Life v. the Common Good: MacIntyre, the Supreme Court and Liberalism as a Living Tradition," which sounds absolutely fascinating (Alasdair MacIntyre was a Scottish philosopher).

This all was coming after undergrad at Princeton, and was followed by a clerkship with Ninth Circuit legend John Noonan. After that she did the usual three-year stint (for our class, anyways) with a big law firm, Ropes & Gray in Boston.

Then she got where she belongs: in the academy, pushing students and ideas to new places. For nearly 20 years, from 1995 to 2013, she was a professor at Notre Dame, before moving to Boston College where she is the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor of Law and Theology. Along the way, she has had visiting professorships and fellowships at Yale, Princeton, Georgetown, and the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago. [Side note- how does one become a Senior Fellow at the Martin Marty Center? And how should I address my pleading letter regarding same?]

She is the author of four meaty books, published by the presses at Oxford, Harvard, and Georgetown, and has written for both the Washington Post and New York Times along the way. In each, she combines issues of faith, ethics and law-- a familiar place for me.

Actually, for a place that is thought of as profoundly secular, Yale law--and our class in particular-- seems to have a fair number of people actively engaged in a faith vocation. Just among those I have profiled so far we have, for example, Rev. Cornell Brooks, Rev. Kelly Carlson, and Catholic super-scholar Lucia Sillechia. I'm glad to add Prof. Kaveny to that list.