The Catholic Court Appeal
Why So Many Catholic Justices on the Supreme Court? Why Now?
by Robert F. Cochran, Jr.
The Supreme Court has been dominated since the founding of our country by mainline Protestants, but with Samuel Alito joining Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and John Roberts, five of the nine justices are now Catholics. All five have been appointed in the last 20 years. In the previous 200 years, only seven Catholics have served on the Court.
There may be political explanations for the attractiveness of Catholic justices, but I think three Catholic doctrines—natural law, subsidiarity, and religious freedom—help to explain why a majority of the justices are now Catholic. My argument is not that citizens who support, presidents who appoint, and senators who confirm these justices consciously do so because they want Catholic religious beliefs on the Court, but that these doctrines yield habits of thinking that make Catholics attractive candidates to the broad range of the American people.
I write as an Evangelical, but one who has come to share a commitment to the Catholic doctrines that I will mention.
Written on Our Hearts
Natural law teaches that humans were created with a nature and that through reason we can discern moral values as well as laws that conform to that nature and enable us to live the fullest lives.
As the Catholic moral philosopher Robert P. George has defined it, natural-law theory holds that the world offers us
ends or purposes that, as basic aspects of human well-being and fulfillment, are intrinsically valuable. These goods can, in principle, be grasped by any rational person whose judgment is not deflected by ideology or prejudice, or compromised by carelessness, inattentiveness, or any of the other intellectual failings that can defeat sound understanding in any field of inquiry.
With the virtue of practical reason, legislators and judges can serve the common good by devising systems of law that promote these basic aspects of human flourishing.
Paul referred to the natural law in Romans 2:15, when he wrote that the Gentiles “show that what the law requires is written in their hearts.” Natural law’s most dominant proponent through the ages has been Thomas Aquinas. Pre-Christian proponents included Aristotle and Cicero. Influential proponents today include the Catholic philosophers John Finnis, Robert George, and Russell Hittinger.
Robert F. Cochran, Jr. is the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law and Director of the Institute on Law, Religion, and Ethics at Pepperdine University of Law. He is the co-editor, with Michael McConnell and Angela Carmella, of Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought (Yale University Press, 2001). He, his wife Denise, and their three children are Evangelical Christians.
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