Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Journal of Law and Religion
Publication Date
7-2023
ISSN
0748-0814
Page Number
189
Keywords
Catholicism, legal liberalism, Vietnam War, Catholic left, legal culture
Disciplines
Law | Law and Society | Religion Law
Abstract
In this article, I bring the history of Catholic radicalism into conversation with legal history. Although there is an extensive historical literature on Catholic responses to the Vietnam War and other 1960s upheavals, this historiography has remained siloed from legal scholarship. Legal scholars (particularly outside of Catholic legal circles) have devoted little attention to figures like Merton, Furfey, and participants in the Catholic “ultraresistance” against the Vietnam War. In scholarly accounts of how social movements remade and reacted to constitutional law, Catholic activism is typically discussed, if at all, in the context of contraception and abortion debates. In broad outlines, the pro-life movement fits the recognizable paradigm in which a social movement organizes around a long-term goal of reversing adverse Supreme Court precedent. Catholic antiwar mobilization may appear less relevant to legal history precisely because its participants were often performatively uninterested in law. But even if their engagement took the form of critique, figures on and around the Catholic left also circulated ideas about the relationship between law, society, and political change. By expanding conceptions of what it means to be involved in legal history, it is possible to see that these figures also partook in American legal culture, in important if unconventional ways. Religious and social historians have developed rich accounts of the Catholic left’s experiences as targets of the law, which can also be mined for insight into these figures’ ideas and attitudes about the law in contrast with the mainstream legal liberalism of the 1960s.
Recommended Citation
Sara Mayeux,
Make All the Laws You Want: The Catholic Left Against Legal Liberalism, Circa 1968, 38 Journal of Law and Religion. 189
(2023)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty-publications/1533