Susan J. Stabile (University of St. Thomas) has published The Practice of Law as Response to God's Call, 32 Seattle U. L. Rev. 389 (2009). Here is part of the Introduction:
My writing in recent years has explored the question of what Catholic social thought and Catholic legal theory add to our consideration of various legal questions. That project proceeds from the premise that faith and religion are not to be relegated to church on Sunday (or temple on Saturday, or other equivalents); rather, faith and religion are relevant to our actions in the world. In the words of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, …
When the subject is the practice of law, or, indeed, any kind of work, the faith perspective is very different from the secular one. The secular world tends to think of work narrowly. Work is typically viewed as separate from our spiritual life (whatever form that spirituality takes). However, the calling of all Catholics is to transform the world into the Kingdom of God. That means that work is not separate from who we are as human beings. Rather, work is how we participate in the act of creation and how we fulfill the reality of our creation in the image of God. Thus legal practice, like all human work, is a religious calling, a vocation.
Section I of this Article will focus on work as a calling. Although I refer in my title to the practice of law as a response to God's call, I suggest that even those who are uncomfortable with the use of religious language can share a notion of law as a calling. Section II will address the need to discern one's place in the legal profession. Implicit in the notion of a calling is that our professional decisions are not merely internally driven, but are in response to an action from a God who calls to us. That reality demands an active reflectiveness about who we are meant to be as lawyers. Finally, Section III will identify some particular influences on the practice of law that proceed from a Catholic religious perspective (the perspective out of which I operate).
