Patrick McKinley Brennan, a native of California, joined the Villanova faculty in 2004 as the first holder of the John F. Scarpa Chair in Catholic Legal Studies, following eight years on the faculty of the Arizona State University College of Law, where for a time he served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and later as Vice Dean. Professor Brennan is the author or co-author of more than thirty articles, essays, and book chapters that study questions in jurisprudence, American public law, law and religion, and Catholic social thought. Professor Brennan is one of the nation's leading scholars working at the intersection of law, religion, and philosophy. Professor Brennan's writings have appeared in the reviews of the Villanova, Michigan, Notre Dame, Boston College, Catholic University of America, St. John's University, and Emory law schools, and in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Jurisprudence, Law and Philosophy, Lonergan Workshop, and The Journal of Law and Religion. Professor Brennan wrote the chapter on (and edited the primary source material of) Jacques Maritain for the two-volume study The Teachings of Modern Christianity on Law, Politics, and Human Nature (Columbia University Press 2006). Professor Brennan is the co-author of By Nature Equal: The Anatomy of a Western Insight (Princeton 1999) and the editor of After Authority (forthcoming, Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington, 2007). Professor Brennan is currently the co-director of a study on "The Vocation of the Child" for Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion." Professor Brennan is an elected member of the editorial board of the American Journal of Jurisprudence. In 2006, Professor Brennan was elected to serve a three-year term on the Executive Council of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Among the courses Professor Brennan has taught on a regular basis are Federal Courts, Administrative Law, Criminal Law, and Jurisprudence. He has offered seminars on such topics as sovereign immunity; law and morality and love; legal epistemology; and the teachings of modern Christianity (Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox) on law, politics, and human nature. Professor Brennan received his B.A. in philosophy from Yale College (with honors as well as distinction in the major), where he also studied Greek and Latin and won the Jacob Cooper Prize in Ancient Greek philosophy for his paper on the doctrine of analogy in Aristotle's Metaphysics. He wrote his senior thesis on the metaphysics of relation in the thought of Francisco Suarez and John of St. Thomas. Professor Brennan then earned an M.A. and pursued doctoral course work in philosophy at the University of Toronto, taking many of his courses in the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Professor Brennan earned his J.D., Order of the Coif, from the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, where he won awards in Torts, Corporations, Political Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Public Law, and Water Law. After law school, Professor Brennan clerked for the Honorable John T. Noonan, Jr., on the United States Court of Appeals in San Francisco and later was associated with major law firms in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Professor Brennan is a member of the State Bar of California. In addition to having lectured at more than two dozen law schools, Professor Brennan has served as a visiting professor in the Boston College Law School, held the Chair for the Culture of Law in the Intercultural Forum for Studies in Faith and Culture at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., and served as a Scholar in Residence at the Columbus School of Law, The Catholic University of America. Professor Brennan has also been a senior research fellow at the Robbins Collection of Canon and Civil Law at U.C. Berkeley. In 2006, Professor Brennan delivered the Brendan F. Brown Lecture at The Catholic University of America. Professor Brennan is a frequent commentator on matters concerning the Catholic Church in American law and politics. Brennan blogs at Mirror of Justice.
Articles
A Quandary in Law? A (Qualified) Catholic Denial, Villanova University Legal Working Paper Series (2007)
A contribution to the second law review symposium dedicated to Steven Smith’s Law’s Quandary (Harvard...
Harmonizing Plural Societies: The Cases of Lasallians, Families, Schools – and the Poor, Villanova University Legal Working Paper Series (2007)
The modern state characteristically assumes or asserts a monopoly over “group persons” and their right...
The Decreasing Ontological Density of the State in Catholic Social Doctrine, Villanova University Legal Working Paper Series (2006)
Over the last century-plus, Catholic social thought has gradually reduced the ontological density of the...
Against Sovereignty: A Cautionary Note on the Normative Power of the Actual, Villanova University Legal Working Paper Series (2006)
Drawing on classical and contemporary jurisprudence and political philosophy, this Essay argues that the Roberts...
Asking the Right Questions: Harnessing the Insights of Bernard Lonergan for the Rule of Law (lead article), Journal of Law and Religion (2006)
Books
AFTER AUTHORITY (with Avery Cardinal Dulles, Russell Hittinger, John Coons, Steven Smith, Thomas Kohler, J. Budziszewski, Joseph Vining, Michael J. White, and Glenn Tinder) (2007)
Book Chapters
Jacques Maritain: Philosopher of Law, Politics, and All That Is, The Teachings of Modern Christianity on Law, Politics and Human Nature (2006)
Book Reviews
Review, of David Yamane, "The Catholic Church in State Politics: Negotiating Prophetic Demands & Political Realities" (Rowman & Littlefield 2005), American Catholic Studies (2006)
"Meaning's Edge, Love's Priority," review of J.B. White, "The Edge of Meaning," (University of Chicago Press 2002). , Michigan Law Review (2003)
Review, of Michael McConnell, Angela C. Carmella, and Robert F. Cochran Jr., "Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought." (Yale University Press 2001). , Journal of Law and Religion (2002)
Review, Thomas J. Rourke, "A Conscience as Large as the World: Yves R. Simon Versus the Catholic Neoconservatives," (Rowman & Littlefield 1997). , Journal of Law and Religion (2002)
"FREE EXERCISE! Following Conscience, Opening Politics, and Developing Doctrine," review of John T. Noonan Jr., "The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom," (University of California Press 1998). , Notre Dame Law Review (1999)
Other