Selected Works of Patrick McKinley Brennan

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Patrick McKinley Brennan

Villanova University School of Law

• Professor of Law
• John F. Scarpa Chair in Catholic Legal Studies
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Patrick McKinley Brennan joined the Villanova faculty in 2004 as the inaugural
holder of the John F. Scarpa Chair in Catholic Legal Studies. Professor Brennan’s
scholarship uses the resources of the central western philosophical and theological
tradition, including but not limited to the Thomistic natural law tradition, to examine a
wide range of questions in American public law. These include such fundamentals as
sovereignty, authority, rights, the rule of law, and punishment and forgiveness, as well
as issues in administrative law, federal jurisdiction, school choice, religious liberty,
and many others. Brennan has a special interest and expertise in the work of Jacques
Maritain and in Catholic social doctrine. Professor Brennan has published three books and
more than thirty-five articles and book chapters, and has lectured at more than thirty
universities in the U.S. and Europe. He regularly teaches Jurisprudence, Constitutional
Law, Federal Courts, Administrative Law, Criminal Law, Justice and Rights, and various
seminars such as “Law, Politics, and Human Nature: The Teachings of Modern Christianity
(Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox).” 

Before coming to Villanova, Professor Brennan was for eight years a faculty member in the
Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, where for several years
he served as Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Research and later as Vice Dean.
Previously, Brennan was associated with major law firms in Washington, D.C. and in San
Francisco. Following law school, Brennan clerked for the Honorable John T. Noonan, Jr.,
of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco. 

A native of California, Brennan earned his J.D. from Berkeley Law (Boalt Hall), U.C.
Berkeley, where he won many awards and was elected to the Order of the Coif. Prior to law
school, Brennan earned an M.A. and pursued doctoral course work in philosophy at the
University of Toronto, taking many of his courses there in the Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, where his focus was late scholasticism. Professor Brennan earned his
B.A. in philosophy from Yale College, where he graduated with honors and distinction in
the major. At Yale, Brennan also studied Latin and Greek and won the Jacob Cooper Prize
for the best essay on ancient Greek philosophy. 

Professor Brennan’s first book (co-authored with John Coons) was By Nature Equal: The
Anatomy of a Western Insight (Princeton University Press, 1999). Brennan’s second book,
Civilizing Authority: Society, State, and Church (Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington,
2007), is an edited collection that grew out of a ten-member symposium he organized while
holding the Chair for the Culture of Law at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in
Washington, D.C., during the Fall of 2004. Professor Brennan’s third book, The Vocation
of the Child (W.B. Eerdmans, 2008), is the product of a multi-year research project that
Brennan directed for the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.
Fifteen authors contributed to this groundbreaking study of the moral world of the child.
Brennan is currently completing a monograph titled The Sovereignty of the Good: An Essay
on Authority, Law, and the State. He is also at work on an introductory text in Catholic
social doctrine. 

Professor Brennan’s many articles have appeared in the reviews of the Villanova,
Michigan, Notre Dame, Boston College, Catholic University of America, St. John’s,
Pepperdine, and Emory law schools, and in the peer-reviewed The American Journal of
Jurisprudence, The Review of Metaphysics, The Journal of Law and Religion, Law and
Philosophy, Lonergan Workshop, Punishment and Society, Journal of Law, Philosophy and
Culture, and American Catholic Studies. His “Talk to Incoming Law Students” was published
in First Things. 

Professor Brennan has been a visiting professor in the Boston College Law School and a
senior research fellow at the Robbins Collection of Canon and Civil Law, U.C. Berkeley.
Brennan has also been a Scholar in Residence at the Columbus School of Law, The Catholic
University of America, where he delivered the Brendan F. Brown Lecture in 2006. In 2010,
Brennan will deliver the Gianella Lecture at Villanova University. 

In 2006, Brennan was elected to serve a three-year term on the executive council of the
American Catholic Philosophical Association, and in 2007 he was appointed to a three-year
term on the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the Association of American Law
Schools. Professor Brennan is a lifetime elected member of the editorial board of the
American Journal of Jurisprudence. Brennan also serves as a fellow of American Center for
School Choice. 

At Villanova, Professor Brennan organizes the annual John F. Scarpa Conference on Law,
Politics, and Culture. Keynote speakers have included the late Avery Cardinal Dulles,
S.J., Justice Antonin Scalia, and Martha Nussbaum. Other speakers have included Jeremy
Waldron, Paul Kahn, Geoff Stone, Roderick Hills, Jesse Choper, John McGreevy, R. Kent
Greenawalt, Richard Schenk, OP, William Wagner, Amy Uelmen, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Richard
Garnett, and many others. 

A frequent commentator on matters concerning the Catholic Church in American politics and
culture, Brennan blogs at Mirror of Justice. 

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