If you stand in the road near one of the on-campus Roman Catholic university law schools in the United States, you can probably see a church spire. You can squint past whatever fire wall or battlement or gothic tower there is on the law building and see the campus church. You can do this at Notre Dame, St. Louis, Creighton, San Francisco, Boston College, and San Diego. If you go inside one of these law buildings, you may find crucifixes, chapels, holy-water fonts, or a statute of Thomas More. But none of these things will tell you what those law schools are about and have been about—not any more than chaste Protestant crosses at Boston University, Mercer, Duke, Richmond, Denver, Southern California, or Southern Methodist will tell you about the law schools at those universities.

What is needed for an understanding of Catholic legal education is another and more ironic picture, an altogether prosaic picture, the picture of a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn, working in the Woolworth Building in New York City: Fanny Holtzmann, twenty-year-old middle daughter in a large immigrant family, is going to law school. She will be a celebrated American lawyer, one of the first women lawyers in New York City, a sensitive, compassionate leader in the causes of American Jewry, a faithful daughter, and a professional model to other lawyers.