Standing Out at the Law School

Professor Tamara Kay has left Notre Dame for the University of Pittsburgh after the Indiana courts threw out her lawsuit against The Irish Rover as a meritless attempt to silence free speech. At the same time, Notre Dame’s Law School has surged in national prestige, ranking among the very top in placing graduates in federal clerkships and Supreme Court positions — a success rooted in the school’s fidelity to its Catholic mission. Yet a decades-old exchange between Bill Dempsey and the University’s then–Board Chair foreshadowed Father Jenkins’s eventual accommodation to secular pressures, reminding us that where Notre Dame stands firm in Catholic identity it flourishes, and where it compromises, it fades.