Introduction
This is largely a good news bulletin. We open by telling of the departure of Professor Tamara Kay from Notre Dame and notable developments at the Law School. But we close with a melancholy reflection by Bill Dempsey on his interchange with Notre Dame Law School’s first Supreme Court law clerk when the latter was chair of the University’s board of trustees.
Professor Tamara Kay leaves Notre Dame
We are pleased indeed to report that Professor Kay has left Notre Dame for the University of Pittsburgh.
In publishing our last bulletin on Kay’s lawsuit against The Irish Rover, we assumed Kay remained at Notre Dame because the University continued to promote her on its website as a “Notre Dame expert” on abortion.
Since then, we have learned she has taken a position at the University of Pittsburgh. Whereupon we suggested to the university that at least now it was time to stop advertising Kay.
Her endorsement was finally taken down.
In her announcement, Kay extolled Pittsburgh’s commitment to academic freedom.
That’s pretty rich coming from someone who lost her lawsuit against the Rover under a statute aimed at plaintiffs who file “meritless lawsuits to chill constitutionally protected speech.” (Trial Court opinion p.17)
What remains in the court case is the assessment of attorney’s fees and costs against Kay, which is mandatory in a case governed by this statute protecting free speech and freedom of the press.
We will keep you informed.
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The Law School
The ability of graduates of a law school to secure career-enhancing judicial clerkships enhances the appeal of the school and therefore the quality of the applicant pool. And it is some indication of the reputation of the school among the country’s judges.
The Notre Dame Law School is first-rate academically and the most Catholic of the schools of the University, and we are accordingly pleased to report that the school has been remarkably successful in placing graduates in federal and state clerkships.
Witness:
- For the third consecutive year, Notre Dame placed fourth among the nation’s law schools in federal clerkships. Notre Dame was outranked only by the University of Chicago, Yale, and Stanford, the top three law schools in the U.S. News rankings. It surpassed all others, including such luminaries as Harvard, Duke, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
- Two graduates secured highly prized clerkships with Supreme Court Justices, Michael Bradley (’22) with Justice Samuel Alito and William Eisenhauer (‘23) with Chief Justice John Roberts.
- Michael Bradley was preceded as a Supreme Court law clerk by his brother Timothy (ND JD ’20), who clerked for Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Both were editors-in-chief of The Irish Rover, and Michael has served on the board of Sycamore Trust.
Michael and Tim are part of the prodigiously talented family of Law School Professor Emeritus Gerard Bradley and his wife Pamela, whose daughter, Jennie Bradley Lichter (ND ’04 Harvard JD ’09), was recently named President of National March for Life. We leave to a later bulletin our appreciation of Professor Bradley’s estimable career at Notre Dame, but we laud now a family whose eight children have earned twelve Notre Dame degrees among them. If that is not a record, surely it is close.
The law school’s success in placing graduates in Supreme Court clerkships has been fairly recent. Before 1996, there had been only five. The school’s more contemporary success is due to recognition of the quality of the school and the informed efforts of Professor Nicole Garnett, who clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, and her associates. (Her husband, Professor Richard Garnett, clerked for the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist.)
Finally, the high proportion of former Supreme Court law clerks on the law school faculty is a significant mark of the quality of the school. Of the 40 tenure track faculty, fifteen have clerked for Supreme Court justices.
The Law School’s first Supreme Court law clerk, Father Jenkins, Bill Dempsey, and The Vagina Monologues.
It happens that the first Notre Dame Law School graduate to serve as a Supreme Court law clerk, Patrick McCartan (JD ’56), was a colleague of Bill Dempsey (Yale JD ’55) on the Court. McCartan clerked for Justice Charles Whitaker and Bill for Chief Justice Earl Warren during the 1959-60 term.
McCartan went on to become managing partner of the Jones Day law firm and chair of the Notre Dame board of trustees when Father John Jenkins succeeded Father Edward Malloy as president of the University.
Before Father Jenkins’s accession in 2005, a surging controversy had erupted over Father Malloy’s approval of the student performance of The Vagina Monologues, a series of graphic accounts of sexual encounters, mainly lesbian, and the “Queer Film Festival.”
Notre Dame’s bishop had roundly condemned the play and the films, and Notre Dame had become the poster school for Catholic institutions hosting the Monologues.
Bill wrote McCartan about these actions by Malloy. After Jenkins’s appointment had been announced, McCartan took Bill aside in a gathering of former law clerks to tell him his “worries were over” because Father Jenkins would get rid of both play and film festival.
And so it appeared, briefly. In an address to the faculty, Jenkins called the student production “problematical” because “the work contains graphic descriptions of homosexual, extramarital heterosexual, and auto-erotic experiences” with “no hint of central elements of Catholic sexual morality.”
But many faculty forcefully protested and Jenkins reversed course, approving both play and film festival.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “A President’s Retreat,” a prominent faculty member, the late Dr. David Solomon, described and deplored what had happened, calling it “one more step in a long process of secularization of the university.” And see our bulletin.
It was also a dark harbinger of what was to come, as we have chronicled in many bulletins over the following years of Father Jenkins’s long presidency.
Bill never spoke to McCartan again about Father Jenkins. McCartan died in 2020 after a distinguished career in the law and important contributions to Notre Dame, Cleveland civic life, and the Church. His daughter, Karen DeSantis, currently serves on the Notre Dame board.
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Oremus
O God of Truth and Love, You have called us into a loving and faithful relationship with You. Your Son identified Himself as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and called us to follow Him wherever He goes.
In their care for and guardianship of the University and the students it serves, may the administrators of the University of Notre Dame always commit themselves to the pursuit and embrace of the Truth, which alone can set us free.
May the Holy Spirit lead them into all truth and recall them to it in times of peril. May they embrace the sorrow that comes from being different from, and rejected by, the world, so that they may rejoice always in the goodness of the Lord.
In the day of battle, may they joyfully take courage in Him who has already overcome the world.
We make our prayer through the intercession of Notre Dame, Our Mother, and in the Name of Jesus, Your Son, who lives and reigns with You, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever. Amen.
The above prayer is by Sycamore Trustee Father John Raphael (’89). To join us in regular prayer projects such as our Novena for Catholic Education and our Meditation on the 12-Days of Christmas, please join our Apostolate.
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4 Responses
good riddance!!
more Orthodoxy, less heretics!!
Some good news for a change!!!! Thank you and God Bless those who are fighting for Our Lady and our Catholic University.
Good to have the early research about Kay’s departure confirmed. I wonder if the offer from Pitt included reimbursement if the attorneys fee liability (I would not be surprised). Many thanks for other points of good news. Now it’s time to pray for Fr. Dowd and for Pope Leo XIV, that they may provide the Catholic leadership that had been so lacking.
I am not sanguine about the leadership issue, but I share your hope that the University leadership will recover what it has list, namely, courage and Catholic delight with which we were educated. Thanks for your comment……………………. Dan Boland, Classes of 1956 and 1961