Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan, archbishop of New York, will be the keynote speaker at “Law and the Gospel of Life,” a new Fordham series designed to explore the challenges of applying Gospel values to law and social policy.
Archbishop Dolan will deliver the series’ inaugural lecture in the McNally Amphitheatre at the Fordham School of Law.
DATE: Tuesday, Jan. 24
TIME: 6 p.m.
PLACE: Fordham School of Law, 140 West 62nd Street, New York, NY 10023 (Event has been moved to Fordham Lincoln Center’s Lowenstein Pope Auditorium, 113 W. 60th Street, due to heavy attendance)
The event is free and open to the public. Registration information isavailable here.
Sponsored by Fordham Law’s Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s Work, the series will explore the intersection of Catholic Church teachings on issues of life and human dignity (as largely set out in the 1995 encyclical “The Gospel of Life”) with legal and social policies on life issues such as abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty.
It is part of the institute’s “Catholic Lawyers Program,” said Ana Renata Dias, the institute’s director.
“Many times, lawyers are faced with situations where they must make difficult decisions,” Renata Dias said. “The idea of the series is to offer a Catholic perspective and a legal perspective, to see how faith can contribute to the practice of law.”
Following the archbishop’s remarks, Fordham law professor Jacqueline Nolan-Haley and Monica McDaniel Esq. (LAW ’09) will offer their responses.
The Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s Work was established in 2001 with the help of William F. “BJ” Harrington (LAW ’59), a longstanding member of the law school’s board of directors and recipient of the school’s Medal of Achievement. The institute was designed to help attorneys, judges, scholars and students integrate faith values into the practice of law.
The institute is overseen by Dias and by Russell G. Pearce, the Edward and Marilyn Bellet Chair in Legal Ethics, Morality and Religion. Pearce is widely credited as a founder of the “Religious Lawyering” movement, which calls for room in the profession for lawyers of all faiths to integrate their religious perspectives into their work.
Harrington’s son, William P. Harrington (LAW ’82), a partner in the Westchester firm of Bleakley Platt & Schmidt, LLP, will moderate the evening’s discussion.
