On Wednesday, November 5, I delivered some remarks at a faculty lunch at Georgetown Law about Paul R. Dean (1918-2008), who was the school's dean from 1954 to 1969. Dean, a devout Catholic layman, wrested control of the law school away from the long-serving Jesuit regent, Francis E. Lucey. Lucey was among those neo-Scholastic critics of the legal realists memorably discussed in Edward Purcell's Crisis of Democratic Theory (1973); he gets his own treatment in Ajay Mehrotra's “Father Francis E. Lucey and President Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Neo-Scholastic Legal Scholar’s Ambivalent Reaction to the New Deal,” in FDR, the Vatican, and the Roman Catholic Church in America, 1933-1945 (2003).)I’ve posted an illustrated version of the remarks on the Georgetown Law Faculty Blog–that is to say, here.
