Making Natural Law "Useful in the Solution of Practical Problems": Global Catholicism and Human Rights in The Catholic Lawyer , 1955–1964

Abstract: Responding to a "need for a magazine for Catholic lawyers," St. John's University established The Catholic Lawyer in 1955. Featuring the most prominent Catholic legal scholars in the United States, The Catholic Lawyer offered a unique forum for Catholics to reflect on their religious tradition's relationship to American law. By tracing the history of The Catholic Lawyer 's first decade of circulation, this article reveals that mid-twentieth-century American Catholic legal scholars consistently employed natural law as their framework for engagement with the American legal tradition, often seeking to reclaim natural law from the abstractions in which it had been shrouded. To illustrate natural law's pressing practical relevance, these scholars frequently turned to the cause of human rights, even as postwar human rights discourse on both sides of the Atlantic proved to be famously abstract. This notwithstanding, The Catholic Lawyer 's attentiveness to both high-level philosophical concepts and seemingly practical issues of human rights elucidates a decisive feature of mid-century American Catholic legal thought: its global orientation.