Catholic Priest, American-Catholic Lawyer

Abstract

Since the publication of Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule’s now-infamous 2020 essay in The Atlantic, “Beyond Originalism,” American legal scholars have developed a renewed interest in natural law jurisprudence’s position in the American legal tradition. Although many of Vermeule’s critics have framed his jurisprudential method as foreign to the American legal tradition, American legal scholars likewise engaged in important debates about natural law jurisprudence nearly a century ago. During this earlier period, scholars debated whether natural law jurisprudence's reliance on deductive reasoning could withstand the inductive and socially scientific methods that became popular at elite American law schools during the 1920s and 1930s. To understand this earlier iteration of debate over natural law jurisprudence, this thesis turns to the life and legacy of William J. Kenealy—a Jesuit priest who served as dean of the Boston College Law School between 1939 and 1956. Although Kenealy has been almost entirely ignored in the historiography, he figured prominently in an attempted revival of natural law jurisprudence that occurred during the early/mid-twentieth century. Terming this movement the “Neo-Scholastic Legal Revival” because of its reliance on Neo-Scholastic understandings of natural law philosophy, this thesis uncovers how Kenealy's religious formation at the turn of the twentieth century, legal training at the Jesuit-run Georgetown University, and wartime leadership at Boston College positioned him well to contribute to the Revival. In doing so, this thesis reveals that leaders in the Revival, including Kenealy, exerted cognizable influence on twentieth-century American legal discourse. Thus, this thesis challenges dominant historical treatments of twentieth-century American legal development that have ignored an attempted revival of natural law jurisprudence that occurred almost a century before Vermeule emerged in the national legal consciousness.