by Joanne Welsh
There’s an adage among gardeners to describe the growth of trees and other perennials: the first year they sleep; the second year they creep; the third year they leap. The Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law (Catholic Law) has been intentionally growing its programs over several years, and it now seems to be in its “third year” (metaphorically speaking), leaping up in rankings, student applications, faculty hires, and high-profile achievements.
Catholic Law rose 23 places in the 2025 U.S. News & World Report rankings, surging to its highest rank ever at #71. The previous year, it rose 28 places in the rankings. Similarly, applications to the school are up; in fact, for 2025 admission they increased almost 50% over the prior year — and their percentage increase is more than double the national average for American law schools during the same admission cycle. Additionally, the Class of 2024 achieved more than 95% placement in positions considered of the highest quality by U.S. News, and with the help of generous donors, the school has established three new endowed faculty chairs in recent years, which has allowed it to recruit faculty away from higher-ranked schools.
The Tradition
To extend the gardening metaphor just a little, think of Catholic Law as a tree. With its roots planted in fertile soil and grafted onto the root system of the University itself, they firmly anchor and nourish the tree so it can grow and flourish. These roots, of course, are its Catholic identity and the Catholic intellectual tradition, which sees faith and reason as complementary and aims to form the whole human person rather than simply the intellect.
Stephen Payne, dean of the law school, and the law school faculty are committed to the tradition and to the school being a place where law can be studied as a dialogue between reason and faith.
“Our team gave a lot of thought to what that means for how we structure ourselves, what our curriculum should look like, what kind of faculty we should have, and what centers and institutes we should have,” he recalls. “All of this should be, as President Kilpatrick describes it, ‘in the heart of the Church.’”
To that end, he and the faculty are consciously creating and building centers and institutes that engage both the Catholic Law community and the broader legal community in that dialogue, along with finding new synergies with the wonderful pre-existing institutes and programs at the school, including the Law and Technology Institute, the Securities Law Program, and several others. Four new centers, in particular, have been established as essential components of what Payne calls the school’s “intellectual architecture,” designed to help form Catholic Law students as whole human persons but also to be key drivers of the school’s growth.
“With respect to all these centers,” says Payne, “the central question is ‘What should our school, as the law school of the Church, contribute that no one else can do as well?’ How should we fill that role in the best way possible that is distinctively Catholic but also, as part of being distinctively Catholic, welcoming and open to everyone?”
The Center for Law and the Human Person
At the heart of Payne’s vision for the school is the Center for Law and the Human Person. He established it to be the law school’s internal think tank for what the Catholic intellectual tradition should contribute to the study and practice of law and to bring the tradition more fully to the school.
The center is co-directed by St. John Henry Newman Professor of Law Marc DeGirolami and Assistant Professor Elizabeth Kirk. Both DeGirolami and Kirk recognize what a gem the center is for Catholic Law and how rare its programming is. To their knowledge, no other law school in the country has a center with this kind of mission.
“So many law schools see themselves as merely giving a technical education. We have something far richer and more beautiful in mind for our students,” says Kirk.
She goes on to describe some of the programming designed for the students, such as the Aquinas Lectures, symposia, the Tolle et Lege (“Take up and read”) reading group, and the Faith in Action lecture series. Tolle et Lege, for example, introduces students to classics in literature, philosophy, and theology — in hopes that students will continue to read for themselves throughout their lifetime. The Faith in Action series, through which the center invites lawyers to give a personal witness to the integration of their faith and their practice of law, strives to push back against the idea that lawyers’ professional and personal lives are separate.
Andrea Quinan, a third-year law student, says the center’s programming was one of the primary reasons she chose to attend Catholic Law, noting particularly the Tolle et Lege reading groups.
“It’s so important to build up an understanding of why we study the law alongside actually studying the law,” Quinan argues. “Otherwise, we gain a lot of knowledge, but we don’t know the driving purpose behind it. It’s like having a ship without a captain.”
Recent graduates speak to the value of the center, as well. Gerald Sharpe, Class of 2025, found it to be deeply formative, giving him “a space to think critically, both in theory and now in practice, about how the law can promote the innate dignity of every person.” He believes that the center “will continue to be a driving force behind the law school’s skyrocketing national reputation — not in spite of, but because of, its rich Catholic identity.”
The Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition
An ongoing debate exists in Catholic intellectual circles about whether Catholicism is compatible with the American Founding and originalism, a legal theory that argues for interpreting the U.S. Constitution based on its meaning at the time of its adoption. Because of this debate, a clear priority emerged within the school to address the intersection of American constitutionalism and the Catholic intellectual tradition and to explore their compatibility. In response, the school founded the Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (CIT).
Led by St. Robert Bellarmine Professor of Law J. Joel Alicea and launched publicly in fall 2022, the CIT has been quite successful. In just four years, it has hosted five events with United States Supreme Court justices. Four of those events took place on campus, creating an extraordinary opportunity for faculty and students to engage directly with the justices. It is also having great success with its Aquinas Fellowships, a highly-competitive seminar program for young practicing lawyers that examines the relationship between the Catholic intellectual tradition and American constitutionalism. The program draws lawyers in the Washington, D.C., area who have graduated from the country’s top law schools, many of whom go on to become Supreme Court clerks.
“This speaks to the desire for the education that we offer,” Alicea said.
The benefits of programming like the Aquinas Fellowships are broad. These nascent programs are growing, and Alicea is hopeful that by bringing some of the field’s most talented people into the Catholic Law community, they also can serve as potential future employers or mentors to the school’s students.
CIT has also been an engine for recruiting and retaining top-notch faculty to the school. These are scholars whose work has been cited by Supreme Court justices in opinions and speeches, and who are placing articles in some of the leading law reviews.
At the heart of all of CIT’s programming, however, is the commitment to educating Catholic Law students in the Catholic intellectual tradition.
“CIT brings to them the riches of the Catholic intellectual tradition and integrates that into their education so they can think more deeply and clearly about what their life in the law means, why it’s important to society, and what the limits of law are,” says Alicea. “Those types of questions are not often asked in other law schools, and we bring those questions to the fore for our students. I think it makes them better lawyers and better citizens.”
Andrew Lewis, a third-year law student, agrees. Lewis said that when he was applying to law school, he was looking for something that would engage him more deeply in the legal profession’s most important debates and form his mind better than the average law school would. “So, I took a chance and bet on Catholic. Even with my high expectations, I have been totally blown away by what CIT has built at Catholic Law. As the many judges — and justices — almost unanimously say when they come to campus, the events and discussions fostered by CIT are simply not happening at nearly any other law school campus. I thank God that I took a chance on Catholic.”
The Center for Religious Liberty
The first of the four centers to be established is the Center for Religious Liberty, co-directed by Professors Mark Rienzi and William Saunders. Its purpose is to study and advance the Catholic view of religious liberty as a fundamental human right for all people, regardless of their faith.
“The idea in starting the Center was that Catholic University is a particularly important place to discuss, advance, and advocate that view of religious liberty for everyone,” recalls Rienzi. “We have something uniquely Catholic to offer to the law world in what is the biggest lawyer town on the planet.”
The Center hosts speakers, organizes conferences, provides educational programming, and comments on religious liberty issues in the public square. Among its most effective student programming is the clinic it offers, which gives Catholic Law students the opportunity to do moot courts with real religious liberty expert litigators and write briefs that get filed in court — including two at the Supreme Court last year.
These are not the moot court competitions that are standard at law schools across the country. These moot courts include the biggest religious liberty case before the Supreme Court in a given year, with the lawyer who is to make the case before the Supreme Court practicing his or her argument ahead of time in front of law professors — and Catholic Law students get the chance to listen in and ask questions afterwards.
“That’s as good a law school experience as you could imagine for a law student who is interested in this area,” notes Rienzi. “It’s uncommon for lawyers to do moot courts for an audience, so to watch one of them with the real people before the real case is a very rare thing.”
The Separation of Powers Institute
The youngest of the four centers, the Separation of Powers Institute was established during the last academic year by Associate Professor of Law Jennifer Mascott. With Mascott on public service leave — she was recently confirmed as a judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit — Assistant Professor of Law Chad Squitieri directs the Institute, working alongside Institute Fellow and Assistant Professor of Law Natalie Schmidt.
The Institute plays an important role in the school’s mission because it focuses on the proper role of the branches of government and how the American way of governing contributes to the common good and the flourishing of individual citizens.
Squitieri emphasizes the importance of a robust separation of powers in government, commenting, “You need constitutional structure for the rights to be more than just words written down on paper. The separation of powers helps make sure that ‘we the people’ stay in charge of our government.”
Given Catholic University’s location in Washington, D.C., and the fact that many of its students are interested in administrative law, it seemed natural to establish the Institute, especially since few other institutes focusing on the structure of government exist.
Two of the Institute’s higher-profile activities are its moot courts and Separation of Powers Bootcamp. Like the Center for Religious Liberty, the Institute has been very successful in hosting moot courts with leading lawyers who are preparing to argue real cases to the Supreme Court, giving some of their students the chance to attend and watch behind the scenes.
As a young organization, the Institute is also working to establish its bootcamp program. It hosted the first bootcamp this past year, a successful, high-intensity educational program for recent law school graduates from across the country. To Squitieri’s knowledge, it’s the country’s only bootcamp focused exclusively on the separation of powers and administrative law topics.
The Third-Year Leap … and Beyond
Payne ticks off the many fruits that the centers are already bearing: the outstanding scholars who have recently joined Catholic Law from higher ranked law schools “because they care about having this dialogue between faith and reason out in the open in an academic setting;” the number of students who have been attracted to study at the law school, in part, because of the work of the centers; and the amazing placements of students to clerkships and law firms, as a result of the center programs and faculty mentoring.
He’s also aware, however, that critics might ask how broad the perspectives of these centers are, how open they are to debate, and how welcoming they are to non-Catholic students, who make up the majority of the school’s student population. He points to the school’s welcoming environment and the richness of the Catholic intellectual tradition itself as factors that draw, and retain, so many of the school’s non-Catholic students.
“Law graduates tell us how wonderful our community is. We have such supportive faculty and staff, and the graduates tell us it feels different here,” Payne says.
As for the intellectual environment, he argues that a law program based on the Catholic intellectual tradition is every human being’s inheritance because the tradition “draws from all the wells of true human wisdom throughout the ages” — whether that be Aristotle, the classical liberal studies tradition, or others.
Payne adds, “Because of our distinctive place in legal education and in the culture, we don’t fit neatly into either side of the political polarization in our culture. For example, we are institutionally pro-unborn life and pro-treating immigrants well, so that puts us in a position to be a model of the kind of civil discourse that our culture badly needs and to be a convener of people who disagree on very important things but view themselves as part of a larger project in which we’re all neighbors.”
With the centers up and running, Payne is looking to expand the school’s reputation through additional initiatives. He is grateful for the philanthropy from the Knights of Columbus and Marble Freedom Trust that have provided the resources to build centers with a top-notch reputation for public (i.e., constitutional and administrative) law, and now he plans to do the same thing on the private law side, particularly in business law. One of his ideas is an initiative on law and principled entrepreneurship, and he is eager to get alumni community support for this program.
At its roots, however, the purpose of all Catholic Law’s existing or planned centers is forming ethical lawyers who live integrated lives. Marc DeGirolami perhaps sums it up best.
“We’re in the business of forming persons, I think,” he says. “And I strongly suspect that that business is going to have an impact, one new lawyer at a time.”
