“To Live a Common Life” ft. Boston College’s Cathleen Kaveny I Saturdays at Seven Ep. 48 (The Legal Vocation: Part Five of a Six Part Series)

In the forty-eighth episode of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Cathleen Kaveny, the Darald and Juliet Libby Millenium Professor of Theology and Law at Boston College. Ream opens by asking Kaveny about her efforts concerning interdisciplinary scholarship, how such efforts break down siloes often defining academe, and how the challenges plaguing society often transcend those siloes. One critical component of interdisciplinary scholarship that Kaveny stresses is the full appropriation of questions that arise from any set of relevant disciplines. Doing so, however, demands the exercise of various virtues including humility and the recognition that one may need to seek the assistance of colleagues. Ream and Kaveny discuss Kaveny’s education and the freedom she found to transcend those siloes as an undergraduate at Princeton as well as a joint J.D./Ph.D. student at Yale. Kaveny then explains the debt of gratitude she owes to several teachers as well as Judge John T. Noonan for whom she clerked for how they shaped her sense of vocation.