Gerard V. Bradley, J.D.
Professor of Law, University of Notre DameGerard V. Bradley is Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches Legal Ethics and Constitutional Law. At Notre Dame he directs (with John Finnis) the Natural Law Institute and co-edits The American Journal of Jurisprudence, an international forum for legal philosophy. Bradley is a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, in Princeton, New Jersey, and served for many years as President of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.
Bradley received his B.A and J.D. degrees from Cornell University, graduating Summa cum laude from the law school in 1980. After serving in the Trial Division of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office he joined the law faculty at the University of Illinois. He moved to Notre Dame in 1992. Bradley has published over one hundred scholarly articles and reviews. His most recent books are an edited collection of essays titled, Challenges to Religious Liberty in the Twenty-First Century (published by Cambridge University Press in 2012), Essays on Law, Religion, and Morality ( Saint Augustine’s Press 2013.) In 2018 Cambridge will publish his volume (co-edited with Christian Brugger) on Catholic Social Teaching. Bradley is currently working on a book about regulating obscenity in the Internet Age.
Research Authored
The Future of Pro-Life Legislation and Litigation
In what might still be the most famous moral-philosophical defense of abortion, Judith Jarvis Thomson admitted that “we shall probably have to agree that the fetus has already become a human person well before birth.” Though she denied that “the fetus is a person from the moment of conception,” she granted that proposition for the sake of arguing for a broad right to abortion.