NOONAN, John T(homas), Jr. 1926-

PERSONAL: Born October 24, 1926, in Boston, MA; son of John Thomas and Marie (Shea) Noonan; married Mary Lee Bennett, December 27, 1967; children: John Kenneth, Rebecca Lee, Susanna Bain.. Education: Harvard University, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1946, LL.B., 1954; Cambridge University, graduate study, 1946–47; Catholic University of America, M.A., 1949, Ph.D., 1951, L.H.D., 1980; Holy Cross College, L.H.D., 1980, student, Gonzaga University and University of San Francisco, 1986 Religion: Catholic.

ADDRESSES: Home—2599 Buena Vista Way, Berkeley, CA 94708. Office—U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, P.O. Box 193939, San Francisco, CA 94119-3939.

CAREER: Admitted to Massachusetts Bar, 1954; National Security Council, Washington, DC, member of special staff, 1954–55; Herrick, Smith, Donald, Farley and Ketchum (law firm), Boston, MA, attorney, 1955–61; University of Notre Dame Law School, Notre Dame Law School, associate professor, 1961–63, professor of law, 1963–66; University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, professor of law, 1967–86, chair of religious studies, 1970–73, chair of medieval studies, 1978–79, director of Natural Law Institute, Robbins Professor Emeritus; judge on U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, 1985–96, senior judge, 1996–. Chairman of the board of Games Research, Inc., 1961–76. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Lecturer at Harvard University Law School, 1972; Pope John XXIII lecturer, Catholic University of America Law School, 1973; Cardinal Bellarmine lecturer, St. Louis University Divinity School, 1973; Ernest Messenger lecturer, Cornell University, 1982; John Dewey Memorial lecturer, University of Minnesota, 1986; Baum lecturer, University of Illinois, 1988; Strassberger lecturer, University of Texas, 1989. Visiting professor at Southern Methodist University, Stanford University, University of California at Los Angeles, and Harvard University. Chairman of Brookline (MA) Redevelopment Authority, 1958–62; member of board of directors, Center for Human Values in Health Sciences, 1969–71, Institute for the Study of Ethical Issues, 1971–73. Consultant to Papal Commission on the Family, Population, and Natality, 1965–66, Ford Foundation, 1968, National Institute for the Humanities, 1973–74, U.S. Catholic Conference, 1979–86, and to other institutions. Overseer, Harvard University, 1991–.

MEMBER: American Association for Legal and Political Philosophy (vice president), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (fellow), Canon Law Society of America (governor, 1970–72), Institute for Research in Medieval Canon Law (secretary-treasurer, 1970–88), Population Council (trustee, 1969–76), American Law Institute, Phi Beta Kappa (senator, United chapters, 1970–72; president, Alpha of California chapter, 1972–73), Thomas More-Jacques Maritain Institute (president, 1977–).

AWARDS, HONORS: Guggenheim fellow, 1965–66, 1979–80; John Gilmary Shea Prize, 1965, for Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists; Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences fellow, 1973–74; St. Thomas More Award, University of San Francisco, 1974; LL.D., University of Santa Clara, 1974, University of Notre Dame, 1976, Loyola University South, 1978, St. Louis University, 1981, University of San Francisco, 1985; Christian Culture Medal, 1975; Wilson Center Fellow, 1979–80; Laetare Medal, University of Notre Dame, 1984; Campion Medal, Catholic Book Club, 1987; Alemany Medal, Western Dominican Province, 1988; Maguire Chair in Ethics, Kluge Center of the Library of Congress.

WRITINGS:

The Scholastic Analysis of Usury, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1957.

Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1965, enlarged edition, Belknap Press (Cambridge, MA), 1986.

The Church and Contraception: The Issues at Stake, Paulist Press (Mahwah, NJ), 1967.

(Editor) The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1970.

Power to Dissolve: Lawyers and Marriages in the Courts of the Roman Curia, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1972.

Persons and Masks of the Law: Cardoza, Holmes, Jefferson, and Wythe as Makers of the Masks, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1976, with a new preface, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2002.

The Antelope: The Ordeal of the Recaptured Africans in the Administrations of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1977.

A Private Choice: Abortion in America in the Seventies, Free Press (New York, NY), 1979.

Bribes, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1984.

The Believer and the Powers That Are: Cases, History, and Other Data Bearing on the Relation of Religion and Government, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1987, revised and updated by Edward McGlynn Gaffney, Jr., as Religious Freedom: History, Cases, and Other Materials on the Interaction of Religion and Government, Foundation Press (New York, NY), 2001.

(Editor with Kenneth I. Winston) The Responsible Judge: Readings in Judicial Ethics, Praeger (Westport, CT), 1993.

(With Richard W. Painter) Professional and Personal Responsibilities of the Lawyer, Foundation Press (New York, NY), 1997, second edition, 2001.

The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1998.

Narrowing the Nation's Power: The Supreme Court Sides with the States, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2002.

Also author of Freedom to Reproduce: Cautionary History, Present Invasions, Future Assurance, 1970, and of a lecture, Great Is Truth: It Prevails/Magna est veritas, Rockford Institute, 1986. Translator of The Decretals, Book IV, by Pope Gregorius IX, 1967, and Marriage Canons from the Decretum, by Gratianus, 1967. Editor of Natural Law Forum, 1961–70, and American Journal of Jurisprudence, 1970.

SIDELIGHTS: Honored American jurist, author, and scholar of modern law, John T. Noonan, Jr. has a primary interest in the relationship between religion and government, an interest reflected in his more than a dozen books. Noonan's texts on usury, contraception and the Catholic Church, and the separation of church and state are considered definitive. His books are lauded by critics and recommended for use by students and in libraries, not only for their exhaustively researched arguments, but for their readability. "Noonan is not only a man of incredible erudition and one of the nation's most distinguished moralists; he is a fascinating storyteller as well," stated New York Times Book Review contributor John Kaplan.

In Persons and Masks of the Law: Cardoza, Holmes, Jefferson, and Wythe as Makers of the Masks, first published in 1976 and published with a new preface in 2002, Noonan examines the way U.S. jurists, even those so famous as Thomas Jefferson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., have chosen "the mask of the law" over the good of individual citizens. He especially uses the example of the concept of property as applied to humans to illustrate his argument. A reviewer for the University of California Press believed the book calls for reform "in the education and even behavior of lawyers."

"Opponents of abortion have long known that they have perhaps their most articulate spokesman in the person of John T. Noonan, Jr.," wrote Basile J. Uddo in America. Uddo went on to say, "Now, in his … book on the subject, A Private Choice: Abortion in America in the Seventies, Professor Noonan has confirmed that belief most splendidly." Uddo further described A Private Choice as "a law book, a history book, a medical text, and a moral treatise, yet it is eminently readable by anyone and everyone,… a book … good beyond hope." In A Private Choice, Noonan challenges the legality and morality of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision making abortion a fundamental right of women. "It should be acknowledged that this book is a model of its kind, as was to be expected of … Noonan …, scholar among scholars," commented Robert G. Hoyt in a Commonweal review. "I would add that no one emotionally and intellectually equipped to attend to what the text actually says will fail to learn from it," Hoyt continued. Several aspects of the response to this book, in particular the assertion of Noonan's erudite yet readable prose, as well as the respect, if not awe, with which he is treated by reviewers, are hallmarks of the reception of the author's subsequent published works as well.

In Bribes Noonan characteristically offers a history of the title concept that spans the length of Western civilization, recounting stories from the Bible and the literature of the ancient Greeks, as well as from contemporary American politics, to illustrate the vagaries of a term that can denote almost anything from gift giving to extortion. Bribes "is about a concept as general as reciprocity and a problem as specific as political 'contributions,'" noted John Kaplan in the New York Times Book Review. Kaplan continued, "It is about morals, religious doctrine and literary criticism as well as a great deal of history." Kenneth L. Woodward, in Newsweek, observed, "Bribes confirms Noonan's growing reputation as one of the nation's most accomplished—and entertaining—philosophers of law." Anthony Burgess, writing in the Observer, took a more humorous, though no less laudatory view of Noonan's effort: "The 839 pages [of Bribes] say everything that has to be said, morally and historically, on the subject. The effect of reading them is to feel preternaturally clean. A lot of people whom one would have thought to be equally immaculate turn out to have been very dirty."

Noonan applied his demonstrated ability to turn large amounts of information into arguments comprehensible to the average reader as well as interesting to the expert in The Believer and the Powers That Are: Cases, History, and Other Data Bearing on the Relation of Religion and Government. The book, which is essentially a case law book because it contains verbatim transcripts from many cases, complete with introductory and footnotes, as well as discussion questions, is divided into three parts. Part 1 contains early documents, from biblical and European sources through Spinoza and John Locke, in the late 1600s. Part 2 contains letters and court cases from the United States through the 1940s. Part 3 focuses on modernday issues concerning law and religion. Edwin S. Gaustad, who reviewed this volume for the Journal of American History, believed its strengths to be its breadth, the author's "fine writing," and, most importantly, the fact that each of the nearly two hundred documents excerpted or reprinted in full is surrounded by a scholarly apparatus that makes it an extremely useful teaching tool. Gaustad added that the book's good sense "might come in handy for churchstate decisions confronting us in the years just ahead." The Believer and the Powers That Are was substantially revised and updated in 2001 by Edward McGlynn Gaffney, Jr., and published as Religious Freedom: History, Cases, and Other Materials on the Interaction of Religion and Government. The most heavily revised section is Part 3, to which Gaffney added case law and discussions of sexual, social, political, medical, scientific, and educational issues facing America in the early twenty-first century. It also includes the scriptural foundations for much of the controversy between modern religion and government. Paul J. Weber, in a review for the Journal of Church and State, praised the book as "an excellent addition to contemporary literature on church-state relations." His one criticism was that such major challenges as charitable choice, faith-based social services, and stem cell research received sparse coverage, but he acknowledged that this is because there is as yet so little case law on these issues. Weber concluded that the book is excellent for law and graduate students and is "also an excellent source book for anyone interested in the long, complex story of the development of religious liberty in Western culture, particularly as that is manifested in contemporary America."

Noonan returned to the subject of the intertwining of church and state in The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom, "a witty and wide-ranging book," according to Richard Wightman Fox, a contributor to the New York Times. Noonan relies heavily on the ideas of Constitution framer James Madison, who first championed the ideal of state noninterference in matters of religion, and notes conspicuous instances in which that ideal has been breached. The author regards this ideal, however, as America's most prized possession and greatest gift to the world. He also concedes that religion has always influenced government, as government has always affected the practice of religion. Fox concluded, "The Lustre of Our Country is a Catholic's paean to the greatness of a liberal American tradition, but more important, it is a judge's and scholar's very enlightening tour through a complex legal and religious history."

In Narrowing the Nation's Power: The Supreme Court Sides with the States Noonan delves into the way the U.S. Supreme Court has since 1997 strengthened states' rights, making states and state institutions immune from lawsuits by individuals for monetary damages related to offenses ranging from age discrimina-tion and patent infringement to violence against women. This measure treats states as sovereign entities, which Noonan claims is unconstitutional. It also erodes the rights and protections available through Congress, under the Constitution's commerce clause and the Fourteenth Amendment, to American citizens on a national scale. David J. Garrow, in a review of the book for the Wilson Quarterly, called it "an immensely valuable and important critique of the Rehnquist Court's constitutional agenda." Richard A. Epstein, in the National Review, took a negative view of Noonan's arguments, calling his analysis "wholly one-sided and historically flawed." Epstein concluded that the Supreme Court's "federalism rulings give much to argue about, but little to denounce. Noonan simply lacks the historical or intellectual ammunition to wage his three-front war to a successful conclusion." Philip Y. Blue, in a review of the book for Library Journal, noted, "In this highly recommended work, the author convincingly sounds the alarm."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Biographical Directory of the Federal Judiciary, 1789–2000, Bernan, 2001.

PERIODICALS

America, July 14, 1979, Basile J. Uddo, review of A Private Choice: Abortion in America in the Seventies; June 1, 1985, p. 458.

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May, 1986, p. 197.

Best-Sellers, March, 1985, p. 462.

Boston Globe, January 26, 1986, p. 22.

Catholic Library World, November, 1987, p. 112.

Christian Century, September 23, 1987, p. 802; January 6, 1988, p. 29.

Church History, December, 1987, p. 555; September, 1989, p. 416.

Commonweal, May 11, 1979, Robert G. Hoyt, review of A Private Choice.

Ethics, January, 1986, p. 429; November 17, 2000, John T. McGreevy, "A Case of Doctrinal Development," p. 12.

First Things, review of Religious Freedom: History, Cases, and Other Materials on the Interaction of Religion and Government, p. 65.

Harvard Law Review, January, 1985, p. 711; May, 1988, p. 1642.

History: Review of New Books, winter, 1999, review of The Luster of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom, p. 61.

Journal of American History, June, 1988, Edwin S. Gaustad, review of The Believer and the Powers That Are: Cases, History, and Other Data Bearing on the Relation of Religion and Government, pp. 226-227.

Journal of Church and State, autumn, 2001, Paul J. Weber, review of Religious Freedom, p. 806.

Journal of Religion, October, 1987, p. 583; January, 1989, p. 133.

Library Journal, May 15, 1998, p. 9; September 15, 2002, Philip Y. Blue, review of Narrowing the Nation's Power: The Supreme Court Sides with the States, p. 78.

National Catholic Reporter, February 15, 1985, p. 12; November 8, 1985, p. 4.

National Review, June 22, 1979; October 28, 2002, Richard A. Epstein, review of Narrowing the Nation's Power, p. 50.

Newsweek, April 1, 1985, Kenneth L. Woodward, review of Bribes, p. 82.

New York Times, December 22, 1984, Richard Wightman Fox, review of The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom, p. 15.

New York Times Book Review, January 27, 1985, John Kaplan, review of Bribes, p. 9; February 7, 1988, p. 34; July 5, 1998, p. 7.

Observer (London, England), March 31, 1985, Anthony Burgess, review of Bribes, p. 27.

Psychology Today, May, 1985, p. 70.

Publishers Weekly, May 11, 1998, p. 64; June 17, 2002, review of Narrowing the Nation's Power, pp. 52-54.

Religious Studies Review, January, 1988, p. 61; April, 1989, p. 149; October, 1989, p. 307.

Society, May, 1986, p. 86.

Sociological Review, February, 1986, p. 213.

Sociology: Reviews of New Books, January/February, 1980.

Theological Studies, September, 1988, p. 565.

Time, February 5, 1985, p. 101.

U.S. Catholic, April, 1986, p. 22.

U.S. News and World Report, July 8, 1985, p. 64.

Wilson Quarterly, winter, 2003, David J. Garrow, review of Narrowing the Nation's Power, p. 109.

ONLINE

Boisi Center for Religion & American Public Life at Boston College Web site, http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/ (March 22, 2001), "Hon. John T. Noonan, Jr., Lecture: The Lustre of Our Country: Why Religious Freedom Is Foundational for Country and for Church."

University of California Press Web site, http://www.ucpress.edu/ (March 18, 2003), reviews of Persons and Masks of the Law: Cardoza, Holmes, Jefferson, and Wythe as Makers of the Masks and Narrowing the Nation's Power.