Today’s feast of St. Joseph the Worker draws one’s attention at this university-based Catholic law school to the work of those in the legal profession. The “entrusting of legal institutions to professionals” and “the training of those professionals in a discrete body of learning” are two of the ten characteristics of “the Western legal tradition” that Harold Berman traced to the so-called papal revolution that took place in Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.in his magisterial.

Reviewing Berman’s magisterial 1983 book Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition for the Catholic University Law Review, Columbus School of Law Professor Raymond Marcin summarized the ten characteristics identified by Berman as follows:

(1) a relatively sharp distinction between legal and other types of institutions; (2) the entrusting of the legal institutions to professionals; (3) the training of those professionals in a discrete body of learning; (4) the existence of that body of learning in a complex, dialectical relationship to the legal institutions, giving the law the capability of a meta-law by which it can be analyzed and evaluated; (5) law as a coherent whole, a body; (6) law as having an ongoing character, a capacity for growth, an inherent mechanism for change; (7) that growth as being logical, patterned, regular, reflecting an inner necessity; (8) law as being supreme over the political authorities, this linked to its historicity; (9) law’s coexistence and competition within diverse legal systems, making the supremacy of law both necessary and possible; and (10) the existence of a tension between ideals and realities, between the dynamic and the stable, between transcendence and immanence, a tension which leads to tradition- renewing revolutions.