Former Domino’s Pizza president and billionaire Tom Monaghan has announced that he will spend $50 million to build a Catholic law school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Monaghan, who has actively participated in and sponsored anti-abortion causes, is hopeful that The Ave Maria School of Law, scheduled to open in the fall of 2000, will become “the West Point for Catholic laity.”
Conservative legal scholar and former U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork has agreed to teach for Monaghan. Bernard Dobranski will leave his post at Washington, DC’s Catholic University to serve as the new law school’s dean.
In a statement made to the Detroit Free Press, Dobranski said that the Ave Maria Law School will seek to correct what he perceives as a moral ambiguity at other law schools. “The rule of law must be founded in a belief that there is an objective, moral order. This is something no law school does effectively.”
