Part of the way that the Maritain Center achieves its mission to apply faith and reason to perennial questions is by sponsoring the research activities of our Student Fellows. This March, we were pleased to provide a small grant to sponsor student Fellow Michal Caplan (J.D. Candidate, 2026) at the Federalist Society Student Symposium in Phoenix, AZ. Below is a reflection from Mr. Caplan on his experience.
Maritain Fellow Reflection on Federalist Society National Student Symposium
By Michael Caplan
Attending the National Student Symposium at the ASU O’Connor College of Law in Phoenix, Arizona was an enthralling and rewarding experience. There, hundreds of law students, academics, practitioners, state and federal judges gathered to discuss the importance of free markets, federalism, and the theme of “Liberty Rising.”
I attended the conference alongside four other Notre Dame Law students and was able to reconnect with students from other law schools whom I know through the Blackstone Legal Fellowship. At the symposium, we heard from speaker panels on topics ranging from state deregulation on economic freedom to the concept of subsidiarity applied to states and localities. The Attorney General of Florida, James Uthmeier, spoke on how his state has led the effort to expand school choice vouchers for parents and to protect children and human trafficking victims from exploitation.
After the presentation, I spoke with Attorney General Uthmeier and garnered his practical insight on pursuing a career in law and public policy after some time in private practice. The panel on when free speech and free markets intersect generated division among the panelists when it came to considering the actions taken by federal agencies and certain states to regulate Big Tech companies and private media censorship. In a room full of originalists and generally right of center conference participants, that panel produced a genuine split because of the cross current jurisprudential and political positions at issue around private media censorship of conservative voices. Professor Ilan Wurman gave an engaging presentation on how the system of jurisprudential formalism directs us to reconsider the judicial role, especially in relation to the Founders’ vision of our constitutional republic.
The final panel of the conference, featuring renowned natural law champion Professor Hadley Arkes, was on “Mandates, Medicine, and Liberty: The Legal Battle Over Bodily Autonomy and the Right to Choose.” That panel concerned the efforts of some states to prohibit life-altering sex alteration surgeries for minors, the alleged right to physician assisted suicide, and abortion policies in the states post-Dobbs. It was remarkable to consider that amid the legal issues discussed in the panel the only panelist to raise the serious moral issues at stake was Professor Arkes. Beyond the question of how federal and state law may address the liberty issues at stake, I hoped to see the entire panel comment on the obvious affronts to human dignity implicated in each issue yet only Arkes did.
The entire symposium proved invigorating, and I was excited to listen into fascinating conversations with fellow law students at the receptions and hear from academics, practitioners, and judges. The symposium proved efficacious for growing my network, as I reconnected with a law firm partner (who spoke at a lunch panel on how to stay involved with FedSoc while in private practice) and met the Florida Attorney General among other academics and judges. I am sincerely grateful to the Maritain Center for sponsoring my attendance at the symposium with a grant. Thank you for this special opportunity and I look forward to implementing some of the knowledge from this conference in my future legal career.