By Jacob Sharpe (A27)

The Honorable Thomas More Donnelly (SF81) learned to pay close attention to peoples’ stories while reading literary works like the Odyssey and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn during his undergraduate years. Before considering a career in the law, he had already built up a sizeable strength—as Johnnies typically do—in attending to others’ thoughts and responding with them in mind. The exposure he gained to lawyer-authors like Goethe in the Program and the experience he acquired in comparing literature with diverse viewpoints made pursuing this line of work a logical decision for Donnelly, who finds the liberal education fostered by St. John’s to be particularly applicable to a career in the justice system. 

In 2022, Donnelly was named a Circuit Judge in Cook County, Illinois—the state’s most populous county and the second-most populous in the United States—after spending nearly 20 years as an associate judge. Throughout his tenure, he recognized that the practice of law often lacks in conversations like those fostered at St. John’s, despite their many commonalities; he strives to bring his constituents open communication and a truer form of justice.

Donnelly’s attitude toward administering justice is geared away from punitive legalism and toward restorative justice, which allows the accused to have conversations with those wronged to expedite the healing process and build mutual understanding. Human dignity is at the core of restorative justice, allowing all parties involved to tell their full stories, beginning to end, and avoid subjection to the process of cross-examination, which can sometimes feel dehumanizing.  

Donnelly offers an example of the power of restorative justice in King Priam’s commiseration with Achilles in the Iliad. Donnelly calls the moment a turning point for each character, where both come in with individual grievances and find shared grief. He compares the interaction to many he’s observed in courtrooms between two parties: “The other side is to blame for what’s happened, [but] there’s often area where they could share grief. In domestic relations, the breakdown of a marriage can be an occasion for not just grievance, but shared grief, or the breakdown of a business relationship between business partners who are now suing each other but once loved each other. When we look for more than transactional justice, we aspire to the transcendentals.”

Quite aptly, much of Donnelly’s life since St. John’s has been aspirational towards the transcendentals. Over four years at St. John’s Santa Fe, the variety of texts he read and discussions he engaged in opened his mind to myriad perspectives. He initially found the attitudes in law school to be comparatively limited: more practical in outlook and lacking a theoretical pursuit of truth. Donnelly committed to a career in the law, nevertheless, and ended up finding himself at home.

Unsurprisingly so, as legal practice and the Program share many commonalities. St. Augustine, who was a lawyer before transitioning to theology, is just one case in point. His commentaries on Genesis and the Psalms are an example Donnelly offers of lawyer-like textual analysis. Unlike other scriptural commentaries, such as those by Thomas Aquinas, who is more focused on “external evidence” from outside authorities such as Cicero and Aristotle, Augustine’s commentaries focus on internal evidence; that is, interpreting a text using only the text, without any distracting outside information. When it comes to interpreting the law, Donnelly considers his experience quite like Augustine’s, “looking for how many times this word is used in that way,” he explains. “It’s the kind of arguments lawyers like to use for interpreting text.”

The Program has shaped Donnelly’s views of the law, but it didn’t immediately direct him to the field. After Commencement, he stayed in Santa Fe and found work with a Dominican priest at a center for the arts. He thrived in the roles of writing and oral presentation, skills that would later prove indispensable for his chosen vocation. However, Donnelly’s entry to law school came about unexpectedly: On his father’s request, he moved back to Chicago to help take care of his younger siblings, and while brainstorming about things to do, he realized that legal work called for many of the skills he knew he already had. Soon after, he enrolled in Loyola University Chicago School of Law and quickly learned why so many Johnnies end up as lawyers: “Between St. John’s and the law, there’s a really great overlap between skills that you need to do well. One of them is something most lawyers do very poorly, and St. John’s really trains you in, and that’s listening.” 

Following graduation, Donnelly gained additional practice in listening, serving as an assistant public defender and clerking for the Honorable Mary Ann G. McMorrow, the first female Illinois Supreme Court Justice. But though Donnelly’s education prepared him well, he credits his success to a genuine passion for his work: “I come alive through fighting for people that I believe in. And my oldest son, when he was 10 or 12, said, ‘Dad, you’re always happy to go to work.’ I was given a kind of work that I really believe in, 100 percent; I could give my all and be proud of it.”

The aspects of Donnelly’s work that most impress and inspire him are simple acts of kindness and decency, sometimes outside of the realm of judging. On one wintery day, he bore witness to the parents of an unhoused client bringing a pair of shoes to court for their son. He realized with shock that he hadn’t noticed his client’s lack of shoes, which, in fact, had been confiscated by the police in an abuse of force. In that instant, Donnelly saw the evils possible within the justice system and humanity’s perseverance toward the good.

Moments like that remind Donnelly of his personal obligation to be a merciful conduit of justice, or, as he puts it, “to carry back the shoes” to those he encounters in court. Donnelly admits that it can be difficult to not fall into despair while in this position. Yet he maintains optimism about his work through an ineffable faith in the cosmic significance of every individual action. “You’re trying to advocate for your client the best you can, and you’re not going to solve [the condition of the world], but you can listen to their story,” he says. Though his alma mater is often touted as a “talking college,” Donnelly’s advocacy for some of society’s most disadvantaged illustrates a less commonly used, but equally true title of St. John’s: an institution of bearing witness to others.