The Subsidiarity Project grew out of two places: the courtroom and the classroom.

By day, I’m a family law attorney. I spend much of my time walking with people through hard transitions — divorce, custody, and the kinds of disputes where law and everyday life meet. That work keeps me close to the realities of family life and to the ways legal rules and cultural expectations help or hurt the people they’re meant to serve.

Before that, in law school, my favorite class was a seminar on Constitutional Theory. We spent the semester wrestling with normative methodologies — originalism, living constitutionalism, and how different approaches to interpretation line up with the Catholic intellectual tradition. It was the first time I saw how legal argument, philosophy, and theology could sit around the same table.

I’m Catholic, and over time the principle of subsidiarity has become a thread running through my interests in family, faith, and culture. I’m drawn to its basic question: what belongs to the family, what belongs to local communities, and what belongs to larger institutions — and how do we keep those relationships ordered so that the smallest communities can thrive?

I created The Subsidiarity Project as a corner for that kind of thinking: a place to collect essays, commentary, and book recommendations, and to make room for conversation with others who care about these themes. It’s not a law practice site and it’s not an academic journal; it’s something in between — more like a notebook on family, faith, and culture, written from the vantage point of someone who works with families and still loves a seminar question.

If you read something here that sparks a thought, I hope you’ll share it, sit with it, or write back. This project is meant to be a compilation and a starting point for discussion. My hope is that these essays will give some shape to the questions closest to home and offer a place to consider them with care.