Ave Maria School of Law was founded in 1999 through the generosity of well-known Catholic philanthropist Mr. Thomas S. Monaghan. The founder of Domino’s Pizza, Mr. Monaghan, sold the company in 1998 and decided to use the profits to advance several important causes, including Catholic legal education. Ave Maria Law’s first class began studies in August 2000 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In August 2005, the law school received full accreditation by the American Bar Association. Following a multi-year study, the law school relocated to Naples, Florida during the summer of 2009, and resides there today.

The founding board of governors included religious and political figures, including Henry Hyde, Edward Cardinal Egan, Robert P. George, Kate O’Beirne, Adam Cardinal Maida, Bowie Kuhn, Bishop Frank Joseph Dewane, and John Cardinal O’Connor. Robert Bork was an early faculty member, and Antonin Scalia and Charles E. Rice consulted on the structure of the curriculum. The National Catholic Reporter described the school as having “a more conservative religious orientation than any existing Catholic law school in the nation” and “militantly religious.”

As Mr. Monaghan often says, “next to priests and consecrated religious, lawyers are the most influential leaders in our country.” Ave Maria School of Law was founded as a Catholic law school that would provide a premier legal education enhanced by the Catholic intellectual tradition that recognizes the existence of objective moral truths and the inherent dignity of every human being. We hope our graduates will see the practice of law not as a separate compartment of their lives but as a vocation, an extension of lives lived in conformance with objective moral truths. We seek to accomplish this by developing in our students the knowledge and skills critical to the intelligent practice of the profession. We work to build in our students a mature judgment informed by exposure to Catholic moral and social teachings through which those students can analyze and approach problems and issues they will face in practice.