Patrick McKinley Brennan, a native of California, joined the Villanova faculty in 2004 as the first holder of the John F. Scarpa Chair in Catholic Legal Studies, following eight years on the faculty of the Arizona State University College of Law, where for a time he served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and later as Vice Dean. Professor Brennan is the author or co-author of some thirty-five articles, essays, and book chapters that study questions in jurisprudence, American public law, law and religion, and Catholic social thought. Professor Brennan's writings have appeared in the reviews of the Villanova, Michigan, Notre Dame, Boston College, Catholic University of America, St. John's University, Georgetown, Pepperdine, and Emory law schools, and in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Jurisprudence, Law and Philosophy, Lonergan Workshop, The Journal of Law and Religion, and the Journal of Law, Philosophy, and Culture. Professor Brennan wrote the chapter on (and edited the primary source material of) Jacques Maritain for the two-volume study The Teachings of Modern Christianity on Law, Politics, and Human Nature (Columbia University Press 2006). The portion of the two-volume work devoted to the Catholic tradition has been reprinted under the title The Teachings of Modern Roman Catholicism on Law, Politics, and Human Nature (Columbia University Press 2007). Professor Brennan is the co-author of By Nature Equal: The Anatomy of a Western Insight (Princeton 1999) and the editor of Civilizing Authority: Society, State, and Church (Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington, 2007). Professor Brennan co-directed a study on "The Vocation of the Child" for Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion, and edited the resulting volume, of fifteen chapters, published by W.B. Eerdmans in 2008.

Professor Brennan is an elected member of the editorial board of the American Journal of Jurisprudence. In 2006, Professor Brennan was elected to serve a three-year term on the Executive Council of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. In 2007, he was appointed to serve a three-year term on the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure of The Association of American Law Schools.

Among the courses Professor Brennan has taught on a regular basis are Federal Courts, Administrative Law, Criminal Law, and Jurisprudence. He has offered seminars on such topics as sovereign immunity; law and morality and love; legal epistemology; and the teachings of modern Christianity (Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox) on law, politics, and human nature. During summer 2007, Professor Brennan offered the course "Modern Catholic Social Teaching on State, Society, Justice, and Law" in Rome.

Professor Brennan received his B.A. in philosophy from Yale College (with honors as well as distinction in the major), where he also studied Greek and Latin and won the Jacob Cooper Prize in Ancient Greek philosophy for his paper on the doctrine of analogy in Aristotle's Metaphysics. He wrote his senior thesis on the metaphysics of relation in the thought of Francisco Suarez and John of St. Thomas. Professor Brennan then earned an M.A. and pursued doctoral course work in philosophy at the University of Toronto, taking many of his courses in the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.

Professor Brennan earned his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, where he won awards in Torts, Corporations, Political Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Public Law, and Water Law and was elected to the Order of the Coif. After law school, Professor Brennan clerked for the Honorable John T. Noonan, Jr., on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco and later was associated with major law firms in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Professor Brennan is a member of the State Bar of California.

In addition to having lectured at more than two dozen law schools, Professor Brennan has served as a visiting professor in the Boston College Law School, held the Chair for the Culture of Law in the Intercultural Forum for Studies in Faith and Culture at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., and served as a Scholar in Residence at the Columbus School of Law, The Catholic University of America. Professor Brennan has also been a senior research fellow at the Robbins Collection of Canon and Civil Law at U.C. Berkeley. In 2006, Professor Brennan delivered the Brendan F. Brown Lecture at The Catholic University of America.

At Villanova, Professor Brennan organizes the annual John F. Scarpa Conference on Law, Politics, and Culture.  Keynote speakers have included Avery Cardinal Dulles, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Martha Nussbaum.

Professor Brennan is a frequent commentator on matters concerning the Catholic Church in American law and politics. Brennan blogs at Mirror of Justice.