Joe Schaaf didn’t know what to expect as he landed in Cherry Point, North Carolina, having been flown there by helicopter from the U.S.S. Nassau where he’d just finished surface warfare training. But unbeknownst to him, while he was riding the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, other forces had already set in motion his next step.
“The first thing I did I called my mother,” Schaaf says. “She said welcome home, you’re going to start law school in two days. I already packed your bag for you.”
Schaaf, who had applied to the University of Dayton School of Law, had been accepted for the Fall semester. But with him on a Navy ship in the middle of the ocean, and with this being a mid-90’s, pre-commercial Wi-Fi world, there was no easy way to get a message to him to let him know. So Schaaf went from at sea on a Friday to flying home to Erie, Pennsylvania for a day to driving to Dayton for the start of law school orientation.
“It was a total culture shock,” Schaaf says. “One day I’m on a ship surrounded by people in uniform and we’re talking about things like docking and three days later I’m with all these people who are law students.”
Schaaf’s interest in law school actually started while he was serving his two years in the Navy after having graduated from Duke.
“I had a sailor who was arrested out in town,” Schaaf says. “Because I was his division officer, I got to go to all his hearings. I saw a lot of courtroom stuff and I said I think I can do this.”
It was the first time Schaaf’s two seemingly different worlds of naval service and legal learning would cross, but it wouldn’t be the last.
After graduating from UDSL in 1997, Schaaf wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, so he went back to the Navy joining the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps.
“I did courtroom stuff at first,” Schaaf says. “I did defense, court marshals, administrative law.”
But soon he found his expertise.
“I ended up specializing in law of war,” Schaaf says.
With that specialty, Schaaf was tasked with, among other things, going to the squadrons of pilots on each aircraft carrier and explaining what types of targets they were allowed to hit and what they needed to avoid. Schaaf says his Catholic upbringing and legal education provided a great starting point for that kind of work.
“It turns out the international law of war we know is heavily reliant on Catholic ethics,” Schaaf says. “In our Catholic teachings there’s a huge difference in fighting the enemy and killing civilians and making sure violence is only done to counter violence.”
Schaaf spent his career educating everyone from carrier strike groups to those newly deployed to Afghanistan on the law of war and rules of engagement in combat before retiring from the Navy in 2016.
He later went on to earn a Master’s degree from the National War College and work at the Department of Justice before stepping down.
As he looks back on his career and all he accomplished, Schaaf has fond memories of his time at UDSL, like how much he enjoyed attending Sunday night mass at the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception. He didn’t know then how experiences like that one would later help shape his career or that his daughter would attend UDSL as well. But for Schaaf, law was a calling. Even if he wasn’t there at first to answer it.
“UD was a great experience,” Schaaf says. “I wouldn’t want to go to any other law school. I’m glad they were able to work with my mom while I was gone so I could get to UD.”