Sixteen Roman Catholic and Christian law professors signed a joint statement this week accusing the Ave Maria School of Law of management practices that appear “to violate core Catholic norms.”

The statement said the law school, which is planning a move from Michigan to Florida against the wishes of many of its faculty members, has also “violated several procedural norms of the secular academy.” The signers included current and former law professors at Cornell, Emory, Notre Dame, and UCLA, as well as Mark Sargent, the law dean at Villanova, a Roman Catholic university.

The school, located in Ann Arbor, Mich., plans to move in 2009 to Ave Maria, Fla. Some professors who oppose the move say they have been punished for speaking out. One of the school’s first tenured law professors has been suspended and barred from the campus, while two others have been denied tenure and placed on leave. The school also recently learned that it faces a potential threat to its accreditation.

“There are standards that we have for law schools and in particular Catholic law schools,” Michael Scaperlands, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, told the Naples Daily News. “From both an academic standpoint and from a Catholic-education standpoint, there seems to be an egregious violation of both.”

The Ave Maria law school’s dean, Bernard Dobranski, said the statement was backed by a “very small group of people” who have been spreading “disinformation and misinformation” about the law school. —Katherine Mangan