Mary Ann Glendon
Learned Hand Professor of Law
Harvard Law School
Mary Ann Glendon, J.D., L.LM. is Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She received a B.A., J.D., and Master of Comparative Law from the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the faculty at the Harvard Law School, she was a professor at the Boston College Law School, and a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School and at the Gregorian University in Rome. She was an attorney in private practice at the Chicago firm of Mayer, Brown & Platt from 1963-68. Glendon is a past President of the International Association of Legal Science, a member of the editorial boards of the American Journal of Comparative Law and First Things, and serves on the advisory boards of the Harvard University Human Rights Initiative and the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program. She was head of the Holy See Delegation to the 4th U.N. Women's Conference in 1995, and sits on the board of trustees at St. John's Seminary. Presently she is a member of U.S. President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, and in 2004 John Paul II appointed her to Head the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences. Her areas of expertise include bioethics, international human rights, and comparative constitutional law in the United States and Europe. She is the author of many books, including Comparative Legal Traditions in a Nutshell (West, 1999), A Nation Under Lawyers: How the Crisis in the Legal Profession is Transforming American Society (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (Free Press, 1991), The Transformation of Family Law: State, Law and Family in the United States and Western Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Abortion and Divorce in Western Law (Harvard University Press, 1987). Her most recent book is entitled A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Random House, 2001). The National Law Journal named her one of the "Fifty Most Influential Women Lawyers in America" in 1998.
