Mary Ann Glendon

“You are going to Beijing to be witnesses,” the Holy See’s Undersecretary for Relations with States told us as we left for the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women last September”daunting words for our band of fourteen women and eight men from nine countries and five . . . . Continue Reading »

The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Neighborhood Life in the Chicago of the 1950s . By Alan Ehrenhalt. Basic Books. 299 pages, $23 . You have to give Alan Ehrenhalt, the editor of Governing magazine, credit for a lot of nerve. It’s one thing to take on the job of . . . . Continue Reading »

The Villagers: Changed Values, Altered Lives, the Closing of the Urban-Rural Gap. By Richard Critchfield. Anchor. 497 pages, $27.50 . In Good Hands: The Life of a Family Farm . By Charles Fish. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 229 pages, $21. Sitting in the British Museum, amidst a great, grimy, . . . . Continue Reading »

Chicago’s financial district and the seat of its city government are only a few blocks apart, yet they belong to two different worlds. I learned this in my first few months of law practice in 1964 when, as low person on the totem pole, I had to handle routine motions in both state and federal . . . . Continue Reading »

Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics by Jane Jacobs Random House, 236 pages, $22 In her latest book, Jane Jacobs trains her genial, sparkling intelligence on a subject that is much neglected in our law-saturated society: the great webs of manners, . . . . Continue Reading »

A well-known account of creativity sets the scene for a celebrated act of creation, and a bleak scene it was: “In the beginning . . . the earth was without form and void, and darkness covered the face of the abyss.” On that occasion, creativity consisted in bringing something out of . . . . Continue Reading »

Mention the First Amendment to any lawyer, and the odds are excellent that he or she will assume you are talking about free speech. This habitual tendency to equate the First Amendment with speech goes beyond mere verbal shorthand. It is revealing of the preeminence that lawyers generally accord to . . . . Continue Reading »

The suggestion has been made on occasion in these pages that Americans are engaged in a Kulturkampf, a contest over the role of common American moral intuitions in contributing to fundamental understandings of what kind of society we wish to be. There are few signs of any such struggle, however, in . . . . Continue Reading »

Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes by Laurence H. Tribe Norton, 259 pages, $19.95 Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes is an expert brief on behalf of strict adherence to the terms of the abortion liberty granted in Roe v. Wade, no matter how much leeway the Supreme Court may give to legislatures in the . . . . Continue Reading »

All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The Romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Those buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone. . . . —W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939 The April 1989 Scientific . . . . Continue Reading »