How far have we come putting into practice what was declared in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which this year marks its 70th anniversary? How can the Church respond today to the new challenges threatening these rights, whether relativism, fundamentalism, and persecution or new types of poverty and oppression? And with whom can the Church engage on these issues? With states, religious leaders, international institutions, cultural institutions, or first and foremost with global civil society? In addition, what are the roots of fundamental rights, and what response can there be to the danger of a multiplication of rights that can paradoxically threaten concepts on the rule of law and human dignity? These are the fundamental questions addressed and debated by the experts whose essays appear in this book. Fundamental Rights and Conflicts among Rights is divided into four parts: Genesis and Meaning of the Idea of Religious Liberty, Laicité and Natural Law, Birth and Transformation of the Culture of Liberty and Human Rights, and the Multiplication of Rights and the Risk of Destruction of the Idea of Right. Throughout the volume, prestigious international experts analyze these issues. Among them are Giuseppe Dalla Torre (Libera Università Maria SS. Assunta), Jean Louis Ska (Pontificio Istituto Biblico), Robert P. George (Princeton University), Marta Cartabia (vice president of the Italian Constitutional Court), Carlos Ignacio Massini (Mendoza, Argentina), Barbara Zehnpfennig (Universität Passau), Mary Ann Glendon (Harvard University), Joseph H. Weiler (New York University), and Roberto Baratta (Macerata, Italia). The volume also contains an essay by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, secretary of state, on “The Church's Interlocutors in the Debate and in the Affirmation of Human Rights.�

This book offers a comparative and historical analysis of the rapid and profound legal changes that took rise in the 1960s in England, France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States, while bringing new and insightful interpretation and critical thought to bear on the explosion of legislation in the last decade. A unique, detailed comparative analysis and summary of the current state of family law, this author's book will serve as a valuable reference for students, scholars, and reformers.

That ours is a time of intellectual, cultural, moral, and religious turmoil does not need to be argued. What does need to be argued, and what Glendon argues with force and freshness, is that our response to turmoil requires a greater honesty in coming to terms with tradition, and with traditions in conflict. That is little understood by many on both the political left and right. Quoting one of her favourite thinkers, theologian Bernard Lonergan, she urges us to be “big enough to be at home in the both and old and new; and painstaking enough to work out one at a time the transitions to be made.� Working within the capacious structure of the Christian intellectual tradition, most reflectively and generously articulated in Catholic teaching, Glendon constructively engages alternative ways of thinking about what it means to be human and what is required to nurture a society worthy of human beings. As the reader will see, her work ranges far and wide, and it goes deep. There is hardly a subject she addresses that does not change the way we think about it.

Political speech in the United States is undergoing a crisis. Glendon's acclaimed book traces the evolution of the strident language of rights in America and shows how it has captured the nation's devotion to individualism and liberty, but omitted the American traditions of hospitality and care for the community.

As Mary Ann Glendon writes in this fascinating new book, the relationship between politics and the academy has been fraught with tension and regret-and the occasional brilliant success-since Plato himself.
In The Forum and the Tower, Glendon examines thinkers who have collaborated with leaders, from ancient Syracuse to the modern White House, in a series of brisk portraits that explore the meeting of theory and reality. Glendon discusses a roster of great names, from Edmund Burke to Alexis de Tocqueville, Machiavelli to Rousseau, John Locke to Max Weber, down to Charles Malik, who helped Eleanor Roosevelt draft the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With each, she explores the eternal questions they faced, including: Is politics such a dirty business that I shouldn't get involved? Will I betray my principles by pursuing public office? Can I make a difference, or will my efforts be wasted? Even the most politically successful intellectuals, she notes, did not all end happily. The brilliant Marcus Tullius Cicero, for example, reached the height of power in the late Roman Republic, then fell victim to intrigue, assassinated at Mark Antony's order. Yet others had a lasting impact. The legal scholar Tribonian helped Byzantine Emperor Justinian I craft the Corpus Juris Civilis, which became a bedrock of Western law. Portalis and Napoleon emulated them, creating the civil code that the French emperor regarded as his greatest legacy.
Formerly ambassador to the Vatican and an eminent legal scholar, Glendon knows these questions personally. Here she brings experience and expertise to bear in a timely, and timeless, study.

This new edition includes some significant revisions since the last edition was published in 2007. In addition to updating the materials to take into account developments in the law in the examined jurisdictions, the new edition also places discussion of the relevant regional law, for the most part European Union and Council of Europe law, within the examinations of the specific legal systems themselves (more accurately reflecting the realities of operating within those systems). In addition, there are updates and addition to the in-depth chapters focusing on discrete comparative problems and exercises.

Mary Ann Glendon's A Nation Under Lawyers is a guided tour through the maze of the late-twentieth-century legal world, in which even lawyers themselves can lose their bearings. Glendon depicts the legal profession as a system in turbulence, where a variety of beliefs and ideals are vying for dominance. Dramatizing issues and events through stories of lawyers and laypersons caught up in the currents of change, she provides a frank assessment of the people and ideas that are transforming our law-dependent culture.

What can abortion and divorce laws in other countries teach Americans about these thorny issues? In this incisive new book, noted legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon looks at the experiences of twenty Western nations, including the United States, and shows how they differ, subtly but profoundly, from one another. Her findings challenge many widely held American beliefs. She reveals, for example, that a compromise on the abortion question is not only possible but typical, even in societies that are deeply divided on the matter. Regarding divorce, the extensive reliance on judicial discretion in the United States is not the best way to achieve fairness in arranging child support, spousal maintenance, or division of property-to judge by the experience of other countries. Glendon's analysis, by searching out alternatives to current U.S. practice, identities new possibilities of reform in these areas. After the late 1960s abortion and divorce became more readily available throughout the West-and most readily in this country-but the approach of American law has been anomalous. Compared with other Western nations, the United States permits less regulation of abortion in the interest of the fetus, provides less public support for maternity and child-rearing, and does less to mitigate the economic hardships of divorce through public assistance or enforcement of private obligations of support. Glendon looks at these and more profound differences in the light of a powerful new method of legal interpretation. She sees each country's laws as part of a symbol-creating system that yields a distinctive portrait of individuals, human life, and relations between men and women, parents and children, families and larger communities. American law, more than that of other countries, employs a rhetoric of rights, individual liberty, and tolerance for diversity that, unchecked, contributes to the fragmentation of community and its values. Contemporary U.S. family law embodies a narrative about divorce, abortion, and dependency that is probably not the story most Americans would want to tell about these sad and complex matters but that is recognizably related to many of their most cherished ideals.

This nutshell offers a general introduction to comparative law that includes both an overview of the methods of comparative law as well as of the two most widespread legal traditions in the world: civil (or Romano-Germanic) law and common law. For both legal traditions, this expert discussion covers their history; legal structures, including constitutional systems, courts, and judicial review; the roles of central legal actors, including lawyers, judges, and scholars; an overview of civil and criminal procedure; the principal sources of law and divisions of substantive law; and the judicial process. Throughout, the discussion also includes references to the place and the importance of supranational law and institutions and their impact on the civil law and common law traditions in Europe.

Mary Ann Glendon offers a comparative and historical analysis of rapid and profound changes in the legal system beginning in the 1960s in England, France, West Germany, Sweden, and the United States, while bringing new and insightful interpretation and critical thought to bear on the explosion of legislation in the last decade. Glendon is generally acknowledged to be the premier comparative law scholar in the area of family law. This volume, which offers an analytical survey of the changes in family law over the past twenty-five years, will burnish that reputation. Essential reading for anyone interested in evaluating the major changes that occurred in the law of the family. . . . [And] of serious interest to those in the social sciences as well.--James B. Boskey, Law Books in Review Poses important questions and supplies rich detail.--Barbara Bennett Woodhouse, Texas Law Review An impressive scholarly documentation of the legal changes that comprise the development of a conjugally-centered family system.--Debra Friedman, Contemporary Sociology She has painted a portrait of the family in which we recognize not only ourselves but also unremembered ideological forefathers. . . . It sends our thoughts out into unexpected adventures.--Inga Markovits, Michigan Law Review