Comparative Law

Mary Ann Glendon communicated an ideal that as students of the law, we were participants in a vast, complex and immensely important human enterprise. [Yet] She never lost sight, with clear-eyed realism, of law as a sociological fact—subject to interests and powers—and of the fragility and flaws of every human undertaking.

The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ’60 believed America had much to learn from laws adopted by nations abroad, according to Harvard Law School Professor Mary Ann Glendon. In an address titled “Who Needs Foreign Law?,” Glendon, the Learned Hand Professor of Law, gave a clear, if somewhat surprising, answer: Scalia did.