HARVARD law professor Mary Ann Glendon’s A Nation under Lawyers comes with a blurb from Gass Sunstein, one of the nation’s most liberal law professors, praising its moderation” and “compassion” and noting that Professor Glendon “defies categorization as a liberal or “conservative.” This is not a good omen. As is usually the case with people who attract that description. she earns the accolade of “moderate’’ by, it turns out, pandering to liberal conversation and mythology and hedging her conservative—sounding arguments almost to the point of retraction. She defies political categorization because she typically seeks to have things both ways.
The book’s three main sections deal with practicing lawyers, judges, and law professors. Although Professor Glendon complains of the “bland platitudes spouted by most professional leaders today.” her discussion of law practice, like most of the rest of the book, is little more than a collection of bland platitudes. She speaks, for example, of the need to “shore up the moral courage of individual practitioners,” as if stating a useful prescription
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