A Nation Under Lawyers

How the Crisis in the Legal Profession Is Transforming American Society

Mary Ann Glendon (View Bio)
Hardcover: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994; Paperback: Harvard University Press, 1996.

"The finest book about the law and lawyers that I have ever read. It should be required reading...both a clarion wake-up call for the legal profession and a bracing tonic for every law student, lawyer, judge and law professor whose enthusiasm for law and life needs pumping up. So, please, buy, beg, borrow or filch A NATION UNDER LAWYERS. Then read it." — Chicago Bar Association Record

"Something is rotten in the state of the legal profession, and Mary Ann Glendon has some good ideas about where the blame lies. In A NATION UNDER LAWYERS, she examines the conduct of lawyers, judges and law professors, and reveals a profession whose members are betraying the honorable traditions and high ideals of the law — and harming society as they do so.... Her tone is warm and earnest, never didactic. Her prose is leavened with quotations from the usual suspects (Holmes, Cardozo, Frankfurter) — and some not so usual (Pericles, Ron Brown, Miss Manners) — making this a book that is a pleasure to read, despite its grim message." — The Wall Street Journal

"[E]ntertaining.... Glendon, a professor at Harvard Law School who started her legal career as an associate at a large Chicago law firm, offers an extremely interesting...mixture of personal anecdote and sociological theory to describe purportedly profound changes in the legal profession over the past half-century and the effect of these changes on our democratic society.... Well written and thought provoking." — Kirkus Reviews