Mary Ann Glendon

Glendon's 1991 book argues that American political discourse has become dominated by a distinctive style of rights language that is 'absolute, individual, and independent of any necessary relation to responsibilities' . This rhetoric promotes unrealistic expectations, heightens social conflict, and inhibits dialogue toward consensus or accommodation. Glendon does not attack rights themselves—she defends them—but the way Americans talk about rights, which has crowded out older languages of responsibility, sociality, and community. The book's chapter titles—'The Illusion of Absoluteness,' 'The Lone Rights-Bearer,' 'The Missing Language of Responsibility'—capture her diagnosis of a legal culture that has lost essential dimensions of political deliberation .

Glendon's earlier comparative studies—The New Family and the New Property (1981), Abortion and Divorce in Western Law (1987), and The Transformation of Family Law (1989)—revealed that American legal approaches to family matters were outliers among Western nations. This cross-national perspective led her to investigate the deeper question of how Americans conceptualize rights generally, producing Rights Talk. From there she moved to the international human rights framework itself, exploring how the Universal Declaration's framers understood human dignity in ways that differed from the absolutist American vernacular. Her method was consistently comparative: examining how different legal systems handle shared human problems reveals assumptions that remain invisible when looking at one system alone .

Published in 2001, A World Made New recovered the drafting history of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Eleanor Roosevelt's central role in it. Glendon found that diplomatic historians had given short shrift to Roosevelt's contribution, with most biographers ending their accounts with FDR's death. Through archival research, she reconstructed the 1945-1953 period when Roosevelt served at the UN, arguing that her role in framing the UDHR was similar to George Washington's at the Constitutional Convention: others did the actual drafting, but Roosevelt's prestige and personal qualities carried the day . The book illuminates the philosophical debates among the framers over how to ground human rights.

Glendon and Moyn offer opposing narratives of human rights history. Moyn argues in The Last Utopia that human rights as a transnational movement emerged only in the 1970s, filling the void left by failed revolutionary politics. Glendon treats the 1948 Universal Declaration as the foundational moment, tracing its origins to the philosophical debates of the 1940s and recovering the intentions of its framers. Where Moyn emphasizes rupture and the 1970s invention of human rights, Glendon emphasizes continuity with the UDHR's vision of human dignity. Glendon's account is more sympathetic to the document's framers; Moyn's is more critical of how human rights became a depoliticized substitute for transformative politics.

Glendon served as U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See from 2008 to 2009 and was the first woman to lead a Vatican delegation, heading the Holy See's 22-member team at the 1995 UN Women's Conference in Beijing . Pope John Paul II appointed her to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in 1994, and she served as its president from 2003 to 2013 . Pope Francis appointed her to the commission reforming the Vatican Bank, where she served five years. In 2019, she chaired the U.S. State Department's Commission on Unalienable Rights. Her diplomatic and ecclesiastical roles extended her scholarly work on human dignity into institutional practice .

Critics argue that Glendon overstates the opposition between rights and responsibilities. As Suzanna Sherry noted, many rights encourage precisely the deliberation and communal interaction Glendon favors: free speech is a precondition for democratic deliberation, associational freedom protects collective action, and the right to vote protects collective governance . Rights and duties are correlative—to say someone has a right is to say someone else has a duty. Critics contend that Glendon's framing risks weakening the legal protections that enable political participation, and that her diagnosis of a 'crisis' in rights discourse may reflect a particular ideological perspective rather than a neutral observation .

Glendon joined Harvard Law School in 1987 and became the Learned Hand Professor of Law, teaching in human rights, comparative law, constitutional law, and legal theory. A former student described her teaching as embracing 'the whole world through the study of law,' communicating an ideal of law as 'a vast, complex and immensely important human enterprise' . Her pedagogical approach emphasized comparative perspective and engaged students with the 'big questions' about human personhood and the good life. She received the National Humanities Medal in 2005 . Her books have been translated widely and remain standard references in comparative law and human rights scholarship.

Glendon's Catholic intellectual tradition—particularly its emphasis on human dignity, subsidiarity, and mediating institutions—informs her critique of autonomous individualism in American rights discourse. The Catholic concept of the person as inherently social, constituted through relationships and communities, contrasts with the 'lone rights-bearer' she identifies in American legal culture. Her work on the Universal Declaration's foundations reflects her view that human rights are grounded in dignity rather than autonomy. She has written on 'mediating groups' and subsidiarity, themes from Catholic social thought that appear throughout her comparative legal analysis . In 2025, the Knights of Columbus awarded her its highest honor, the Gaudium et Spes Award, for a life advancing the Church's mission .