A Nation Under Lawyers

How the Crisis in the Legal Profession Is Transforming American Society

Paperback

ISBN 9780674601383

Publication date: 03/01/1996

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.

Praise

One of the most accessible and best-written books about the legal profession in the last few years.

—David Luban, New York Times Book Review
Glendon argues powerfully…[A Nation Under Lawyers is] a witty and concise book…about the profession’s ‘crisis’; possibly the best of the many such books; certainly the easiest to read… This fine book will make us think.

—Richard A. Posner, New Republic
The finest book about the law and lawyers that I have ever read… [It] is 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.

—Patrick W. O’Brien, Chicago Bar Association Record
Glendon’s analysis has historical depth and ideological subtlety: she recognizes both the strengths and the weaknesses of the past and states that the number of lawyers matters less than what those lawyers do.

—Publishers Weekly
Poor old civilization finally has an eloquent lawyer to defend it.

—Judith Martin, “Miss Manners”