MOUNT VERNON — Legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon will lecture on “Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” at 11 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 13, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons at Cornell College.
Glendon’s visit is for the annual Earhart-Cornell Lecture series, “The Liberal Arts and the Public Square,” funded by the Earhart Foundation of Ann Arbor, Mich. Admission to the lecture is free.
Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University. She writes and teaches in the fields of human rights, comparative law, constitutional law and legal theory. Her most recent book, “A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” is the story of Mrs. Roosevelt’s proudest achievement: the framing of the United Nations’ declaration of rights so basic that they belong to everyone on earth simply by virtue of being human. The U.N. adopted the measure in 1948.
Named by the National Law Journal as one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in America in 1998, Glendon was appointed in 1994 by Pope John Paul II to the newly created Pontifical Academy of Social Science. In 1995 she was chosen by the Vatican to lead its 22-member delegation to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.
In 1988, Glendon won the Scribes Book Award from the American Society of Writers on Legal Subjects for her comparative study “Abortion and Divorce in Western Law.” Another comparative study, “The Transformation of Family Law,” won the Legal Academy’s highest award, the Order of the Coif Triennial Book Award in 1993.
After receiving bachelor’s, law and master of comparative law degrees from the University of Chicago, Glendon practiced law in Chicago and served as a volunteer civil rights attorney from 1963 to 1968. She taught at Boston College Law School from 1968 to 1986, became law professor at Harvard in 1986 and has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School and the Gregorian University in Rome.
Hers is the fifth lecture in the annual Earhart-Cornell Lecture series, which previously has featured Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist and popular science writer; Stephen Carter, Yale University law professor and author; Walter Williams, economist, columnist and commentator; and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.