Hello there. This is Mark Bowerline with another conversation.

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Mary Ann Glendon is an emeritus professor of law at Harvard and former U.S. Ambassador

of the Holy See.

Her many writings include the books The Transformation of Family Law, Rights Talk, and

A Nation Under Lawyers, Good title, plus a new book,

in the courts of three popes, an American lawyer and diplomat

in the last absolute monarchy in the West.

That's our topic today.

Welcome, Professor Glendon.

Happy to be here, Mark.

All right, you refer to that little spot in Rome as a court.

And you've been there as a woman, a layperson, a lawyer, and a citizen, not a, not a subject of the, of the king, the court, the emperor, whatever.

That makes you at first sight out of place. And you even compare yourself

early on in the book to Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee. And yet you have been actually an

important figure in many episodes there. How have you been able to be on the inside?

...