Mary Ann Glendon communicated an ideal that as students of the law, we were participants in a vast, complex and immensely important human enterprise. She embodied in her own life and generated in others a joy and a passion for what we studied together because it was valuable and relevant to our lives. At the same time, she was never naïve or utopian in this vision of the distinctive nobility and grandeur of law’s ideals. She never lost sight, with clear-eyed realism, of law as a sociological fact—subject to interests and powers—and of the fragility and flaws of every human undertaking.