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About the Authors

Lori Andrews received her B.A. from Yale College and her J.D. from Yale Law School. She is a lawyer with an expertise in biotechnologies. Andrews is the author of 14 books and more than 100 other publications. She is currently a professor of law at Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Ray Bradbury was born in 1920 in Waukegon, Ill. He graduated from high school but never attended college; instead he spent hours in libraries. One of the most popular science fiction writers of the 20th century, Bradbury is most well-known for his 1953 dystopian novel Farenheit 451. He is the author of 30 books and more than 600 short stories. In 2004, he received the National Medal of Arts for his lifetime of writings. Living in Los Angeles, he raised four daughters (now adults) with his wife Maggie, who passed away in 2003.

Kent Greenfield studied economics and history at Brown University before going on to the University of Chicago Law School. He later served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the United States Supreme Court. In 1995, he became a professor of law at Boston College Law School. He is the author of the book The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits, published in 2011.

Nicholas Kristof grew up on a farm in Oregon. He graduated from Harvard University before studying law at Oxford University. He has traveled extensively, visiting more than 150 countries. He has been a columnist for The New York Times since 2001 and has won two Pulitzer Prizes.

Adam Liptak was born in Stamford, Conn., in 1960. He attended Yale University for English and was an editor of The Yale Daily News Magazine. He later returned to Yale for a law degree. He has published articles in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and many other publications while he was a practicing lawyer. He currently works on The New York Times’ news staff as the Supreme Court correspondent. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two children.

William Ker Muir, Jr. was born in Detroit, Mich. He earned his Ph.D. in political science at Yale University. He has taught at the University of Michigan Law School, Yale and the University of California, Berkeley. He has also worked as an attorney, politician and writer. This excerpt comes from his most recent book, Freedom in America, which was published in 2011.

Azar Nafisi was born in 1947 in Iran. She was educated in Switzerland and received her Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma. Nafisi returned to Iran in 1979 to teach English literature at the University of Tehran. However, due to the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, she had to stop teaching so as to avoid scrutiny and instead invited seven of her female students to her house for regular meetings to discuss literature. She left Iran in 1997 to go to the United States. She is best known for her book Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.

Steven Pinker was born in 1954 in Montréal, Québec, Canada. He received a B.A .in psychology at McGill and earned his Ph.D. at Harvard in experimental psychology in 1979. From 1982-2003, Pinker was a professor at MIT in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He has written dozens of books and scientific essays and is known for his theory of language acquisition.

Philip H. Phenix was educated at Princeton University, Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University. He was formerly dean of Carleton College and was professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. This essay originally appeared in The Christian Scholar, a quarterly review (Spring, 1967).

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born in 1882 in Hyde Park, N.Y. Though he did not perform exceptionally well in school, he was involved on campus while he attended Harvard, most notably being the editor-in-chief of The Harvard Crimson daily newspaper. He married Eleanor Roosevelt in 1905 and in the years following became a member of a prestigious law firm. He became the 32nd President of the United States in 1933 and held this office until his death in 1945, making him the only president to have served longer than eight years. He guided the United States through a time of extreme economic crisis and world war and overcame his personal paralytic disability.

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1905 in Paris, France. He earned a doctorate of philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure. During his time at the school, he met Simone de Beauvoir, a romantic interest and a lifelong companion. Along with being one of the most well-known philosophers of the 20th century, Sartre is also remembered for his plays, novels, and short stories, the most famous of which is his play Huis Clos (No Exit). He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature but refused it as well as all other official honors. He died in 1980 in Paris.

Sheryl WuDunn grew up in New York City. She went to Cornell University, where she studied European history, and later attended the Harvard Business School and Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She joined The New York Times as a Beijing correspondent in 1989. She is the first Asian American to win a Pulitzer Prize.

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