Live to Make Men Free

In Live to Make Men Free, American attorney Roger Sherrard takes readers inside Albania's precarious, high-stakes transition from a Stalinist-style atheist state to a fledgling democracy. During a half-century of communist rule, Albania's dictatorship framed the United States of America as the country's chief enemy, warning its citizenry of an imminent invasion. Americans during that time were banned entry to the Balkan state. But after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Albanian leaders invited Americans to assist their effort to form "a new identity and a new national purpose."

On his first of more than fifty visits over twenty-five years, Sherrard was asked to talk about some of the principles of liberty espoused by America's Founders. At the heart of the Declaration of Independence, he said, is the belief that our rights as human beings are granted to us not by a government, but by our creator. e purpose of government is to recognize and protect those "unalienable" rights. Just as it was at America's founding, the effort in Albania to implement those principles to establish a just society with a separation of powers and an independent judiciary was met with resistance. Albanian leaders who boldly embraced the rule of law had to pay a price, as Sherrard soon discovered.