Mr. Abram, whose public career began as a prosecutor at Nuremberg and an

administrator of the Marshall Plan, is a lifelong civil-rights and civil-liberties activist who is not too active to take time to think--for example, about the limits of civil disobedience, about the ideal of academia, about insanity as a criminal defense. MBA: "Martin Luther King, when he practiced civil disobedience, was always willing to go to jail.... He knew that the civilized society, with its constraints of law, protected him and protected his movement, and it was too valuable to be forsaken by him." WFB: "So you distinguish Martin Luther King from William Sloane Coffin and Dr. Spock?" MBA: "Absolutely."