Home > West's Encyclopedia of American Law > Rawls, John Bordley

John Bordley Rawls was one of the major moral and political philosophers of the twentieth century. His work embraced liberalism and egalitarianism, while rejecting UTILITARIANISM and more radical political ideas. His most important work, A Theory of Justice (1971), discusses the idea of "justice as fairness."

Rawls was born on February 21, 1921, in Baltimore, Maryland. He earned his bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1943 and his doctorate from Princeton in 1950. Rawls was an instructor at Princeton between 1950 and 1952, before attending Oxford University in England as a Fulbright Fellow. Upon his return to the United States in 1953, he served as a professor at Cornell University (1953–59) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1960–62).

In 1962, Rawls was appointed professor of philosophy at Harvard University, an...