John Rawls, an American philosopher and professor of political philosophy at Harvard University and author of A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism (1993), The Law of Peoples (1999) and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001) . He is widely regarded as one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century. His political theory proposes two principles on which to base the notion of justice from the original position contractarian spirit of the classical political philosophers.
Rawls was awarded the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton.