May, Larry

Introduction

Larry May (born 1952) is an American professor of legal and moral philosophy. He has spent most of his career at Purdue University (1979–1991), Washington University in St. Louis (1991–2009), and most recently as the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy, Law, and Political Science at Vanderbilt University (2009–2017). He has authored or coauthored 16 books and more than 120 articles, and edited or coedited 18 books, on a wide range of topics, including the philosophy of international criminal law, collective and shared responsibility, just war theory, and Thomas Hobbes’s legal and political thought. His pioneering work on the philosophy of international criminal law has helped to usher in a wave of attention to the conceptual and normative questions underlying these relatively new and developing institutions.

A central concern running through much of May’s work is with the issue of wrongdoing committed by groups and against groups: how to conceptualize it, how to assign...