Samuel Freeman is Goldstone Term Professor of Philosophy and Law, University of Pennsylvania. He edited both John Rawls's Collected Papers (1999) and his Essays in the History of Political Philosophy (2007).

"Highly recommended."--D.H. Rice, CHOICE

"Freeman seems to have read almost all of the classical philosophical sources on which Rawls drew, to have assimilated large stretches of contemporary and secondary literature, and to have thought deeply about every sentence Rawls ever wrote.... The result is an extraordinarily substantial set of papers...this is a very valuable book."--Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"Freeman is the leading authority on the thought and writing of John Rawls, and Rawls was the leading political and social philosopher of the twentieth century. Freeman's clear, careful, and deeply informed studies in these essays offer important insight about basic questions of interpretation and justification--about Rawls's contractualism, about his relation to utilitarianism, about the idea of public reason, and about his reasons for limiting his principles of distributive justice to the self-contained nation-state."--Thomas Nagel, New York University

"Freeman is one of the leading political philosophers of his generation. His influential papers include some of the most sophisticated and illuminating discussions of themes from Rawls's earlier and later work. This important collection will be essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in political philosophy." --R. Jay Wallace, University of California at Berkeley