One of five brothers, Dr. Rawls was born in 1921 to Anna Abell Stump and William Lee Rawls. Two of his brothers, Richard ’45 and William ’27, also graduated from Calvert. His father was a self-taught lawyer who became a partner at the Marbury Law Firm, an ancestor of today’s DLA Piper. Dr. Rawls’ mother was from Greenspring Valley and briefly served as the president of the Baltimore chapter of the League of Women Voters, a women’s political advocacy group.

 

Dr. Rawls’ time at Calvert was a marked by highs and lows. He entered Calvert in 1927, a year before his brother Bobby died of diphtheria he had contracted from Dr. Rawls himself, who had been very sick. The following winter, his brother Tommy died after catching the same pneumonia that had beset Dr. Rawls after a tonsillectomy. The stress from witnessing the deaths of two of his brothers from diseases he’d had first gave Dr. Rawls a stammer. But the numerous opportunities at Calvert to practice public speaking allowed him to discover that he didn’t stammer when speaking in rhyme. Dr. Rawls continued to distinguish himself at Calvert and graduated after six years as the class valedictorian.

 

In 1935, he left Baltimore for the Kent School in Connecticut. Four years later, he entered Princeton, where he followed in his brother’s footsteps to become a member of The Ivy Club. After forays in chemistry, math, music, and art history, Dr. Rawls decided to major in philosophy. He took a brief hiatus to serve abroad during World War II [in the 32nd Infantry Division, 128th Regiment] and returned to Princeton to complete his graduate degree, thanks to the G.I. Bill.

Upon earning his graduate degree in philosophy from Princeton in 1949, Dr. Rawls married Margaret Warfield Fox, who had graduated from Roland Park Country School in 1945. The couple had four children together during their long marriage.

 

Dr. Rawls taught at Princeton, Christ Church College in Oxford as a Fulbright fellow, Cornell, and MIT before becoming the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard in 1962. During his tenure, he published A Theory of Justice in 1971. This work was an extraordinary innovation in a field of political philosophy that had fallen stagnant in the 20th century. Most undergraduates interested in politics now read Dr. Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, and generations of philosophers have spent their lives studying the consequences of the book’s arguments. In 1999, President Clinton awarded Dr. Rawls a National Humanities Medal, declaring that his work had “helped a whole generation of learned Americans revive their faith in democracy.”

 

Those who knew Dr. Rawls personally admired him both for his achievements in philosophy and his kindness and devotion to his students. At Dr. Rawls’ memorial service in 2002, Princeton philosopher John Cooper described him as “saintly” in his manner and care for others. Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, wrote in The New York Times that Dr. Rawls had “sometimes been portrayed as a kind of natural saint, who effortlessly put others first… [but] the reality was more complicated and more admirable than that: he had a keen sense of the emotions that make for injustice, yet waged a constant struggle for justice… [with] a vision of the general good” in mind.

 

Dr. Rawls was an exceptional philosopher and, by all accounts, an unfailingly modest and compassionate man. I am grateful to have studied his work and feel honored to have in common a Calvert education.