Charles R. Beitz is an American political scientist. He is a Professor of Politics at Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 specializing in Political Theory. His philosophical and teaching interests focus on international political theory, democratic theory, the theory of human rights and legal theory.

Beitz received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. From 1987 to 1988 he was a Research Fellow for the International Security Program, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs is a permanent research center located within the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The center's current director is political scientist Graham T. Allison....

, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. Before joining the Politics Department at Princeton, Dr. Beitz taught at Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....

 and Bowdoin College

Bowdoin College

Bowdoin College , founded in 1794, is an elite private liberal arts college located in the coastal Maine town of Brunswick, Maine. As of 2011, U.S. News and World Report ranks Bowdoin 6th among liberal arts colleges in the United States. At times, it was ranked as high as 4th in the country. It is...

, where he was also Dean for Academic Affairs. For the academic year 2007-2008, Beitz was a Visiting Professor of Politics for the Program on Global Justice, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

.

Beitz's work, along with that of Brian Barry

Brian Barry

Brian Barry FBA was a moral and political philosopher. He was educated at the Queen's College, Oxford, obtaining the degrees of B.A. and D.Phil under the direction of H. L. A. Hart....

, Thomas Pogge

Thomas Pogge

Thomas Winfried Menko Pogge is a German philosopher and is currently the Director of the Global Justice Program and Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University...

 and Henry Shue, has been among the most important and influential in the literature concerning global justice

Global justice

Global justice is an issue in political philosophy arising from the concern that the world at large is unjust.-Context:The broader philosophical context of the global justice debate, in both its contemporary and historical forms, is the issue of impartiality...

. Of significant interest is his promotion of a cosmopolitan translation of John Rawls

John Rawls

John Bordley Rawls was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University....

's Justice as Fairness domestic theory to the international sphere. His most significant work, his 1979 book Political Theory and International Relations, inspired a recent symposium in the journal Review of International Studies in 2005. Contributors to this journal edition include Chris Brown, David Miller, Simon Caney, Catherine Lu and Nicholas Rengger. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

in 2008.

Books

• Beitz, Charles R. Political Theory and International Relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
• Beitz, Charles R. Political Equality: An Essay in Democratic Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
• Beitz, Charles R. The Idea of Human Rights. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2009

Articles

• Beitz, Charles R. “Rawls’s Law of Peoples.” Ethics 110:4 (2000) : 669–696.
• Beitz, Charles R. “Human Rights as a Common Concern.” The American Political Science Review 95:2 (2001): 269–282.
• Beitz, Charles R. “What Human Rights Mean.” Daedalus, 132: 1 (2003), 36-46.
• Beitz, Charles R. “Human Rights and the Law of Peoples.” In The Ethics of Assistance, morality and the distant needy, ed. Deen K. Chatterjee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.