John Martin Gillroy

John Martin Gillroy is an American philosopher, author, and academic.

He is Professor of philosophy, law, and public policy emeritus at Lehigh University, and the Founding Director of its Environmental Policy Design Programs.

He has also been founding Director of three other graduate programs and has held endowed faculty positions at Trinity College, Vermont Law School and Bucknell University, where he was John D. MacArthur Chair of Environmental Law and Policy.

He has also been a Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford, and a Visiting Professor of International Relations Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and at the Law Faculty of Queen's University at Kingston.

Gillroy is known for his work in applying Enlightenment arguments about practical reason and moral agency to analyze contemporary law and policy, especially environmental risk policy and the evolution of the modern International Legal System.

He is the executive editor of Philosophy, Public Policy, and Transnational Law, a Palgrave-Macmillan book series.

In his 2013 book An Evolutionary Paradigm for International Law Philosophical Method, David Hume, and the Essence of Sovereignty, Gillroy presented the latest refinement of his methodology of Philosophical-Policy And Legal Design (PPLD), which he has been teaching for over thirty years.

His core course in PPLD has been featured on the American Philosophical Association’s Blog.

PPLD emphasizes the use of Enlightenment Argument to integrate philosophy, public policy, and law into paradigms for application to the full range of contemporary public issues.

Through this interdisciplinary approach, students, citizens, scholars and practitioners alike learn to analyze primary-source philosophical texts, convert them into a Paradigm Structure, develop persuasive policy-legal arguments, and apply them perspectives to real-world issues in policy and law.