Tom Palmer

Tom G. Palmer is Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and director of Cato University. He was very active in the late 1980s and the early 1990s in the propagation of classical liberal ideas in the Soviet bloc states and their successors and continues to be active throughout the region through his work with www.cato.ru, the Cato Institute's Russian-language website. He is currently working to achieve similar successes in the Middle East, as director of the Jack Byrne Project on Middle East Liberty, which sponsors an Arabic-language libertarian website, the Lamp of Liberty (www.misbahalhurriyya.org) and is publishing material in Arabic, Kurdish, Azeri, and Farsi. Before joining Cato he was an H. B. Earhart Fellow at Hertford College, Oxford University, and a vice president of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.

Tom regularly lectures in America, Europe, Eurasia, and the Middle East on political science, public choice, civil society, and the moral, legal, and historical foundations of individual rights. He has published reviews and articles on politics and morality in scholarly journals such as the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Ethics, Critical Review, and Constitutional Political Economy, as well as in publications such as Slate, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Spectator of London.

Tom received his B.A. in liberal arts from St. Johns College in Annapolis, Maryland, his M.A. in philosophy from The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., and his Ph.D. in politics from Oxford University.