Richard Lippke grew up in Iowa and attended Iowa State University, where he received his B.A. in philosophy with distinction and was awarded memberships in Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While at the University of Wisconsin, he received a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. He then taught for a year at Iowa State University before taking a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Florida. In 1984, he joined the faculty at James Madison University, where he taught through 2007. He was given the Madison Scholar award from the College of Arts and Letters in 2001 in recognition of his research accomplishments. In 2006, he was given the inaugural Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Iowa State University. In the summer of 2007, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Australian National University. He is currently a Senior Scholar in the Department of Criminal Justice, Nelson Poynter Scholar at the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions, and Adjunct Professor of Law at Indiana University.

Dr. Lippke has published two books (Radical Business Ethics, Rowman and Littlefield, 1995, and Rethinking Imprisonment, Oxford University Press, 2007) and thirty-five articles in academic journals. In his research, he employs moral and political theories, in conjunction with empirical and legal research, to analyze social and public policy issues. As an applied moral and political philosopher, he is interested in normative questions concerning the design of legal and social institutions and the actions of individuals living under them.

Dr. Lippke’s work in business ethics on topics such as persuasive advertising, insider trading, and employee privacy has been widely reprinted in business ethics textbooks. His more recent work on the philosophy of criminal law encompasses such topics as felon disenfranchisement, prison labor, supermax prisons, the preventive detention of dangerous offenders, and the use of character evidence in criminal trials. He is currently working on a series of articles on the moral questions raised by the practice of plea bargaining. He plans to use his time at the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics to develop his work on plea bargaining into a book.