Brian Barry [1936–] is the Lieber Professor of Political Philosophy at Columbia University in New York. He received the BA at Oxford in 1958 and the MA and DPhil at Oxford in 1964. He was the winner of the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science in 2001 and he is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, as well as a Fellow of the British Academy and the American Society of Arts and Sciences.

His publications include Political Argument (1965, 1991), Sociologists, Economists and Democracy (1970), A Treatise on Social Justice, Vol 1., Theories of Justice (1989) and Vol. 2, Justice as Impartiality (1995), Culture and Equality (2001), and Why Social Justice Matters (2005).