Hope May

Hope Elizabeth May is the wife of Jeffrey Wigand , who is the subject of the academy award nominated . Wigand gained international acclaim for agreeing to serve as a key witness in a lawsuit between 46 state attorneys general and the 4 largest tobacco companies in the U.S.. The suit resulted in the historical settlement known as the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement or simply "Master Settlement Agreement." tells, in part, the story of this agreement as well as the failure of CBS to air Wigand's interview with on 60 Minutes because CBS was threatened with a lawsuit for Tortious interference by Brown and Williamson.
Wigand and May met when he visited Central Michigan University in 2001 . They subsequently began working together and married in 2008.
May is an American philosopher and author who teaches at Central Michigan University where she directs its Center for Professional and Personal Ethics. She is also a licensed attorney and a member of the Michigan bar. She grew up in South Orange, New Jersey and attended Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey which offered a number of philosophy classes at the time, as well as an experimental cohort program which included classes taught by several of the faculty at Columbia who had doctoral degrees. Epistemology was offered under this cohort program of which May was a part. The program also allowed its participants to meet and dine with notable scholars and alumni such as Robert Sternberg. As she retrieved her books from under the table after a luncheon with Sternberg, he noticed that she had a copy of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. He commented "ah, pulling Nietzsche out from under the table, very significant." May credits her decision to pursue philosophy as a career to her high school's philosophy offerings and to her reading of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, which was assigned in her "Literature and Philosophy" class.
As an undergraduate, May studied with Daniel Kolak, a prolific Croatian philosopher who currently teaches at William Paterson College. As a graduate student at Michigan State University, she studied with Nicholas D. Smith, a prolific scholar best known for his work on the Socrates of Plato's early dialogues. Smith is currently the James F. Miller Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College.
May's recent work focuses on integrating the moral philosophy of Aristotle with a theory of motivation known as self determination theory in a way that is consistent with classical liberalism's emphasis on individual autonomy. She is the founder of The Center for Self Concordance , a non-profit entity which promotes the cultivation of self-concordance through pro-bono legal work, and through the creation of public and private ecologies which allow for the growth and sustenance of self-concordance.

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