Robert P. George

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.  He is also a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.  He previously served as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights (1993-1998), and as a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States (1989-90), where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.

A graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School, Professor George earned a doctorate in philosophy of law from Oxford University.  He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Swarthmore, and received a Knox Fellowship from Harvard for graduate study in law and philosophy at Oxford.

He is author of Making Men Moral:  Civil Liberties and Public Morality (1993), In Defense of Natural Law (1999), and The Clash of Orthodoxies (2002), and editor of Natural Law Theory:  Contemporary Essays (1992), The Autonomy of Law:  Essays on Legal Positivism (1996), Great Cases in Constitutional Law (2000), The Meaning of Marriage (2006), and several other volumes.  His co-authored book Self-Body Dualism and Contemporary Ethical and Political Controversies will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year.  Another co-authored book, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, will be published by Doubleday in January of 2008.

Professor George’s articles and review essays have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Review of Politics, the Review of Metaphysics, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, and Law and Philosophy.  He has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, First Things, National Review, Touchstone, the Boston Review, and the Times Literary Supplement.  He has an article forthcoming in Daedalus.

Professor George was the 2007 John Dewey Lecturer in Philosophy of Law at Harvard University.  He also gave a 2007 Janus Lecture at Brown University.  He is a winner of many awards and prizes, including a 2005 Bradley Prize for Civic and Intellectual Achievement, the 2005 Philip Merrill Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Liberal Arts of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and the 2007 Sidney Hook Memorial Award of the National Association of Scholars.  He holds honorary doctorates of law, letters, ethics, civil law, humane letters, and science.

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the boards of directors of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Institute for American Values, the Center for Individual Rights, the Family Research Council, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Institute on Religion and Democracy.  He is general editor of New Forum Books of Princeton University Press, and is a member of the editorial boards of the American Journal of Jurisprudence, the International Journal of Biotechnology Law, First Things, Persona y Derecho, and Academic Questions.

In addition to his academic work, he is Of Counsel to the law firm of Robinson & McElwee.