Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Founder and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is also the Herbert W. Vaughan Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, and a Distinguished Visiting Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
He is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and also serves as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). He previously served as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.
Professor George is author of “Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality” (1993), “In Defense of Natural Law” (1999), and “The Clash of Orthodoxies” (2001). He is editor of several volumes, including “Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays” (1992), “The Autonomy of Law: Essays on Legal Positivism” (1996), “Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality” (1996), and “Great Cases in Constitutional Law” (2000), and co-editor with Jean Bethke Elshtain of “The Meaning of Marriage” (2005). He is co-author of two new books, “Embryo: The Case for Human Life” (Doubleday) and “Self-Body Dualism and Contemporary Ethical and Political Controversies” (Cambridge University Press).
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, and the American Journal of Jurisprudence. He is a frequent contributor to First Things and has also written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Review, Touchstone, the Boston Review, City Journal, and the Times Literary Supplement.
A graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School, Professor George also earned a master’s degree in theology from Harvard and 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 holds honorary doctorates of law, letters, ethics, humane letters, civil law, and science.
On December 10, 2008, Professor George received the Presidential Citizens Medal, one of the highest honors that can be conferred by the United States on a civilian. Among his other awards and prizes are the Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement, the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Sidney Hook Award of the National Association of Scholars, the Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters, the Henry Salvatori Prize, the Paul Bator Award of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy, a Silver Gavel Award of the American Bar Association, and the Stanley Kelley, Jr. Teaching Award in Politics at Princeton. He was the 2007 John Dewey Lecturer in Philosophy of Law at Harvard and the 2008 Judge Guido Calabresi Lecturer at Yale and Sir Malcolm Knox Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.
Professor George serves on the Academic Council of the American Enterprise Institute and on the boards of directors of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Institute for American Values, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Family Research Council, and the Center for Individual Rights. He serves on editorial boards of the American Journal of Jurisprudence, the Journal of International Biotechnology Law, and Touchstone and First Things magazines.
Professor George is general editor of New Forum Books, a Princeton University Press series of interdisciplinary works in law, culture, and politics. In addition to his academic work, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves as Of Counsel to the law firm of Robinson & McElwee.