Robert P. George (born July 10, 1955) is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, where he lectures on constitutional interpretation, civil liberties and philosophy of law. He also serves as the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. George has been called "one of the key contemporary proponents of natural law" and America's "most influential conservative Christian thinker."
George grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia. He was educated at Swarthmore College (BA), Harvard Law School (JD), Harvard Divinity School (MTS), and Oxford University (DPhil). At Oxford he studied under John Finnis and Joseph Raz.
George joined the faculty of Princeton University as an Instructor in 1985. The following year he became a tenure-track Assistant Professor. In 1988-89 he spent a sabbatical leave at Oxford University as a Visiting Fellow in Law, working on his book Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1993. The book challenged key premises of contemporary liberal political philosophy, and drew praise even from thinkers working firmly within the liberal tradition. One prominent political philosopher, Jeffrie Murphy, stated that “Robert George has, I must admit, made me nervous about my commitments to liberalism.” In 1994, George was awarded tenure at Princeton and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. In 1999, he was elevated to the rank of Professor and installed in Princeton’s McCormick Chair of Jurisprudence, a celebrated endowed professorship previously held by Woodrow Wilson, Edward S. Corwin, Alpheus T. Mason, and Walter F. Murphy. In 2000, George founded Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, of which he continues to serve as Director. The Madison Program has become a model for other innovative programs in civic education, such as the Daniel Webster Program at Dartmouth College, the Alexander Hamilton Program at NYU, and the Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown University.
George is an award-winning teacher at Princeton, where his courses are heavily subscribed and, according to the Princeton University Undergraduate Course Guide, are among the most highly rated in the university. In the spring of 2007, George joined his Princeton colleague Cornel West, a leading left-wing public intellectual, to co-teach a seminar entitled “Great Books: Ideas and Arguments”. Readings included Sophocles' Antigone, Plato's Gorgias, St. Augustine’s Confessions, Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk, von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Strauss’s Natural Right and History, and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. The George-West collaboration drew attention both on and off campus, and was widely noted as an example of how scholars can work together across ideological lines of division to enhance the quality of higher education.
George served from 1993 to 1998 as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, and from 2002 to 2009 as a member of the President's Council on Bioethics. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. He has served on UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST), of which he remains a corresponding member. He is a member of the boards of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Institute for American Values, the American Enterprise Institute, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and several other organizations. He serves on the editorial boards of Touchstone, First Things, and Public Discourse magazines, as well as several academic journals. He is of counsel to the law firm of Robinson & McElwee PLLC in Charleston, West Virginia, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Supreme Court Justice and former Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan has praised George as “one of our nation’s most respected legal theorists,” saying that his success is due to “his sheer brilliance,” “the analytic power of his arguments and range of his knowledge,” and “his deeply principled conviction and profound integrity.”
George twice served as Governor of the West Virginia Democratic Youth Conference, and attended the 1976 Democratic National Convention as an alternate delegate. George moved to the right in the 1980s, due to his views on abortion. George is founder of the American Principles Project, which aims to create a grass-roots movement around his ideas. The American Principles Project states that it is dedicated to "preserving and propagating the fundamental principles on which our country was founded." He is a chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, an advocacy group opposed to same-sex marriage.
George drafted the Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto signed by Orthodox, Catholic and Evangelical leaders that "promised resistance to the point of civil disobedience against any legislation that might implicate their churches or charities in abortion, embryo-destructive research or same-sex marriage."
Andrew Sullivan writes that George, along with other public intellectuals, played a key role in creating the "theoconservative" movement and integrating it into mainstream Republicanism. He sees George as a central figure to understanding "the revolution in American conservatism that has taken place in the last few years."
George was involved in a highly publicized dispute with Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago relating to the case Romer v. Evans in which both scholars testified as experts in moral and political philosophy and civil rights. In his testimony, George cited Nussbaum’s own published work, among many other sources, as contradicting her testimony. Expanding on George’s allegations against Nussbaum, John Finnis published an article in Academic Questions making serious charges of academic dishonesty against her. Nussbaum, in an article published in the Virginia Law Review that included an appendix co-authored with classicist Kenneth Dover, rearticulated and defended her views.
George responded in an article of his own in Academic Questions, noting that Nussbaum had not addressed the specific charges of dishonesty made against her. He wrote that she had falsely suggested in a written submission to the court that Dover had retracted or revised statements about Socrates's negative judgment of homosexual sodomy in the postscript to the second edition of his book Greek Homosexuality, a postscript which makes no reference to Socrates, and that neither Nussbam nor Dover offered any explanation for that.
In December 2008, George was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President George W. Bush. On May 4, 2010, in Warsaw, he received the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland. He is a recipient of the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and he was one of four winners of the 2005 Bradley Awards for Civic and Intellectual Achievement. He is also a winner of the Sidney Hook Memorial Award of the National Association of Scholars and the Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Liberal Arts of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. In 2007, he gave the annual John Dewey Lecture in Philosophy of Law at Harvard University, on the subject of natural law. He has given the annual Judge Guido Calabresi Lecture at Yale University, the Sir Malcolm Knox Lecture at the University of St. Andrews, and the Frank Irvine Lecture at Cornell University. George holds honorary doctorates of law, letters, science, civil law, humane letters, ethics, and juridical science.
George is an accomplished finger style guitarist and bluegrass banjo player. His guitar playing is in the style of Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed. His banjo playing mixes the styles of Earl Scruggs, Don Reno, and Bela Fleck. As a teenager, he performed with folk groups and bluegrass bands in coffee houses, rod and gun clubs, and at state and county fairs in West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia. At Swarthmore he was the leader of a country and bluegrass band known as “Robby George and Friends.” Currently, he performs in New Jersey with the band “Blue Heart”.
