Robert P. George | |
|---|---|
 George in 2018 | |
| Born | Robert Peter George (1955-07-10)July 10, 1955 (age 70) |
| Awards | Presidential Citizens Medal Canterbury Medal Irving Kristol Award Philip Merrill Award Sidney Hook Memorial Award James Q. Wilson Award Bradley Prize Barry Prize |
| Education | |
| Education | Swarthmore College (BA) Harvard University (MTS,JD) University of Oxford (DPhil,BCL,DCL,DLitt) |
| Thesis | |
| Doctoral advisor | John Finnis Joseph Raz |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Aristotelianism Thomism |
| Institutions | Princeton University University of Oxford Harvard University American Enterprise Institute Witherspoon Institute Pepperdine University |
Robert Peter George (born July 10, 1955) is an American legal scholar,political philosopher, andpublic intellectual who is the sixth McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of theJames Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions atPrinceton University. He lectures onconstitutional interpretation,civil liberties,philosophy of law, andpolitical philosophy.
George co-founded theWitherspoon Institute, where he is the Herbert W. Vaughan senior fellow. He is also a senior fellow of theAmerican Enterprise Institute, and is the Ronald Reagan Honorary Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Nootbaar Honorary Distinguished Professor of Law atPepperdine University.[1] He has been a visiting professor atHarvard Law School.
George was born on July 10, 1955, inMorgantown, West Virginia,.[2] His father was ofSyrian descent and his mother ofItalian descent.[3] The grandson of immigrants, he grew up inMorgantown, West Virginia.[4]
George attendedSwarthmore College as an undergraduate and was electedstudent body president, played in multiple student musical bands, and met his wife, Cindy Schrom. While studying under Swarthmore professors Linwood Urban and James Kurth, George developed an interest in medieval philosophy andnatural law.[5]
After graduating from Swarthmore with aBachelor of Arts in thehumanities in 1977,[6] George enrolled atHarvard University, where he simultaneously studied law and theology. He received aMaster of Theological Studies (M.T.S.) fromHarvard Divinity School and aJuris Doctor (J.D.) fromHarvard Law School in 1981. George won Harvard's Frank Knox Memorial Scholarship, enabling him to pursue doctoral studies in jurisprudence in England at theUniversity of Oxford, beginning in September 1981.[7] He earned hisDoctor of Philosophy (D.Phil.) from Oxford with a specialization in law and ethics in 1986.[8]
As a doctoral student atNew College, Oxford,[9] George studied the philosophy of law under the supervision ofJohn Finnis andJoseph Raz and served as a lecturer in jurisprudence at the college. He was a graduate classmate ofJeremy Waldron andLeslie Green.[10] After the completion of his D.Phil., George received aBachelor of Civil Law (B.C.L.) and aDoctor of Civil Law (D.C.L.) in 2016,[11] and aDoctor of Letters (D.Litt.) in 2019, all from Oxford.[12][13][14]
George joined the faculty ofPrinceton University as an instructor in 1985, and in the following year, he became a tenure-track assistant professor. He spent 1988–89 on sabbatical leave as a visiting fellow in law atOxford University, working on his bookMaking Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality. George was promoted to associate professor withtenure at Princeton in 1994 and to professor in 1999, being named to Princeton's McCormick Chair of Jurisprudence,[15] an endowed professorship previously held byWoodrow Wilson,Edward S. Corwin,William F. Willoughby,Alpheus T. Mason, andWalter F. Murphy.[16][17] George founded Princeton'sJames Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions in 2000 and serves as its director.[18] While George describes the program as not ideological, articles in the media have described it as a program that fosters conservative ideals.[19][20]
George has been a frequent conversation partner withCornel West, a leading left-wingpublic intellectual, and the two are considered close friends.[21][22][19] They have appeared together at colleges and universities around the country, arguing for civil dialogue and a broad conception of campus freedom of speech as essential to the truth-seeking mission of academic institutions.[citation needed]
In March 2017, they jointly published the statement "Truth-Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Thought and Expression," in response to what they described as "campus illiberalism,"[23] stemming from an incident when an invited speaker and his faculty conversation partner atMiddlebury College were shouted down and physically attacked. The statement was picked up by national media.[24][25][26] They are co-authors of the bookTruth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division, published in 2025 byPost Hill Press.
George twice served as Governor of the West Virginia Democratic Youth Conference, and attended the1976 Democratic National Convention as an alternate delegate. He moved to the right in the 1980s, largely due to his views onabortion,[4] and left theDemocratic Party as a result of what he saw as its increasingly strong commitment to legal abortion and its public funding, and his growing skepticism about the effectiveness of large scale government-run social welfare projects in Appalachia and other low income rural and urban areas.
In 2009, George founded theAmerican Principles Project,[27] which aimed to create a grass-roots movement around his ideas.[4] He is a past chairman of theNational Organization for Marriage, an advocacy group opposed tosame-sex marriage,[4] and co-founder of the Renewal Forum, an organization that seeks to endsex trafficking and commercial exploitation of women and children.[28]
George was one of the drafters of the 2009Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto signed by Orthodox, Catholic and Evangelical leaders that theNew York Times said "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".[4] He has also joined with Muslim scholarShaykh Hamza Yusuf in urging hotel chains and other businesses to refrain from offering or promoting pornography.[29] He has worked closely with his former student RabbiMeir Soloveichik and with Rabbi LordJonathan Sacks of Great Britain to combat anti-Semitism. Much of George's work on religious liberty has centered on the idea that religion is a "distinct human good", which he asserts allows people to "live authentically by ordering one's life in line with one's best judgments of conscience".[30]
George was threatened with death by abortion rights extremistTheodore Shulman, who also targetedPriests for Life director Rev.Frank Pavone, saying that they would be killed if the accused killer of Dr.George Tiller (aWichita abortion-provider) was acquitted.[31] For his crimes, Shulman was sentenced by Federal JudgePaul A. Crotty to 41 months' imprisonment and 3 years'supervised release.[32]
George endorsed U.S. SenatorTed Cruz in the2016 Republican presidential primaries.[33] In his own words, he "fiercely opposed" the candidacy ofDonald Trump, saying that he was "a person of poor character". In July 2017, after Trump had become president, George praised his nomination ofNeil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. However, he characterized his attempts to restrict immigration to the United States from certain countries as "unnecessary and therefore unjust" He went on to say, "One thing you have to say for President Trump is that he has been fortunate in his enemies. Although he gives them plenty to legitimately criticize him about, they always go overboard and thus discredit themselves with the very people who elected Mr. Trump and may well re-elect him."[34]
 | This section needs to beupdated. The reason given is: board memberships are from 2015, may not be true in 2021. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(September 2021) |
George served from 1993 to 1998 as a presidential appointee to theUnited States Commission on Civil Rights, and from 2002 to 2009 as a member ofthe President's Council on Bioethics.[35] George was appointed to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom by the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012, and in the following year was elected Chairman of the Commission. He served until hitting the statutory term limit in 2016.[35] He currently chairs the New Jersey Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.[36]
He is a former Judicial Fellow at theSupreme Court of the United States, receiving during his tenure there the JusticeTom C. Clark Award.[35] He has served as the U.S. member of UNESCO's World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST), of which he remains a corresponding member.[35] He is a member of the boards of theEthics and Public Policy Center (where he is Vice-Chairman of the Board),[37]the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty,[38] theNational Center on Sexual Exploitation,[39] theCenter for Individual Rights,[40]The Heritage Foundation, theLynde and Harry Bradley Foundation,[41] and the Academic Freedom Alliance,[42] which he co-founded in 2021. He is also a past member of the board of theAmerican Enterprise Institute[43] and the Templeton Foundation Religion Trust.[citation needed]
He isOf Counsel to the law firm Robinson & McElwee and is a member of theCouncil on Foreign Relations.[8] George is a contributor toTouchstone, a magazine of which he is also a senior editor.[44]
In 2009, George was described as America's "most influential conservative Christian thinker" by David Kirkpatrick of theNew York Times.[4] Kirkpatrick went on to state:
George's admirers say he is revitalizing a strain of Catholic natural-law thinking that goes back to St.Thomas Aquinas. His scholarship has earned him accolades from religious and secular institutions alike. In one notable week a few years ago, he received invitations to deliver prestigious lectures at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Harvard Law School.
Supreme Court Justice and former Harvard Law School DeanElena Kagan praised George as "one of the nation's most respected legal theorists," saying that the respect he had gained was due to "his sheer brilliance, the analytic power of his arguments, the range of his knowledge," and "a deeply principled conviction, a profound and enduring integrity".[45]
In announcing his election as chairman of theU.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2013, outgoing ChairwomanKatrina Lantos Swett, a Democrat appointed by Senate Majority LeaderHarry Reid, praised George as "a true human rights champion whose compassion for victims of oppression and wisdom about international religious freedom shine through all we have accomplished".[46] George was described byThe New Yorker in 2014 as "a widely respected conservative legal philosopher" who has "played [intellectual] godfather to right-leaning students on [the Princeton] campus".[47]
George's critics, including some Catholic scholars, have argued that he has neglected critical aspects of the Christian message, including "the corruption of human reason through original sin, the need for forgiveness and charity and the chance for redemption," focusing instead on "mechanics" of morality, and – through his political associations and activism – turned the church "into a tool of Republican Party".[4]
On December 8, 2008, George was awarded thePresidential Citizens Medal by PresidentGeorge W. Bush in a ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House.[4] His other awards include the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, theCanterbury Medal of theBecket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Philip Merrill Award of theAmerican Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Irving Kristol Award of theAmerican Enterprise Institute, the Sidney Hook Award of theNational Association of Scholars, the Bradley Prize for Civic and Intellectual Achievement, the Paul Bator Award of theFederalist Society for Law and Public Policy, the Barry Prize of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Paul Ramsey Award of the Center for Bioethics and Culture, and Princeton University's President's Award for Distinguished Teaching. He holds twenty-three honorary degrees, including a doctorate honoris causa awarded by theUniversitat Abat Oliba CEU University in Barcelona. In 2017,Baylor University launched the "Robert P. George Initiative in Faith, Ethics, and Public Policy" as part of its "Baylor in Washington" program.[48] In 2020, the Initiative became a joint project of theUniversity of Dallas and theAmerican Enterprise Institute.[49]
George has namedSherif Girgis,Ryan T. Anderson, Melissa Moschella, Daniel Mark, Ana Samuel,Meir Soloveichik, Joel Alicea,Yoram Hazony, Micah Watson, David Tubbs, and Christopher Green as some of his notable students who have gone on to careers in scholarship and teaching.[10]
George is a finger-style guitarist andbluegrass banjo player.[50] His guitar playing is in the style ofChet Atkins andJerry Reed. His banjo playing has been influenced by Earl Scruggs, Don Reno, and Bela Fleck. As a teenager, he performed with folk groups and bluegrass bands in coffee houses, clubs, and state fairs,[50] and at Swarthmore, he led the band "Robby George and Friends".[51]
