Professor Robert P. George

Robert P. George is the sixth McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and Director of Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, which was founded under his leadership in 2000. George holds honorary visiting professorships in law and public policy at Pepperdine University and has frequently been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. He is a Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.

Professor George has chaired the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the President’s Council on Bioethics. In addition, Professor George has been the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. He was also a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore, he holds JD and MTS degrees from Harvard University as well as the degrees of DPhil, BCL, DCL, and DLitt from Oxford University. He holds twenty-three honorary doctorates. 

Professor George is a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement, the Barry Prize of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the James Q. Wilson Award of the Association for the Study of Free Institutions, the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Professor George is the author of Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality and In Defense of Natural Law, among many other works. He has given honorific lectures at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, St. Andrews, and Cornell, among other universities, and has been a Constitution Day Lecturer at the Library of Congress.

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is Of Counsel to the law firm of Robinson & McElwee. He is bluegrass banjo player and finger-style guitarist.