Robert P. George, J.D, D.Phil.

Council Member

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 the author of Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (1993) and In Defense of Natural Law (1999), and editor of Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays (1992), The Autonomy of Law: Essays on Legal Positivism (1996), and Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality (1996), all published by Oxford University Press. He is also editor of Great Cases in Constitutional Law (2000) and co-editor of Constitutional Politics: Essays on Constitution Making, Maintenance, and Change (2001), from Princeton University Press, and The Clash of Orthodoxies (2002), published by ISI Books. He is co-author of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (2008, Doubleday) and Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics (2008, Cambridge University Press).

In 2008, Professor George received the Presidential Citizens Medal at a ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House. He is a winner the Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement; 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.

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 holds honorary doctorates of law, letters, science, ethics, civil law, humane letters, and juridical science.

Professor George is a member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. From 1993-98, he served as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He is also a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the 1990 Justice Tom C. Clark Award. He is the recipient of a Silver Gavel Award of the American Bar Association, the Paul Bator Award of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy. In 2007 he gave the John Dewey Lecture in Philosophy of Law at Harvard. In 2008 he gave the Judge Guido Calabresi Lecture at Yale and the Sir Malcolm Knox Lecture at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Professor George is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and serves as Of Counsel to the law firm of Robinson & McElwee.

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