Praxis Circle Contributor Robert P. George is the sixth McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. The New York Times once called him “the most influential conservative Christian thinker” in the United States. Praxis Circle interviewed Robert George because of his exceptional understanding of applied Classical and Christian worldview, his expertise in natural law, and his constant advocacy for the principles of America’s founding that have made the United States a great nation.
Originally from West Virginia, Dr. George received a BA at Swarthmore College, a JD at Harvard Law School, an MTS at Harvard Divinity School, as well as a DPhil., BCL, DCL, and DLitt at Oxford University. He currently holds twenty-two honorary doctorates.
Along with his impressive academic achievements, Dr. George has had an extensive career in advising America’s leaders as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, presidential appointee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the President’s Council on Bioethics, as well as being a U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology and a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States.
Dr. George is also a passionate educator and has instructed at Princeton University since 1985, where he was eventually named Princeton’s McCormick Chair of Jurisprudence—an endowed professorship previously held by Woodrow Wilson, Edward S. Corwin, William F. Willoughby, and Walter F. Murphy. He also serves as Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University which he founded in 2000. Dr. George is also a frequent visiting professor at Harvard Law School.
Dr. George is author of many books, including Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (1993), In Defense of Natural Law (1999), The Clash of Orthodoxies (2001) and Conscience and Its Enemies (2013). He is co-author of Conjugal Union: What Marriage Is (2014), Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (2011), Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics (2008), and What is Marriage? (2012). 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 of the Cambridge Companion to Natural Law (2017).
Dr. 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 has also written hundreds of pieces for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, First Things, the Boston Review, and the Times Literary Supplement.
Dr. 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 Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and the President’s Award for Distinguished teaching at Princeton—one of the university’s highest honors.
