George is also the founder of the Witherspoon Institute,where he is the Herbert W. Vaughan senior fellow. He is also a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute,and is the Ronald Reagan Honorary Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Nootbaar Honorary Distinguished Professor of Law at Pepperdine University.[1] He has frequently been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.
George attended Swarthmore College as an undergraduate and was later elected student 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 and natural law.[5]
George joined the faculty of Princeton 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 at Oxford University,working on his book Making Men Moral:Civil Liberties and Public Morality. George was promoted to associate professor with tenure at Princeton in 1994 and to professor in 1999,being named to Princeton's McCormick Chair of Jurisprudence,[15] an endowed professorship previously held by Woodrow Wilson,Edward S. Corwin,William F. Willoughby,Alpheus T. Mason,and Walter F. Murphy.[16][17] George founded Princeton's James 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]
Cornel West
George has been a frequent conversation partner with Cornel West,a leading left-wing public 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 at Middlebury College were shouted down and physically attacked. The statement was picked up by national media.[24][25][26] They are co-authors of the book Truth Matters:A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division,published in 2025 by Post Hill Press.
George twice served as Governor of the West Virginia Democratic Youth Conference,and attended the 1976 Democratic National Convention as an alternate delegate. He moved to the right in the 1980s,largely due to his views on abortion,[4] and left the Democratic 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.
George was one of the drafters of the 2009 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."[4] He has also joined with Muslim scholar Shaykh 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 Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and with the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan 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 endorsed U.S. Senator Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries.[33] In his own words,he "fiercely opposed" the candidacy of Donald Trump,saying that he was "a person of poor character." In July 2017,after Trump had become president,George praised his nomination of Neil 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]
Other professional and public service activities
This section needs to be updated. 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 the United States Commission on Civil Rights, and from 2002 to 2009 as a member of the 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]
In 2009, George was called the "most influential conservative Christian thinker" in the United States by David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times.[4] Kirkpatrick goes 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 Dean Elena Kagan has 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 the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2013, outgoing Chairwoman Katrina Lantos Swett, a Democrat appointed by Senate Majority Leader Harry 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 by The 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]
George has named Sherif 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]
Musical activity
George is a finger-style guitarist and bluegrass banjo player.[50] His guitar playing is in the style of Chet Atkins and Jerry 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]
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