Robert P. George

George endorsed Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries. 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."

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." 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."

George's critics, including many 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."

On December 8, 2008, George was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President George W. Bush in a ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House. His other awards include the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute, the Sidney Hook Award of the National Association of Scholars, the Paul Bator Award of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy, and Princeton University's President's Award for Distinguished Teaching. He holds nineteen honorary degrees, including a Doctor Honoris Causa awarded by the Universitat Abat Oliba CEU University in Barcelona, Spain in 2017. Also in 2017, Baylor University launched the "Robert P. George Initiative in Faith, Ethics, and Public Policy," as part of its Baylor in Washington, D.C. program.

George founded Princeton's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions in 2000 and continues to serve as its director. Since 2007, George has been teaching undergraduate seminars on leading thinkers in Western intellectual history with friend and colleague Cornel West, a leading left-wing public intellectual; readings have included Sophocles's Antigone, Plato's Gorgias, St. Augustine's Confessions, Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto, Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, Strauss's Natural Right and History, Lewis's The Abolition of Man, and King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail". The George-West collaboration – allowing only 18 students, many fewer than want to attend – has drawn attention on campus and in the national media. In 2017, George and West did a three-hour interview together on C-Span's "Book Notes." They have also 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. In March 2017, they jointly published the statement "Truth-Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Thought and Expression," which has been signed by several thousand professors, students, academic administrators and others. In April 2019, George and West participated in an "assembly series" discussion at Washington University in St. Louis titled "Liberal Arts Education: What’s The Point?".

George served from 1993–1998 as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, and from 2002–2009 as a member of the President's Council on Bioethics. 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.

George joined the faculty of Princeton University as an instructor in 1985, and in the following year 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 (1993, Oxford University Press). 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, a celebrated endowed professorship previously held by Woodrow Wilson, Edward S. Corwin, Alpheus T. Mason, and Walter F. Murphy.

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, 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 founded the American Principles Project, which aims to create a grass-roots movement around his ideas. He is a past chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, an advocacy group opposed to same-sex marriage, and co-founder of the Renewal Forum, an organization fighting the sexual trafficking and commercial exploitation of women and children.

Robert Peter George (born July 10, 1955) is an American legal scholar, political philosopher, and public intellectual who serves as the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He lectures on constitutional interpretation, civil liberties, philosophy of law, and political philosophy. George, a Catholic, is considered one of the country's leading conservative intellectuals.

George was born on July 10, 1955, and is of Syrian and Italian descent. He grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia, the grandson of immigrant coal miners. He was educated at Swarthmore College (BA), Harvard Law School (JD), Harvard Divinity School (MTS), and University of Oxford (DPhil, BCL, DCL, and DLitt). As a doctoral student at Oxford, he studied philosophy of law under the supervision of John Finnis and Joseph Raz, and served as a Lecturer in Jurisprudence in New College.