Robert P. George will present his lecture, “Modern Legal Philosophy,” at noon, Oct. 25 in McCollum Hall.
George is the McCormick professor of jurisprudence and the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.
George will survey ideas and debates about the nature and functions of law, and the relationship between law and morality, in the tradition of Anglo-American jurisprudence beginning with Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous lecture “The Path of the Law” presented in Boston on Jan. 8, 1897. He will discuss movements such as legal realism, legal positivism, critical legal studies and natural law theory. Among the thinkers he will engage, in addition to Holmes, are Karl Llewelyn, Jerome Frank, H.L.A. Hart, Lon L. Fuller, Ronald Dworkin, Roberto Unger, Joseph Raz and John Finnis.
George has served as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and before that on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. George is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he holds J.D. and M.T.S. degrees from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
This annual lecture is named after Roscoe Pound, an American legal scholar and former dean of the University of Nebraska College of Law and Harvard Law School.
This program has been approved for 1.0 continuing education credit in Nebraska. Register here.
