Robert Peter George (born July 10, 1955) is an American legal scholar, political philosopher, and public intellectual who is the sixth 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 co-founded 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. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.

George was born on July 10, 1955, in Morgantown, West Virginia. His father was of Syrian descent and his mother of Italian descent. The grandson of immigrants, he grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia.

George attended Swarthmore College as an undergraduate and was 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 philosophy and natural law.

After graduating from Swarthmore with a Bachelor of Arts in the humanities in 1977, George enrolled at Harvard University, where he simultaneously studied law and theology. He received a Master of Theological Studies (M.T.S.) from Harvard Divinity School and a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from Harvard Law School in 1981. George won Harvard's Frank Knox Memorial Scholarship, enabling him to pursue doctoral studies in jurisprudence in England at the University of Oxford, beginning in September 1981. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy (D.Phil.) from Oxford with a specialization in law and ethics in 1986.

As a doctoral student at New College, Oxford, George studied the philosophy of law under the supervision of John Finnis and Joseph Raz and served as a lecturer in jurisprudence at the college. He was a graduate classmate of Jeremy Waldron and Leslie Green. After the completion of his D.Phil., George received a Bachelor of Civil Law (B.C.L.) and a Doctor of Civil Law (D.C.L.) in 2016, and a Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) in 2019, all from Oxford.

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, an endowed professorship previously held by Woodrow Wilson, Edward S. Corwin, William F. Willoughby, Alpheus T. Mason, and Walter F. Murphy. George founded Princeton's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions in 2000 and serves as its director. While George describes the program as not ideological, articles in the media have described it as a program that fosters conservative ideals.

George has been a frequent conversation partner with Cornel West, a leading left-wing public intellectual, and the two are considered close friends. 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]}