George C. Christie
James B. Duke Professor of Law
A.B. 1955, J.D. 1957, Columbia University; Diploma in International Law 1962, Cambridge University; S.J.D. 1966, Harvard University; Honorary Doctorate 2007, University of Athens. A native of New York City, Professor Christie was editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review. He commenced his legal career with private practice in Washington, D.C. In 1960-61, he was a Ford Fellow at Harvard Law School and, in 1961-62, was a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge University. He then joined the law faculty of the University of Minnesota, where he taught for almost four years. In 1966, he returned to Washington to serve as assistant general counsel for the Near East and South Asia of the Agency for International Development before coming in 1967 to Duke.
His chief academic interests are in the areas of torts and jurisprudence, in both of which he has published widely. He is the editor of, among other books, a casebook in jurisprudence originally published in 1973, and now in its third edition, and one on torts first published in 1983, and now in its fourth edition. His monograph “The Notion of an Ideal Audience in Legal Argument” was published in 2000 and published in French in 2005. His previous monograph, “Law, Norms and Authority,” was published in 1982.
He has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University, George Washington University, the University of Michigan, the University of Florida, the University of Athens (Greece), the University of Otago (New Zealand), the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), Fudan University (Shanghai, China), Doshisha University (Kyoto, Japan), and the University of Erlangen (Germany) and a fellow of the National Humanities Center as well as a visiting fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra. He is a member of the Board of Editors of Law and Philosophy and of Isopoliteia. He is currently working on problems encountered in the adjudication of human rights as part of his wider interest in comparative legal reasoning.
