George C. Christie is James B. Duke Professor of Law at the Duke University School of Law. He has degrees from Columbia and Harvard, and a diploma in International Law from Cambridge. In addition to a long career in academia, he has been at various times a lawyer in private practice as well as assistant general counsel for the United States Agency for International Development.
His chief academic interests are in the areas of torts and jurisprudence, in both of which he has published widely. His monograph: The Notion of an Ideal Audience in Legal Argument was published in 2000 and then translated and published in French in 2005. An earlier monograph: Law, Norms and Authority was published in 1982. His current interest in problems encountered in the adjudication of human rights is part of his wider interest in comparative legal reasoning. Professor Christie has been a visiting professor at a number of universities in the United States, including Northwestern University and the University of Michigan, as well as at universities in Greece, New Zealand, China, Japan, South Africa, and Germany. He is a past fellow of the National Humanities Center in the United States and has also been a visiting fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.