Robert F. Drinan, S.J., Professor of Law
B.A., M.A., Boston College; LL.B., LL.M., Georgetown; Th.D., Gregorian University, Rome

Expertise: legal ethics, human rights, constitutional law

E-mail Address: drinan@law.georgetown.edu

Father Drinan, in addition to teaching at the Georgetown University Law Center courses in International Human Rights, Constitutional Law, Civil Liberties, Legislation, Advanced Legal Ethics Seminar, and Professional Responsibility, also pursues careers as a priest, lawyer, politician, and activist. He has received twenty-one honorary degrees, including Georgetown, Loyola (Chicago), Villanova, Syracuse, and Santa Clara. He has served as a visiting professor at four American universities and as the Dean of the Boston College Law School. During the ten years between his Deanship at Boston College and his joining the Georgetown University Law Center faculty in 1981, he served in the United States Congress as a Representative from Massachusetts, where he was a member of various committees and the chairman of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice of the House Judiciary Committee. As a Congressman, his travels included official Congressional delegations to Vietnam, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, and Japan. He has also served on private delegations to the Netherlands, South Africa, Sudan, Israel, and the Soviet Union and privately sponsored human rights missions to Chile, the Philippines, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Argentina, France, and Vietnam. He is a regular contributor to several law reviews and journals of policy and opinion and the author of The Fractured Dream (Crossroad, 1991); Stories From the American Soul (Loyola U. Press, 1990); Cry of the Oppressed: The History and Hope of the Human Rights Revolution; God and Caesar on the Potomac: A Pilgrimage of Conscience; Beyond the Nuclear Freeze; Honor the Promise: America's Commitment to Israel; Vietnam and Armageddon; Democracy, Dissent and Disorder; The Right to be Educated (ed.); and Religion, the Courts and Public Policy.

Father Drinan serves on numerous committees devoted to the furtherance of human rights. He is currently serving as a member of the ABA House of Delegates and is a past-chairman of the ABA Section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities. In addition, he serves on the Board of Directors of the International League for Human Rights, the Lawyer's Committee for International Human Rights, the Council for a Livable World Educational Fund, Americans for Democratic Action [past President] and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He is one of the founders of the Lawyer's Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control and the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry.