George Custis Christie

George Custis Christie, longtime Duke Law Professor, died on November 4, 2025, at the age of 91, at his home in Durham, North Carolina.

George was born on March 3, 1934 in New York City, New York, the second child and only son of Custis Christie and Sophia Velimahitis Christie. Both of George’s parents had immigrated, separately, from Greece, where Custis had been a lawyer active in the Greek government of Eleftherios Venizelos. George was also extremely close to his “Uncle John” Ravazulos, a relative of his mother, who often took care of George.

George’s life was a marvel of extraordinary stamina and intellectual gifts, illustrated by the incident in 1940, when after becoming separated from his father in a New York Department store, 6-year-old George walked the 9 miles from the store to his family’s apartment in Washington Heights, following the bus route. George’s family was waiting for the ransom note from his supposed kidnappers.

George often recalled vividly the moment on December 7, 1941, when 7-year-old George was attending a film in New York with his father and the film suddenly stopped. In response to George’s question, George’s father responded "polemos" (war), and then explained that the film was stopped because Pearl Harbor had been bombed and World War II was starting. George was forever fascinated with military history and particularly that of World War II and naval history.

In 1949, George was 15 and attending the Catholic military school, Xavier High School, in New York when his father died suddenly, which left George’s family with limited resources.

With the benefit of scholarships and summer jobs, George was able to continue his education, travelling to Europe in 1953 on a Fullbright scholarship at the age of 19 to study at the London School of Economics, and eventually receiving his A.B in 1955 and his J.D. in 1957 from Columbia University, where he was editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review, graduating at the age of 23 years old.

Following law school, George was enlisted in the U.S. Army for 6 months in 1957, and often recounted stories of Sergeant Brown, who complimented George as being an excellent 6-month soldier.

After practicing law from 1957 to 1960 with the firm of Covington and Burling in Washington, DC, George was a Ford Fellow at Harvard Law School from 1960 to 1961, later receiving his S.J.D. from Harvard in 1966.

George was profoundly influenced by his study in 1961-62 as a Fullbright Scholar at Jesus College, Cambridge University, where he rowed in the May and Lent races and made life-long friends, and from which George received a Diploma in International Law in 1962

In 1962, George 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 joining the faculty of Duke Law School in 1967.

Duke University’s School of Law was George’s academic home from 1967 to 2013, where he began as a full professor and eventually held the chair of James B. Duke Professor of Law. After retirement, he remained professor emeritus and he continued to publish and attend conferences for many more years.

Duke was a powerful force in George’s scholarship and teaching. He published widely on the subjects of international law, constitutional law, torts and jurisprudence while teaching generations of law school classes of extraordinary students, both at Duke's main campus and Duke’s international programs around the world. He published casebooks in multiple subjects and multiple books of legal philosophy, one of which, The Notion of an Ideal Audience in Legal Argument, was also translated into French with support from the Centre Perelman at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

At Duke, George was asked to draft “the Christie rule” which prescribed a system of faculty and administrative governance for the entire Duke academic community.

Duke encouraged George to continue to travel the world and offered George regular sabbaticals which enabled him to teach as 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 enjoy a fellowship at the National Humanities Center in Durham, NC, as well as a visiting fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra.

In 2007, George received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, his father's alma mater.

Duke Law School honored George with many awards, and gave him a magnificent retirement dinner in 2013, when Duke also created a student scholarship in his name.

George is survived by his three children, Dr. Constantine George Christie of Rochester, NY; Rebecca Sophia Christie, of Brussels, Belgium; and Nicholas George Christie, Esq. of Cary, NC; his four grandchildren, George Blockx Christie, Paul Blockx Christie, Lilika Blockx Christie, and Alexander Liu Christie; his first wife, Susan Monserud, of Woodbury, Ct; and his second wife, Deborah Carnes Christie, of Durham, NC. George was predeceased by his sister, Dr. Lillian Christie McDermott, who founded the internationally known Physics Education Group at the University of Washington.

The family requests that gifts in memory of George be made to the George C. Christie Scholarship at Duke University School of Law.

A Greek Orthodox Funeral was held on Friday, Nov. 7 at Saint Barbara Greek Orthodox Church, in Durham, NC, to which donations in George’s memory may also be made.