George Alexander was born in 1931 and grew up in Philadelphia and New York. He attended the College of the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with major honors in 1949. He was then commissioned in the regular Navy and served on active duty until he began law school, also at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1953. Since his graduation cum laude in 1959 he has always been a full time teacher.
He first taught legislation and legislative drafting at the University of Chicago as a Bigelow Fellow and then moved to Syracuse University where he spent the next ten years, two of them as Associate Dean. He was then active in the New York Civil Liberties Union (Vice-President) and the American Association of University Professors (Syracuse University Chairman). He was also elected Chair of the Agenda Committee of the University Senate (roughly, President).
After five years of teaching, he accepted a Sterling Fellowship to Yale Law School in 1964, earning an LL.M. in 1965 and a J.S.D. in 1969. In 1970 he came to Santa Clara University as Dean. The school then had under 300 students and 12 full time faculty. In the fifteen years he served as Dean, the school tripled in size.
When he returned as a full time law professor in 1986, he was named Director of the Institute of International and Comparative Law and has, since that time, served in that capacity to administer the overseas programs (now in 12 countries), and oversee the Visiting Scholar program for foreign judges, professors and lawyers. He also administers the international law certificate program and is the named Director of the proposed LL.M. program in U.S. Law.
In 1985 he was named the Owens Lawyer of the Year, the only person to win that award without having graduated from Santa Clara University. In 1994, he was elected Faculty University Professor by the Faculty Senate and in 1996 he was named to the first endowed chair in the law school's history.
Professor Alexander has published 13 books including "Honesty and Competition" about false advertising regulation, "The Aged and the Need for Surrogate Management" (with Professor Lewin), "Writing a Living Will: Using a Durable Power of Attorney, International Perspectives on Aging,"and "Commercial Torts" many book chapters as well as over fifty articles in refereed scholarly journals in the United States and abroad.
Professor Alexander has served as a consultant to the Comptroller General of the United States continuously since 1976. He was President of the Society of American Law Teachers and continues on its board of directors. This year he is President of the Santa Clara University Faculty Senate. While his other extracurricular activities have involved a wide range of legal concerns, he has been particularly active in manners of elderlaw. He served as Vice Chair of the A.B.A. Committee on Legal Problems of the Elderly, the chair of the Family Law Committee Section's Committee on Law and Aging and as the first chair of the California Bar Associations committee on Legal Problems of the Elderly. He was also an organizer and Chair of the A.A.L.S. Section on Law and Aging.
He teaches antitrust, constitutional law and law & psychiatry and professess to understand how each closely relates to the other two. His office can usually be located by the continuous sound of classical music or opera. He is married to one of his law classmates and has a lawyer daughter, a software engineer son and two grandchildren.