Christopher L. Eisgruber ’83

Some key facts about Princeton's president-elect:   Age: 51   Hometown: Corvallis, Ore.   Current position: Princeton University provost – the University’s second-ranking official and its chief academic and budgetary officer – since 2004. Constitutional scholar.   Advanced education and professional training: Rhodes scholar (Oxford University, M.Litt., politics). Law degree from the University of Chicago (will be the first Princeton president since Francis Patton, who served from 1888 to 1902, who does not have a Ph.D.). Law clerk to U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Patrick Higginbotham and U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.   Academic positions: Professor, New York University Law School (1990-2001). Princeton University faculty since 2001.   Recent teaching: Freshman seminar in the fall on the Supreme Court and constitutional democracy.   Books: The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process (2007); Religious freedom and the Constitution (with Lawrence G. Sager, 2007); Global Justice and the Bulwarks of Localism: Human Rights in Context (co-editor with Andras Sajo, 2005); Constitutional Self-Government (2001).   Princeton major: Physics, graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Thesis on the theory of general relativity.  

Undergraduate activities: Editor of INQUIRY, a national student science journal; secretary-treasurer of the Princeton Science Foundation; research assistant in chemical engineering at Argonne National Lab in Illinois. Intern in the Oregon governor’s office and as a campaign worker for Anderson for President.

Eating club: Elm   Nassau Herald quote: From Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: “Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.”   

Personal: Married to Lori A. Martin, a securities litigator with the firm WilmerHale; father of a 14-year-old son.

Sports: Lifelong Chicago Cubs fan.