George Porter, Jr. L’26

George hopes to help create a more economically egalitarian society through the law. He is primarily interested in practicing labor law for a union or government agency.

He grew up in central Pennsylvania and Baltimore and later studied political science at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 2019. Outside of class, he was active in Philadelphia’s criminal justice reform community and tutored incarcerated men at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility. A summer job at the Baltimore Orioles’ stadium, organized under UNITE HERE Local 7, deepened his interest in the labor movement.

From 2019 to 2023, George worked as a paralegal at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Antitrust Division in Washington, DC., where he was assigned to merger and conduct investigations in the health care, insurance, and consumer products industries. He also represented his coworkers in grievance and disciplinary proceedings as a shop steward in AFSCME Local 3719, one of the DOJ’s staff unions.

Being a union member has shown George that people are better off when they can exercise power in their workplaces. As a lawyer, he aims to play a small role in pulling federal labor law back toward the pro-union intent of the National Labor Relations Act. Other topics he intends to explore at Penn Carey Law include debtors’ rights, public and alternative ownership, and the welfare state.