Robert Flanders

Robert G. Flanders Jr. (born July 9, 1949) is a Rhode Island attorney who served as an Associate Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court from 1996 to 2004.Flanders was the Republican Party nominee for the 2018 election for US Senator from Rhode Island. He lost the election to Democratic incumbent Sheldon Whitehouse.

Flanders was born and grew up in North Massapequa, Long Island, New York, and graduated from Chaminade High School in Mineola, New York. He attended Brown University and graduated magna cum laude in 1971. As a law student at Harvard, Flanders played minor league baseball for the Tigers and served as an editor of the Harvard Law Record. He graduated from law school in 1974.

Flanders began his legal career in New York as associate with the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton & Garrison in litigation law. He returned to Rhode Island in 1975, and the firm of Edwards & Angell, where he became a partner and Chairman of the firm's Litigation Department.He also served as assistant executive counsel to the Governor of Rhode Island. He elected to the Town Council ofBarrington, where he served for two terms. He later became the town solicitor for Glocester, Rhode Island and general counsel to the Rhode Island Solid Waste Management Corporation.In 1987, he founded his own business and government litigation firm, Flanders and Medeiros.

In 1996, after serving as special prosecutor for the Judicial Tenure and Discipline Commission and being chosen as one of five finalists by a judicial merit-selection commission, Governor Lincoln Almond named Flanders to a vacant seat on the five member Rhode Island Supreme Court. On March 29, 1996, Flanders was sworn in as one of the five Justices of the Rhode Island Supreme Court. In 2004, after eight years of service on the Supreme Court, Justice Flanders resigned to return to private law practice as a partner in the law firm of Hinckley, Allen & Snyder. He has also served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the Roger Williams University Law School, where he has taught constitutional law and judicial process courses, and as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Law and Public Policy at Brown University, where he taught courses on constitutional theory and the judicial process.

Flanders serves as a member of various boards of directors and commissions, including the CARE New England Hospital system, Women & Infants Hospital (vice chair of the board), the Providence Performing Arts Center, the Veterans Memorial Auditorium, the Rhode Island Historical Society, Common Cause of Rhode Island, the Brown University Leadership Advisory Council, and the Greater Providence YMCA, where he served as Chairman of the Board for a three-year term that ended on May 29, 2003.

Flanders won the Republican party nomination, defeating the only other candidate on the ballot, Rocky De La Fuente, a businessman who was seeking to get on the Senate ballot in several states in 2018. In the general election of November 6, 2018, he lost to incumbent Sheldon Whitehouse, receiving 38% of the vote to Whitehouse's 61%.

Flanders grew up in a middle class household and is the oldest of seven children.He and his wife Ann live in East Greenwich, Rhode Island.