Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional
studies at the Manhattan Institute. Previously he was executive
director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the
Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato
Institute, director of Cato's Robert A. Levy Center for
Constitutional Studies, and publisher of the Cato Supreme Court
Review.
Shapiro is the author of Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations
and the Politics of America's Highest Court (2020), coauthor of
Religious Liberties for Corporations? Hobby Lobby, the
Affordable Care Act, and the Constitution (2014), and editor of
11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review (2008-18). He
has contributed to a variety of academic, popular, and professional
publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the
Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Washington
Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National
Review, and Newsweek. He also regularly provides
commentary for various media outlets and once appeared on the
Colbert Report.
Shapiro has testified many times before Congress and state
legislatures and has filed more than 500 amicus curiae
"friend of the court" briefs in the Supreme Court. He lectures
regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, is a member of the
board of fellows of the Jewish Policy Center, was an inaugural
Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute, and has been an
adjunct law professor at the George Washington University and
University of Mississippi. He is also the chairman of the board of
advisers of the Mississippi Justice Institute, a barrister in the
Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court, and a member of the Virginia
Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Earlier in his career, Shapiro was a special assistant/adviser to
the Multi-National Force in Iraq on rule-of-law issues and
practiced at Patton Boggs and Cleary Gottlieb. Before entering
private practice, he clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly of the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He holds an AB from
Princeton University, an MSc from the London School of Economics,
and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School.
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