How Legal Education Is Changing America

In the past, Columbia Law School produced leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now it produces window-smashing activists. In Lawless, Ilya Shapiro explains how we got here and what we can do about it. The problem is bigger than radical students and biased faculty—it’s institu­tional weakness. Shapiro met the mob firsthand when he posted a controversial tweet that led to calls for his firing from Georgetown Law. A four-month investi­gation eventually cleared him on a technicality but declared that if he offended anyone in the future, he’d create a “hostile educational environment” and be sub­ject to the inquisition again. Unable to do the job he was hired for, he resigned. In Lawless, Shapiro reveals how the illib­eral takeover of legal education is transforming our country.

Ilya Shapiro is a prominent legal scholar, author, and commentator known for his expertise in constitutional law, particularly judicial nominations and the Supreme Court. He is currently a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Shapiro previously held positions at the Cato Institute, including vice president and director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies.