Ilya Shapiro Joins the Manhattan Institute as Director of Constitutional Studies

New York, NY — The Manhattan Institute (MI) is pleased to announce that Ilya Shapiro has joined the Institute as Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies.

Shapiro will build on the Institute’s long tradition of legal policy scholarship by weighing in on matters of constitutional law and articulating constitutionalist principles of limited government through commentary, media appearances, and events. Having filed over 500 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court in his career, Shapiro’s work at MI will also include an amicus program.

Shapiro recently joined the ranks of scholars leaving academic institutions where free speech is increasingly under attack, or as he put it in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, institutions that “enforce an orthodoxy that stifles intellectual diversity, undermines equal opportunity, and excludes dissenting voices.”

“Ilya Shapiro is a constitutional scholar of the first rank. Over the course of his long and distinguished career, he has greatly enriched the national conversation about America’s founding ideals, and he’s been a steadfast friend of economic opportunity, individual liberty, and the rule of law,” said Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam. “I’m honored and delighted to have Ilya as part of our team.”

“I'm delighted to join the Manhattan Institute, whose work I've long admired and many of whose scholars are already friends,” Ilya Shapiro added. “This institution does pathbreaking work, often making counterintuitive points that really add value to the policy debate. I can't wait to add a constitutional dimension to all of that, holding government officials to the strictures of a founding document that protects liberty and promotes human flourishing by dividing and checking power.”

“I couldn’t be more excited about welcoming my friend Ilya Shapiro to the Manhattan Institute,” commented MI senior fellow and director of legal policy James R. Copland. “Ilya adds a deep constitutional expertise to our team of scholars. Moreover, Ilya long oversaw the nation’s foremost amicus program, and he will greatly enhance MI’s ability to do what my late, great colleague Peter Huber called ‘speaking to the courts’—amplifying our impact across all policy areas.”

Shapiro is the author of the 2020 book Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court which will be published in paperback on July 5. 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.

Shapiro was most recently executive director of Georgetown Law’s Center for the Constitution, the details of which have been chronicled elsewhere. Prior to his appointment at Georgetown, Shapiro was 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. 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.