Ilya Shapiro

Ilya Shapiro is director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, a think tank dedicated to individual liberty, limited government. free markets, and peace. Before joining Cato, he was a special assistant/adviser to the Multi-National Force in Iraq on rule-of-law issues and practiced at two large law firms in Washington, D.C. Shapiro is the author of Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court, co-author of Religious Liberties for Corporations? Hobby Lobby, the Affordable Care Act, and the Constitution, and editor of 11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review. He has testified before Congress, federal agencies, and state legislatures, and has filed more than 300 amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs in the Supreme Court. He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, was an inaugural Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute and a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, and has been an adjunct law professor at the George Washington University and University of Mississippi. In 2015, National Law Journal named him to its 40 under 40 list of “rising stars.” Before entering private practice, Shapiro clerked for U.S. Fifth Circuit Judge E. Grady Jolly. He holds degrees from Princeton, the London School of Economics, and the University of Chicago Law School. In addition to English, Shapiro speaks Russian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian—but alas not Hungarian.