Luncheon 2025: Free Speech, DEI, and the Crisis in Legal Education

Event Description:
In the past, Columbia Law School produced leaders like Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and several Supreme Court justices. Now it produces window-smashing activists.  This cannot continue. Ilya Shapiro will discuss how the illib­eral takeover of legal education is transforming our country. Unless we stop it now, the consequences will be with us for decades.

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.

Ilya Shapiro will discuss how we got here and what we can do about it and his new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites.

About the Speaker:
Ilya Shapiro is Director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. 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, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, and Newsweek.

He also regularly provides commentary for various media outlets, is a legal consultant to CBS News, and once appeared on the Colbert Report. Shapiro has testified before Congress and state legislatures and has filed more than 400 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court, including one that The Green Bag selected for its “Exemplary Legal Writing” collection. He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, 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. In 2015, National Law Journal named him to its 40 under 40 list of “rising stars.”

Cancellation policy: Cancellations made by 12:00pm MDT on February 7, 2025 will be honored, minus a 15% processing fee.

Register below or visit https://donorbox.org/events/730948.