Ilya Shapiro -- Lawless: The Miseducation of America's Elites

Join us for a talk with acclaimed local author and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Ilya Shapiro, on his recently published book: Lawless: The Miseducation of America's Elites.

In LAWLESS: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (Broadside Books; on sale January 14, 2025), Ilya Shapiro shows how the warping of higher ed is leading to a country transformed by radicalization. Law schools used to teach students how to think critically, advance logical arguments, and respect opponents. Now, those students cannot tolerate disagreement and reject the validity of the law itself.

Recently, protestors at Columbia broke into a building and created illegal encampments, the student-led Columbia Law Review demanded that finals be canceled because of “distress.” At Stanford, chanting activists, egged on by an associate dean, drove away a federal judge. Yale’s hostility to free speech led more than a dozen federal judges to boycott the school for clerkship hiring. And yet, these rioting Ivy Leaguers are the same people who will hold important government positions, fight constitutional lawsuits, and advise Fortune 500 companies.

In LAWLESS, Shapiro uses his personal experience and deep research to explain 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. Columbia Law School once produced leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Today, it produces window-smashing activists. We’re handing the reins of power to lawless radicals who will be America’s future judges, prosecutors, politicians, and presidents. Unless we stop it now, the consequences will be with us for decades.

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 was a vice president of the Cato Institute and director of Cato’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. His books include Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court, and he has contributed to a variety of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Washington Post, USA Today, and National Review. He holds degrees from the University of Chicago Law School and Princeton University.