Craig Trainor

Craig W. Trainor is Senior Litigation Counsel with the America First Policy Institute’s (AFPI) Constitutional Litigation Partnership (CLP). AFPI is a conservative think tank that comprises multiple policy centers and is organized on principles of liberty, free enterprise, national greatness, American military superiority, foreign policy engagement in the national interest, the American Founding, and the primacy of American families and workers. CLP is the strategic litigation arm of AFPI and works with liberty-oriented partners on impact litigation to achieve constitutional restoration and to ensure the supremacy of the individual against Big Tech, Big Media, and Big Government overreach.

Previously, Trainor served as the Director of Judicial Education at the Law & Economics Center at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, leading its flagship Judicial Education Program (the JEP). The JEP educates and trains American federal and state judges in basic economics, accounting, statistics, regulatory analysis, and the principles necessary to maintain the rule of law, economic freedom, and constitutional limitations on governmental authority and the administrative state. 

For over ten years, Trainor was a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer in New York City, litigating cases in New York state court and the United States District Court for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York. He has tried numerous cases to verdict, from unlawful gun possession to racketeering conspiracy, and secured substantial financial compensation for his clients whose civil rights and liberties had been violated by state actors. 

Prior to founding his law practice, Trainor Law, P.C., he served as a New York City prosecutor, an associate attorney at a white collar criminal defense firm, and a law clerk to Chief Judge Frederick J. Scullin, Jr., United States District Court for the Northern District of New York. 

Trainor is a Haggerty-Richardson Fellow with the Conservative Partnership Institute, a member of the American Enterprise Institute’s Leadership Network, an elected member of the Philadelphia Society, and a member of the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Trainor sits on the Steering Committee of the Federalist Society’s New York City Lawyers Chapter and previously sat on the Criminal Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association. He was also a 2019 New York City Regional Fellow with the National Review Institute and a member of the Manhattan Institute’s Young Leaders Circle. His writing on the intersection of law, policy, and culture has appeared in the New York Post, National Review, City Journal, the Washington Examiner, Quillette, the American Conservative, the Federalist, and the late Weekly Standard, among other publications.  

Trainor is a cum laude graduate of the Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law, where he was a national moot court champion and an articles editor of the law school’s flagship journal, and a magna cum laude graduate of the City University of New York at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in government with honors. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Trainor was a longtime resident of Manhattan who now proudly calls Virginia home.