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Ilya Shapiro

Ilya Shapiro

Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies, Cato Institute

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Before joining Cato, he 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. 

Shapiro is the co-author of Religious Liberties for Corporations? Hobby Lobby, the Affordable Care Act, and the Constitution (2014). He has contributed to a variety of academic, popular, and professional publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, L.A. Times, USA Today, Weekly Standard, New York Times Online, and National Review Online. He also regularly provides commentary for various media outlets, including CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC, Univision and Telemundo, the Colbert Report, and NPR. 

Shapiro has testified before Congress and state legislatures and, as coordinator of Cato’s amicus brief program, filed more than 150 “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court, including one The Green Bag selected for its “Exemplary Legal Writing” collection. He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, is a member of the Legal Studies Institute’s board of visitors at The Fund for American Studies, was an inaugural Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute and a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, and has been an adjunct professor at the George Washington University Law School. In 2015, National Law Journal named him to its list of 40 “rising stars” in the legal community. 

Before entering private practice, Shapiro 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 (where he became a Tony Patiño Fellow).



  • A.B., Princeton University
  • M.Sc., London School of Economics
  • J.D., University of Chicago
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Click to play: Founding Principles as Pillars of Our Foreign Policy
Event Videos

Founding Principles as Pillars of Our Foreign Policy

Mike Gallagher, Nathan Kaczmarek, Henry Nau, Jeremy A. Rabkin, Ilya Shapiro

Co-sponsored by the Federalism & Separation of Powers Practice Groups and the Article I Initiative

What would history have to say about the way in which American foreign policy is...

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