Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies, Manhattan Institute
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Previously he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute.
Shapiro is the author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (2025) and Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020), coauthor of Religious Liberties for Corporations? (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, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, and Newsweek. He also regularly provides commentary for various media outlets, writes the Shapiro’s Gavel newsletter on Substack, and once appeared on the Colbert Report.
Shapiro has testified many times before Congress and state legislatures and has filed more than 500 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court. He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, is a member of the board of fellows of the Jewish Policy Center, 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 former member of the Virginia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Earlier in his career, Shapiro 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. Before entering private practice, he 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.
Author and FoxNews.com Contributor
John R. Lott, Jr. is an economist who has held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice and was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission during 1988 and 1989. He has published over 100 articles in academic journals. He also is the author of six books including More Guns, Less Crime, Freedomnomics, The Bias Against Guns, and Are Predatory Commitments Credible? He has just released another book entitled "Debacle: Obama's war on jobs and growth and what we can do now to regain our future." Lott is a FoxNews.com contributor and a weekly columnist for them. Opinion pieces by Prof. Lott have appeared in such places as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, USA Today, and The Chicago Tribune. He has appeared on such television programs as the ABC and NBC National Evening News broadcasts, Fox News, "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," and the "Today Show." He received his Ph.D. in economics from UCLA in 1984.
Editorial Features Editor, The Wall Street Journal
James Taranto edits the Journal's op-ed pages. Until January 2017 he wrote the popular Best of the Web column for WSJ.com. In August 2007 he was named a member of the Journal's editorial board.
From 2000 through 2008, his column appeared at OpinionJournal.com, of which he was editor. He previously served as the Journal's deputy editorial features editor. He joined the Journal in 1996 as an assistant editorial features editor after spending five years as an editor at City Journal, the Manhattan Institute's quarterly of urban public policy. He has also worked for the Heritage Foundation, United Press International, Reason magazine and KNX News Radio in Los Angeles. He is co-editor of "Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House" (Wall Street Journal Books, 2004). He attended California State University, Northridge.
Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies, Manhattan Institute
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Previously he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute.
Shapiro is the author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (2025) and Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020), coauthor of Religious Liberties for Corporations? (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, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, and Newsweek. He also regularly provides commentary for various media outlets, writes the Shapiro’s Gavel newsletter on Substack, and once appeared on the Colbert Report.
Shapiro has testified many times before Congress and state legislatures and has filed more than 500 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court. He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, is a member of the board of fellows of the Jewish Policy Center, 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 former member of the Virginia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Earlier in his career, Shapiro 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. Before entering private practice, he 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.
Senior Fellow, Cato Institute
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy and civil liberties. He worked as special assistant to President Reagan and editor of the political magazine Inquiry. He writes regularly for leading publications such as Fortune magazine, National Interest, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Times. Bandow speaks frequently at academic conferences, on college campuses, and to business groups. Bandow has been a regular commentator on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. He holds a J.D. from Stanford University.
Senior Writer, National Review
Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor for National Review, a columnist for Bloomberg View, and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Ponnuru grew up in Kansas City and graduated summa cum laude from Princeton’s history department. Ponnuru has published articles in numerous newspapers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Newsday, and the New York Post. He has also written for First Things, Policy Review, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic,Reason, and other publications. He has appeared on numerous television news programs. He is the author of The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life. He is also the author of the monograph The Mystery of Japanese Growth (American Enterprise Institute/Centre for Policy Studies).
John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets and Forbes Opinions, a senior economic adviser to H.C. Wainwright Economics, and a senior economic adviser to Toreador Research and Trading (www.trtadvisors.com).
Distinguished University Professor, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
University Professor Nelson Lund is the author of Rousseau’s Rejuvenation of Political Philosophy: A New Introduction. He has also written widely in the field of constitutional law, including articles on constitutional interpretation, federalism, separation of powers, the Second Amendment, the Commerce Clause, the Speech or Debate Clause, the Equal Protection Clause, and the Uniformity Clause. In addition, he has published articles in the fields of employment discrimination and civil rights, the legal regulation of medical ethics, and the application of economic analysis to legal institutions and legal ethics.
Professor Lund graduated from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, after which he received an MA in philosophy from the Catholic University of America and a PhD in political science from Harvard University. He left the faculty of the University of Chicago to attend its law school, where he served as executive editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and chapter chairman of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. After law school, he held positions at the United States Department of Justice in the Office of the Solicitor General and the Office of Legal Counsel. He also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Patrick E. Higginbotham of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and to the Honorable Sandra Day O'Connor of the United States Supreme Court. Following his clerkship with Justice O'Connor, Professor Lund served in the White House as associate counsel to the president from 1989 to 1992.
Since joining the faculty at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, Professor Lund has taught Constitutional Law, Legislation, Federal Election Law, Employment Discrimination, State and Local Government, and seminars on the Second Amendment and on a variety of topics in Jurisprudence.
Professor of Law, Quinnipiac University School of Law
Stephen G. Gilles joined the Quinnipiac School of Law faculty in 1995. He teaches courses in tort, insurance, administrative, and advanced constitutional law and in law and economics. His research interests include tort law, especially negligence and strict liability, and constitutional law, especially parental and abortion rights. His recent publications include “The Judgment-Proof Society,” in the Washington & Lee Law Review and “Parental (and Grandparental) Rights after Troxel v Granville” in the Supreme Court Economic Review. Before joining the School of Law, he clerked for Judge Robert Bork and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, practiced as an appellate litigator, and taught at the University of Chicago Law School. He is married and has six children.
Why Does Obama Keep Losing at the Supreme Court?
Birmingham, AlabamaPartisan Politics and the Selection of Judges: A Toxic Mix
Irvine, CaliforniaThe War on Men
Voting Rights and the Supreme Court
Irvine, CaliforniaThe Framers' View of the Role of the Federal Government
Book Review: Bad History, Worse Policy: How a False Narrative about the Financial Crisis Led to the Dodd-Frank Act
John Tamny
Related Links: Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes...
Doug Bandow on Immigration Reform
Orlando, FloridaMandatory Liability Insurance for Firearm Owners: Design Choices and Second Amendment Limits
Nelson Lund, Stephen G. Gilles
Some twenty-five years ago, one of us sketched out a rationale for using mandatory liability...
The Naked Constitution: What the Founders Said and Why It Still Matters
Memphis, TennesseeMarital Discord at the Court
Houston, Texas