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.
Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Missouri Kansas City School of Law
Professor William G Eckhardt is a Professor Emeritus from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law and a retired Colonel with the United States Army Judge Advocate General’s Corp. Bill Eckhardt received his bachelor of arts with honors from the University of Mississippi in 1963 and his LL.B., also with honors, from the University of Virginia in 1966. In addition, he earned an LL.M. Equivalent with honors from The Judge Advocate General’s School in 1970. He is a graduate of the United States Army War College, where he served on the faculty and held the Dwight D. Eisenhower Chair of National Security.
Professor Eckhardt completed 30 years of service and retired as a Colonel in the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps. His significant positions included: chief prosecutor in the My Lai cases (receiving the Federal Bar Association – Federal Younger Lawyer Award for his professional efforts), personnel affairs branch chief in the Army’s Litigation Division, general counsel to units in California and Germany, the Army’s chief appellate defender and legal adviser to Wartime Theater Commander. His varying teaching duties included being an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
Professor Eckhardt teaches criminal law, administrative law and evidence.
Professor of Law, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law
Chris Holman joined the UMKC faculty in 2005, and his primary research focus lies at the intersection of intellectual property and biotechnology. He has published numerous articles in law reviews and scientific publications such as Science, Cell and Nature Biotechnology, and has authored amicus briefs in a number of important biotechnology patent cases at the Supreme Court and Federal Circuit. In 2008 he was awarded the Daniel L Brenner Faculty Publishing Award for an influential law review article on human gene patent litigation.
Professor Holman has taught classes in patent law, copyright law, intellectual property survey, antitrust, biotechnology and pharmaceutical law, and law science and technology. He is a faculty advisor for the law school’s Intellectual Property Emphasis Area, and helps oversee the IP clinic.
Prior to becoming a law professor, Holman served as vice-president of intellectual property and patent counsel at several Silicon Valley biotechnology companies and worked as an associate at a major intellectual property law firm. He was also a tenure-track chemistry professor in the California State University system. A native of California, Holman received his Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of California at Davis, and engaged in post-doctoral drug discovery research at Roche Biosciences in Palo Alto, Calif. He then attended law school at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, during which time he was an associate editor for the Berkeley Technology Law Journal and served as a full-time judicial extern in federal court in the Northern District of California.
Book Banning in Primary Schools
Missouri-Kansas City Student Chapter
Kansas City, MOMeet and Greet
Kansas City, KansasTen Observations on the War on Terror
Kansas City Lawyers Chapter
Kansas City, MOSCOTUScast 1-23-08 featuring Chris Holman
Christopher Holman
On January 16, 2008 the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the case of Quanta...