The Orange County Federalist Society is pleased to host Ilya Shapiro, renowned constitutional scholar and Director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute, for a discussion of his new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites.
In Lawless, Shapiro offers a powerful critique of how America’s legal and academic institutions have drifted from their constitutional moorings. Drawing on his own experiences and research, he explains how elite law schools, the legal profession, and the judiciary have embraced ideology over principle—often at the expense of liberty, the rule of law, and intellectual diversity.
Shapiro will explore urgent questions:
- How did our top institutions become unmoored from constitutional principles?
- What role has legal education played in reshaping America’s elites?
- What can lawyers, students, and citizens do to restore fidelity to the Constitution and the promise of self-government?
Join us for this timely and thought-provoking conversation about law, education, and the future of constitutional governance.
When: Wednesday, September 10, 2025 at 11:45 a.m. (registration), 12:00 Noon (lunch)
Where: First Floor Conference Room, 2040 Main Street, 1st Floor, Irvine, CA.
(Please validate your parking ticket in the lobby before or after entering the venue.)
Cost: $30/members, $35/non-members, $20/students, for lunch and 1 hour of MCLE credit (the Federalist Society is a California State Bar approved provider of MCLE).
RSVP and Pay: To RSVP and pay by credit card, please visit the Federalist Society event page (link coming soon).
To pay by cash or check at the door, please send an RSVP to Tim Kowal at OCFedSocPresident@gmail.com and make checks payable to “The Federalist Society.”
*** Please email us if you have any dietary concerns. ***
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 before that a vice president of the Cato Institute, director of Cato’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, and publisher of the Cato Supreme Court Review.
Shapiro is the author of Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020), coauthor of Religious Liberties for Corporations? Hobby Lobby, the Affordable Care Act, and the Constitution (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, the 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 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 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.
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