Law schools are different from other academic institutions. They are the incubators of America’s future elite. When they go wrong, it profoundly affects the wider culture in a way that other institutions do not.
That’s the central point in Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites, the compelling new book by Ilya Shapiro. Shapiro, a lawyer, a veteran of the libertarian Cato Institute, and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, gained fame in 2022 when he was investigated for political incorrectness prior to starting a position as executive director of the Georgetown Law School Center for the Constitution.
Georgetown investigated Shapiro after he posted that Sri Srinivasan, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, would be President Joe Biden’s “best pick” for the Supreme Court. Shapiro added: “But alas [Srinivasan] doesn’t fit into [the] latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get [a] lesser black woman.”
Shapiro’s “lesser black woman” phrasing caused a reaction and led Georgetown Law Dean William Treanor to denounce the post as “appalling” and “at odds with everything we stand for at Georgetown Law.” It completely upended Shapiro’s life.
“The day after the tweet was the second-worst day of my life, after another January day nearly 25 years earlier, when my mom died,” he writes. “I thought that I had blown up my life and killed my career. Everything I had worked hard for over decades — the sacrifices my parents had made in getting me out of the Soviet Union, the earnest striving of an immigrant kid to get to the Ivy League and work in the halls of power, the life my wife and I were building for our two sons.”
Shapiro cleared the investigation but then turned down the position anyway. In Lawless, he explains his phrasing this way: “I argued that Judge Srinivasan was the best candidate, meaning that everyone else in the entire world was less qualified. So if Biden kept his promise, he would pick a less-qualified — or, given Twitter’s character limit, ‘lesser’ — black woman. Then I went to bed. Overnight, a firestorm erupted on social media, particularly over those three words: ‘lesser black woman.’” Shapiro “deleted the tweet and apologized for my inartful choice of words but stood by my view that Biden should have considered all possible nominees.” He is now at the Manhattan Institute.
Lawless is an indictment of wokeism in the field of law. It’s a frightening and well-written book that is loaded with examples of lawyers abandoning the basic principles of law to bow to the Left. The pattern is familiar by now: A law professor will say or write something “insensitive,” which is followed by a hysterical student reaction, which is then followed by weak administrators calling for a “review.” Shapiro describes it well:
“Nearly all these cases follow the same pattern: Students weaponize hurt feelings — which are often performative, not genuine — to demand the obliteration of a political opponent’s career. Institutional cultures are so weak, thanks to a bureaucratic explosion and increase in academic activists, that administrators are easily overwhelmed by these moral panics and either engage in performative denunciations of the accused or actually terminate them. This pernicious dynamic is reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in which students publicly shamed and otherwise humiliated professors to scare them into ideological obedience.”
This is particularly toxic for society because law schools produce a disproportionate number of America’s leaders, from the corporate world to Capitol Hill. Shapiro notes that law school “graduates aren’t going to shuffle off, as gender studies majors do, to similarly academic and inconsequential jobs. No, law graduates, an increasing number of whom have undergraduate degrees in activism that masquerades as education, will end up running the country. They’re the elite in training.”
Shapiro reasonably calls for a return to common sense and open-minded pedagogy in “the clash between the classical pedagogical model of legal education and the postmodern activist one.” Basically, a return to free speech, due process, and other foundations of Western jurisprudence. He has marshaled a lot of evidence and statistics to show that this may be difficult.
One particularly shocking example is from 2023, when Judge Kyle Duncan of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals was shouted down and censored by a mob of angry students at Stanford University School of Law. Instead of defending Duncan, Stanford DEI dean Tirien Steinbach famously asked, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” Shapiro rightly calls this “a cute way of giving ideological opponents a heckler’s veto — not just on speakers, but on class materials, extracurricular activities, whatever. If they hate an idea enough, surely it isn’t worth exposing students to a person who espouses that idea.”
Shapiro also emphasizes the importance of law school deans who have some backbone. Again and again, in Lawless, he turns to the theme of courage — of the simple ability that faculty of America’s law schools need to tell young Marxist stormtroopers that this is the United States and we don’t racially discriminate inane direction, we don’t peddle illogic to fit narratives, and we do not censor or cancel people. Shapiro is particularly savage with Treanor of the Georgetown University law school.
“The central commonality of all of Georgetown’s recent problems is the unprincipled and weak leadership of Dean Bill Treanor,” Shapiro writes. “Although a successful fundraiser and gifted scholar — though with a tin ear for current affairs — Treanor has proven himself again and again to be just the kind of ‘invertebrate’ whose lack of integrity plagues law schools across the country.”
By writing pusillanimous emails and “not coming out forcefully and saying, ‘We support the free speech of faculty outside of the school,’ like they’ve done previously with liberal professors who’ve said offensive things,” the dean caved to the students. Shapiro calls the “scuttlebutt” that Treanor had lost out on the presidency of Georgetown due to his mishandling of Shapiro’s case “well-deserved karma.”
Shapiro is a terrific writer, avoiding legal jargon in favor of a narrative that flows and keeps the reader turning the pages. His blow-by-blow account of his ordeal with the Georgetown University School of Law reads like a thriller or an account of someone who barely escaped the clutches of the East German Stasi.
Shapiro found himself before two committees that were firing off ridiculous questions: “So, ideally, if you could go back in time, how would you have reworded your tweet to convey what you were intending? … When you were posting the tweet that evening, was that in your personal capacity or was that professionally? … Was there anything different or unusual in that moment in how you posted that tweet? … When you read it yourself, do you think it sounds offensive? … Are you aware that other university community members, including students and alums, staff, and faculty have expressed that they were offended by your tweet?”
Even more revolting is Shapiro’s account of the new antisemitism now rocking college campuses. After Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the president of the New York University law school’s student bar association circulated a newsletter blaming the Jewish state for the attack. After the New York City Police Department cleared out an anti-Israel encampment at Columbia in May 2024, the student editors of the Columbia Law Review claimed to be “irrevocably shaken” and demanded that their school cancel final exams and pass all students. The journal then published an article arguing that Jews “capitalized on the Holocaust to create a powerful narrative that monopolizes victimhood.” The editorial process undertaken to run the piece excluded Jewish students.
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Shapiro sees a kind of cultural “perfect storm” that has created the modern environment. There was the “growth of bureaucracies generally, and DEI offices in particular,” which “have fueled a monstrous shift in the legal academy.” The COVID-19 pandemic and “racial reckoning” provoked by George Floyd’s killing accelerated “trends such as critical race theory, once thought to be a relic of the 1980s and early ’90s.” Radicals “went on the march as intolerant faculty and weak administrators let them.” The “at-best mealy-mouthed response by university leaders to the explosion of antisemitism after Hamas’s barbarism — and indeed the fomenting of that terrorism apologia by DEI ideologies instructing that Israel is an ‘oppressor’ — opened people’s eyes to academia’s moral corruption, including at the nation’s top law schools.”
Brilliantly argued and spot-on, counselor. Lawless should be mandatory reading at all American law schools — especially at Georgetown.