A high-profile law professor who endured cancel culture firsthand lays bare the crisis in American law schools, and sounds the alarm over the threat of radicalization affecting future lawyers, politicians, and judges.
When Ilya Shapiro was hired at Georgetown University’s Center for the Constitution, it was an exciting new step in his career. Then he posted a controversial tweet that led to a media circus, heckling crowds of activist students, and a four-month investigation which eventually concluded that because he wasn’t an employee when he tweeted, he wasn’t subject to university policies—but that if he said something that offended anyone in future, he’d create a “hostile educational environment” and be subject to the inquisition again.
Recognizing that he couldn’t work under those conditions, Shapiro resigned and sounded the alarm. He saw the precarious status of free thought at law schools and what it meant for the future of our democracy. What happened wasn’t exclusive to him or to Georgetown; this form of illiberalism is a problem across higher education. More dangerously, it’s precipitating a national crisis: a corruption that goes to the heart of the American legal system. In Lawless, Shapiro shows how the warping of higher ed is leading to a country transformed by radicalization.
In this rigorously researched jeremiad against censorship, Shapiro demonstrates how the problem is bigger than emotional college kids, and more than just extreme overrepresentation of liberal professors—only three percent of the faculty at Harvard identifies as conservative. The new radicalism is rooted in an activist bureaucracy shaping future generations of American elites into extremists. These are America’s future judges, prosecutors, politicians, and presidents, and Shapiro contends they’ve stopped
