Lawless: The Miseducation Of America's Elites • TaxProf Blog

Ilya Shapiro (Manhattan Institute), Lawless: The Miseducation of America's Elites (2025):

In the past, Columbia Law School produced leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now, it produces window-smashing activists.

What happens when America’s top law schools stop believing in legal education?When protestors at Columbia broke into a building and created illegal encampments, the student-led Columbia Law Review demanded that finals be canceled because of “distress.” At Stanford, chanting activists, egged on by an associate dean, drove away a federal judge. Yale’s hostility to free speech led more than a dozen federal judges to boycott the school for clerkship hiring.

Law schools used to teach students how to think critically, advance logical arguments, and respect opponents. Now, those students cannot tolerate disagreement and reject the validity of the law itself. And yet, rioting Ivy Leaguers are the same people who will hold important government positions, fight constitutional lawsuits, and advise Fortune 500 companies.

In Lawless, Ilya Shapiro explains how we got here and what we can do about it. The problem is bigger than radical students and biased faculty—it’s institutional weakness. Shapiro met the mob firsthand when he posted a controversial tweet that led to calls for his firing from Georgetown Law. A four-month investigation eventually cleared him on a technicality. but declared that if he offended anyone in future, he’d create a “hostile educational environment” and be subject to the inquisition again. Not being able to do the job he was hired for, he resigned.

This cannot continue. In Lawless, Shapiro reveals how the warping of higher ed—and especially the illiberal takeover of legal education—is transforming our country. We’re handing the reins of power to lawless radicals who will be America’s future judges, prosecutors, politicians, and presidents. Unless we stop it now, the consequences will be with us for decades.

Reviews:

Ilya Shapiro takes the academy to court—and wins. In this thoughtful new book, he makes the case that legal education has been captured and corrupted by left-wing ideologues. He knows it from observation, but also from experience. He pulls no punches and tells it like it is. — Christopher F. Rufo

When did breaking windows become an acceptable activity for lawyers-in-training? Lawless is the shocking story of how our most prestigious law schools were overtaken by student mobs, enabled by faculty and bureaucrats who care more about diversity quotas and “safety” than truth-seeking and the robust exchange of ideas. A sobering must-read. — William P. Barr

It should be axiomatic that the law is followed at law schools. But like much of what transpires on American campuses these days, it has become business as anything but usual. In Lawless, the brilliant Ilya Shapiro catalogues the ideological capture of America’s law schools, where woke administrators and bureaucrats are focused on imposing their worldview and preferred social order, not on nurturing young minds to debate ideas freely and – yes – wrestle with opinions with which they don’t agree. If debating ideas is too tough a task for aspiring lawyers, they certainly aren’t ready for the courtroom, the boardroom, or anywhere else lawyers are required. — Betsy DeVos

Ilya Shapiro, Lawless I: The Illiberal Takeover of Legal Education. My "lived experience" at Georgetown gave me a unique perspective on the higher-ed crisis.
Ilya Shapiro, Lawless II: Critical Theory Returns with a Vengeance. You can’t have legal education dominated by an ideology that denies the law’s legitimacy.
Ilya Shapiro, Lawless III: It's the Bureaucracy, Stupid. CRT gets all the attention, but this less-sexy part is equally important—if not more so.
Ilya Shapiro, Lawless IV: Leadership Failures Old and New. The pandemic showed the weakness of the leadership class.
Ilya Shapiro, Lawless V: Where Do We Go from Here? There are ways to reform, but it won't be easy.