Georgetown Law’s Campaign to Cancel Ilya Shapiro: ‘This Is Melting Down’

Less than two weeks ago, Georgetown University Law Center (GULC) welcomed Ilya Shapiro as the new executive director and senior lecturer for the school’s Center for the Constitution. Shapiro, who had previously served as the vice president and director of the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, was set to start on February 1. “I could not be more thrilled at the prospect of his joining us,” read a statement from Randy Barnett, Georgetown’s faculty director for the center.

By Monday, Shapiro was placed on administrative leave, pending an “investigation” into a series of tweets criticizing Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a black woman for the Supreme Court seat vacated by Stephen Breyer. The tweets, posted on the night of January 26, argued that Biden’s Supreme Court nominee “will always have an asterisk attached” because of the president’s promise to “only consider black women,” and that Sri Srinivasan, an Indian-American justice on the D.C. Court of Appeals, was “objectively” the “best pick for Biden.” But Srinivasan didn’t fit the “latest intersectionality hierarchy,” Shapiro wrote, “so we’ll get [a] lesser black woman.”

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Nate Hochman

Nate Hochman was a staff writer at National Review.

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Less than two weeks ago, Georgetown University Law Center (GULC) welcomed Ilya Shapiro as the new executive director and senior lecturer for the school’s Center for the Constitution. Shapiro, who had previously served as the vice president and director of the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, was set to start on February 1. “I could not be more thrilled at the prospect of his joining us,” read a statement from Randy Barnett, Georgetown’s faculty director for the center.

By Monday, Shapiro was placed on administrative leave, pending an “investigation” into a series of tweets criticizing Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a black woman for the Supreme Court seat vacated by Stephen Breyer. The tweets, posted on the night of January 26, argued that Biden’s Supreme Court nominee “will always have an asterisk attached” because of the president’s promise to “only consider black women,” and that Sri Srinivasan, an Indian-American justice on the D.C. Court of Appeals, was “objectively” the “best pick for Biden.” But Srinivasan didn’t fit the “latest intersectionality hierarchy,” Shapiro wrote, “so we’ll get [a] lesser black woman.”