Identity of Speakers
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Ilya Shapiro
Faculty/Staff
OtherSenior Lecturer at Georgetown Law School
Resources
Additional Information
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Incident Nature:
Social media
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Incident Political Orientation:
Right wing -
Incident Responses:
University investigation not issuing in sanctions
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Incident Status:
No litigation
- Was Speech Code incident
Summary
Ilya Shapiro, the Vice President and Director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, was hired by Georgetown Law in January 2022 to run the school’s Center for the Constitution. In January, Mr. Shapiro tweeted on his personal account that the best pick for the Supreme Court vacancy was “Sri Srinivasan, who is solid prog. & v smart. Even has identity politics benefit of being first Asian (Indian) American. But alas doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.”
Georgetown immediately placed Mr. Shapiro on administrative leave following this tweet and initiated an investigation as to whether he violated the school’s code of professional conduct, non-discrimination, and anti-harassment policies.
Mr. Shapiro apologized for his tweet, saying he regretted his “poor choice of words” but called it a shame that “men and women of every race” would not be considered in the President’s Supreme Court nomination process.
Following a 122-day investigation, Georgetown reinstated Mr. Shapiro on a technicality, noting that he could not be sanctioned for his tweets because he had not formally begun working at Georgetown when he tweeted them. The report noted that his comments “had a significant negative impact on the Georgetown law community.”
In response, Mr. Shapiro tendered his resignation, stating that he “cannot again subject my family to the public attack on my character and livelihood that you have now made foreseeable, indeed inevitable.”
