Read about the fascinating intellectual evolution of our favorite gender studies major.
Independent Women’s Forum is pleased to announce that Kristin Shapiro, a prominent Washington, D.C., lawyer and a Senior Fellow at IWF, is the latest entry in our popular series of Champion Women profiles.
A lawyer with BakerHostetler, Kristin will be at the counsel’s table when the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments for Moore v. United States. Kristin has helped prepare for Supreme Court arguments before, but this is her first time to occupy a coveted seat at the counsel’s table.
As an attorney for the Moores, Kristin declines to publicly discuss the details of the pending case. But the Wall Street Journal explained that the case involves “the legality of a form of wealth tax that is the long-time dream of the political left.”
Kristin grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City, on the Kansas side, the daughter of an elementary school principal mother and a father who was a computer programmer. She graduated from Blue Valley North High School and went on to New York University. “I really loved Broadway,” she says, “and so I wanted to go to New York. I went to NYU. I graduated from NYU in three years. I considered myself a liberal. And so, you’ll shudder when I tell you that I majored in sociology and gender and sexuality studies.”
Shudder. So, what happened?
“What happened is that I worked for two years after NYU and then I went to law school. I’d always envisioned going to law school,” Kristin says. “I was a debater in high school and obviously, I was not going to make any money with my college majors. I went to Northwestern. It was wonderful. And what happened was I had a slew of professors from all across the ideological spectrum, including conservative professors. One professor who sticks out in my mind is Steve Calabresi. I had him for constitutional law. He founded The Federalist Society, which is the mecca for conservatives in the legal world.
“I can’t say I walked away from Calabresi’s class completely considering myself a conservative, though I certainly did walk away thinking ‘Gosh, the conservatives have a good point on a lot of these things.’ Maybe I’m liberal as a policy matter, but conservative in terms of my interpretation of the law, or something like that? Once your mind opens, you become receptive. You start thinking, ‘Well, gosh, you know, what’s the other side of this thing?’ You stop uncritically accepting all of the positions that you had and the positions of the political party you considered yourself aligned with, and it just sort of unravels from there. And that’s what happened to me.”
Kristin is married to Ilya Shapiro, whose free speech battle with Georgetown University made headlines last year, and who is now at the Manhattan Institute. They live in an 1860s house in Virginia, which they have fixed up, with their four children (including one-year-old twins).
We know you will enjoy reading about the fascinating intellectual evolution of our favorite gender studies major!
