Today is the day when we remember the bravery of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy to liberate Europe from the Nazi menace—79 years have passed already! But it’s also a personal anniversary: June 6, 2022 was the day I resigned from Georgetown after having been reinstated on the technicality that I wasn’t yet an employee when I tweeted my blasphemy and thus wasn’t subject to the diversicrats’ thought-policing.
I serialized that whole saga here on Shapiro’s Gavel, with links collected at the final post, “What It’s Like to Be a Free Man.” Naturally, I announced my resignation in the Wall Street Journal. Then I announced my next professional move, going to the Manhattan Institute, on Tucker Carlson’s old Fox News show, as one does. It was all written up in a New York Times profile, as typically happens when lawyers change jobs.
Then I went on a media blitz, launched this Substack, and promptly went on vacation. Upon returning, I began this next stage of my career, filing amicus briefs and commenting on the Supreme Court and other constitutional issues, but also shining a spotlight on the rot in academia. Understandably, my focus with regard to this last item has been legal education, and to that end I got a book deal, to publish Canceling Justice: The Illiberal Takeover of Legal Education with HarperCollins early next year. I also co-authored model legislation for abolishing DEI bureaucracies and restoring colorblind equality at public universities. Texas recently became the latest state to adopt it.
But it hasn’t all been hard work and mission-driven legal advocacy. In November, Kristin and I welcome our “third and fourth amendments,” boy-girl twins that made us a family of six. I can’t believe these beautiful babies, born tiny (especially the girl) but now dominating the growth-percentile charts, are turning seven months next week. I went on paternity leave through the end of the year, though it’s unclear what that really means when you’re working remotely for a think tank and have a book to write. What it really meant is that I didn’t travel for three months, a period of airport-avoidance I hadn’t achieved since I don’t know when (besides the first four months of the pandemic). But I more than made up for it in the following three months, when I tried valiantly to satiate the demand for calling out woke mobs and the spineless deans who enable them.
Coincidentally, this Thursday Kristin and I mark out 10th wedding anniversary. (The traditional gift is tin or aluminum and I must say I’m still scratching my head at what to get my bride: any suggestions?) We’ll do that with good friends in San Francisco before heading to the Napa Valley, where, in addition to visiting a planned four wineries, I’ll attend a Federalist Society leadership meeting while she gets some well-deserved rest.
It’s been an amazing, unpredictable, and unforeseeable year. But now it’s time to get back to my book, for which the manuscript is due the end of next month. I’m almost done and can’t wait to submit: like Justice Scalia, I enjoy having written.
A Year Since I Left Georgetown