Robert A. Schapiro was named a Witkin Award winner in 2023 for Excellence in Legal Education. Dean Schapiro is Dean and C. Hugh Friedman Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale College, Master of Arts from Stanford University, and Juris Doctorate from Yale Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. Schapiro clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court and for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Prior to becoming Dean at the USD School of Law in 2021, Dean Schapiro was a faculty member at Emory University School of Law. At Emory, he served as Dean and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center on Federalism and Intersystemic Governance. He had previously held positions as associate vice provost for academic affairs, associate dean of faculty for the law school, and as associate faculty director for Emory’s Halle Institute for Global Learning. While at Emory, Dean Schapiro received several awards, including the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award for excellence in graduate education, the Ben F. Johnson Faculty Excellence Award, Most Outstanding Professor from the Emory Student Bar Association, and Professor of the Year from the Emory Law School Black Law Students Association.
Dean Schapiro’s scholarship focuses on federalism and state and federal constitutional law. His most recent scholarly works include The Unconstitutional Conditions Vacuum in Criminal Procedure, Yale Law Journal (forthcoming 2024) (with Kay Levine & Jonathan Remy Nash), Protecting State Constitutional Rights from Unconstitutional Conditions, U.C. Davis Law Review (2022) (with Kay Levine & Jonathan Remy Nash), and States of Inequality: Fiscal Federalism, Unequal States, and Unequal People, California Law Review (2020). His book, Polyphonic Federalism: Toward the Protection of Fundamental Rights, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2009.