David Shapiro (he/him) became Executive Director in January 2023 and leads the work of the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. Prior to joining Chicago Lawyers’ Committee, David devoted his career to fighting for racial justice and civil rights, first at the ACLU National Prison Project, and most recently as a MacArthur Justice Center attorney and a Northwestern Law Clinical Professor.

In 2016, David founded and became director of MacArthur Justice Center’s Supreme Court and Appellate Program, growing the team from just him to a team of sixteen staff members, and working to ensure that people subjected to police brutality, indecent prison conditions, wrongful convictions, and other law enforcement abuse have the best representation possible in appellate and Supreme Court cases. In 2022, the MacArthur Justice Center was honored by Bloomberg Law as a Pro Bono Innovator for the work of the Program.

David has argued appellate cases in state and federal courts across the nation, including the U.S. Supreme Court, the Illinois Supreme Court, the Seventh Circuit, and many other appeals courts sitting both as panels and en banc. He has won major victories on such issues as police brutality, deaths in custody, wrongful convictions, prisoners’ religious exercise, criminal sentencing, and freedom of speech.  David spent the first ten years of his career litigating principally in federal district courts. For example, he obtained a consent decree that restructured a jail’s censorship policies, helped to try a case that abolished the segregation of prisoners with HIV throughout the State of Alabama, and litigated many federal cases on behalf of innocent people who were wrongfully convicted. David has had the privilege of exposing law students to the power of litigation to achieve justice. Students that have worked under his supervision have argued and won cases in federal courts across the United States.

David has published law review articles on civil rights, incarceration, and policing in the Harvard Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the George Washington Law Review, among many others, in addition to co-authoring a textbook on prisoners’ rights and training federal court staff on civil rights litigation through the Federal Judicial Center.

David graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 2001, was a Fulbright Scholar from 2001-02, graduated from Yale Law School in 2005, and clerked for Judge Edward R. Becker on the Third Circuit.