Becoming Cato's Fourth Director of Constitutional Studies

In September I became the fourth director of Cato's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. This is the biggest honor of my professional life, and it is also a tremendous responsibility. The Levy Center (or CCS, as we call it here) has been shaped by the three directors who came before me. And those three directors have also served as professional mentors to me over the last nine years. The best way to explain why CCS is so unique and so important is by sharing what I've learned from each of its previous three directors: Roger Pilon, Ilya Shapiro, and Anastasia Boden. First, Roger Pilon. Roger founded CCS and led it for 30 years. Roger was the CCS director when I interned here in 2015 and when I served as a legal associate in 2016-17. When Roger founded CCS, the main philosophical dispute in constitutional interpretation was framed as "judicial activism" versus "judicial restraint." Roger founded CCS to advocate for a then-radical third approach: judicial engagement. As Roger put it, CCS was founded "to encourage judges to be more engaged than many conservatives believed proper, and to locate the authority for that engagement in the Constitution itself, properly understood."