David Michael Shapiro returned to MJC as Executive Director in 2025, having previously worked at the organization for over a decade. A respected advocate, scholar, and thought leader, David brings nearly 20 years of civil rights experience to MJC.
David has argued civil rights cases in 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, malicious prosecution, prisoners’ religious exercise, criminal sentencing, prison and jail conditions, and freedom of speech. In 2024, David received the Abner Mikva Award from the American Constitution Society Chicago Lawyer Chapter for “extraordinary contributions to progressive legal causes.”
From 2023 to 2025, David served as Executive Director of Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, where he led a team committed to racial justice and economic opportunity. Shapiro dramatically expanded fundraising, boosted the Committee’s public profile, steered the organization through federal government attacks, increased financial resilience, and worked to end long-term solitary confinement in Illinois.
In 2016, David founded and became director of MacArthur Justice Center’s Supreme Court and Appellate Program, growing the team and working to ensure that people subjected to police brutality, indecent prison conditions, wrongful convictions, and other law enforcement abuse received 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.
Previously, David’s work focused on civil rights litigation in trial courts, both at the ACLU National Prison Project and then here at MJC. 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, obtained an injunction that struck down a state censorship law as unconstitutional, and litigated many federal cases on behalf of innocent people who were wrongfully convicted.
A prolific writer and former Northwestern Law Clinical Professor, 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. Given his expertise, David is often invited as a commentator and keynote speaker on civil rights, criminal justice, and the judicial system.
David graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 2001, was a Fulbright Scholar based in Moscow from 2001-02, graduated from Yale Law School in 2005, and clerked for Judge Edward R. Becker on the Third Circuit.