Steven G. Calabresi


Steven G. Calabresi is Clayton J. and Henry R. Barber Professor of Law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. He is the nephew of Guido Calabresi, a U.S. Appellate judge and former dean of the Yale Law School.

Biography

Calabresi graduated from the Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1976. He then attended Yale College, graduating cum laude in 1980. He received his J.D. degree from Yale Law School, where he was the Note & Topics Editor of the Yale Law Journal. After law school, he served as law clerk for Judge Ralph K. Winter of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Judge Robert H. Bork of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court.
While at Yale Law School, Calabresi and two Yale College friends, Lee Liberman Otis and David McIntosh, founded the Yale chapter of the Federalist Society, one of the Society's three original chapters. In 2019, he was chairman of the Society's board of directors. Calabresi is an active libertarian-conservative author and commentator.
Calabresi joined the faculty of Northwestern Law School in 1990. He has been a visiting professor at Yale Law School, and a visiting professor of political theory at Brown University, where he has taught since 2010.

Political life

Calabresi served under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush from 1985 to 1990. During that time, he advised Attorney General Edwin Meese III, and Reagan Domestic Policy Chief T. Kenneth Cribb, and wrote campaign speeches for Vice President Dan Quayle. Calabresi supports legally recognizing same-sex marriages. In 2016, Calabresi endowed the Abraham Lincoln Lecture on Constitutional Law at Northwestern Priztker School of Law in Chicago. The lecture's purpose is to show Lincoln's enormous talent as a constitutional lawyer and to reflect on what legal changes Lincoln's legacy might appropriately call for today.
With Gary S. Lawson, Calabresi has argued that the Mueller Probe was unlawful.
In July 2020, Calabresi wrote a New York Times editorial condemning a tweet by President Trump that floated postponing the 2020 election. Calabresi said the tweet "frankly appalled" him, called it "fascistic", and said it was "itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate."

Publications

Calabresi has published more than 65 articles in law reviews, including:
He has written or edited several books, including: