Steven Calabresi

Steven Gow Calabresi (born 1958) is an American legal scholar and the Clayton J. and Henry R. Barber Professor of Law at Northwestern University.

He is the co-chairman of the Federalist Society.

He is the nephew of Guido Calabresi, a U.S. Appellate judge and former dean of the Yale Law School.

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 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.

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.

Calabresi joined the faculty of Northwestern Law School in 1990.

He has been a visiting professor at Yale Law School (in the fall semesters of 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016), and a visiting professor of political theory at Brown University, where he has taught since 2010.

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 2019, he was chairman of the Society's board of directors.

Calabresi is an active libertarian-conservative author and commentator.

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."

On January 13, 2021, Calabresi and Democrat Norman Eisen co-wrote an op-ed in The New York Times saying that President Trump should be charged and impeached in a second trial before the end of his term in office or immediately after for what he said and did on January 6 and for his effort to subvert Georgia's election results by asking the secretary of state "to find" enough votes for him to win the state.

The authors also said that the Senate should disqualify Trump from ever holding any public office again after convicting him.

They wrote that the recordings of Trump's phone call and his speech to supporters on January 6 were enough evidence to convict on those charges.

Calabresi has published more than 65 articles in law reviews, including:

He has written or edited several books, including: