Matthew A. Shapiro

Matthew Shapiro writes about civil procedure, dispute resolution, and related aspects of private and public law, drawing on legal and political theory to examine the ways in which the state uses procedural law to shape the resolution of private disputes in light of important public values such as democracy, dignity, equality, and the rule of law.

In 2024, Professor Shapiro received a Rutgers University Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence, which is awarded annually to five of the “most distinguished young faculty members” across the entire Rutgers University system in recognition of “truly outstanding contributions to research.” His article Distributing Civil Justice won the Association of American Law Schools’ 2021 Scholarly Papers Competition. Two of his other papers were selected for the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, and another was chosen for the New Voices in Civil Justice Workshop. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals—including the Boston University Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, and Law and Philosophy—as well as in two edited collections of essays on private law theory published by Oxford University Press.

Professor Shapiro was a law clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., on the Supreme Court of the United States and to Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He also practiced with a large law firm, specializing in appellate and complex civil litigation. Before joining the Rutgers Law School faculty, he was a member of the faculty of the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, having begun his academic career as an Associate in Law (fellow) at Columbia Law School.

Professor Shapiro received a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was a Book Reviews & Features Editor of the Yale Law Journal; an M.Phil. and a D.Phil. in political theory from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Keasbey Memorial Foundation Scholar; and an A.B. from Princeton University.