Kate Shaw is a Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. A constitutional law scholar, her academic work and writing focus on executive power, the law of democracy, the Supreme Court, and reproductive rights and justice.

Her scholarly writing has appeared, among other places, in the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, and the Northwestern University Law Review, and her popular writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Time, and The Atlantic. Shaw is a contributor with ABC News, a contributing opinion writer with The New York Times, co-host of the Supreme Court podcast “Strict Scrutiny,” and a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States.

Before joining the Penn faculty in January 2024, she spent over a decade on the faculty of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where she was also co-director of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy. Earlier in her career she served as an associate counsel in the Obama White House Counsel’s Office and served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and the Honorable Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Shaw received her Bachelor of Arts from Brown University, and her Juris Doctor from Northwestern University.

Chautauqua Institution’s Robert H. Jackson Lecture is named in honor of the former Chautauquan, Jamestown lawyer, New Dealer, Solicitor General, Attorney General, Supreme Court justice, and Nuremberg chief prosecutor. Every summer the Jackson Lecture is a leading expert discussing the Supreme Court, the Justices, signal decisions, and related legal developments.

Chautauqua’s previous Jackson Lecturers have been Geoffrey Stone (2005), Linda Greenhouse (2006), Seth Waxman (2007), Jeffrey Toobin (2008), Paul Clement (2009), Jeff Shesol (2010), Dahlia Lithwick (2011), Pamela Karlan (2012), Charles Fried (2013), Akhil Amar (2014), Laurence Tribe (2015), Tracey Meares (2016), Judge Jon O. Newman (2017), Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella of Canada’s Supreme Court (2018), Donald B. Verrilli, Jr. (2019), Ruth Marcus (2020), Melissa Murray (2021), Reva Siegel (2022) and Justin Driver (2023).