Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University, where he also serves as Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. He has written widely and influentially on democracy, justice, and the methods of social inquiry.

A native of South Africa, he received his J.D. from the Yale Law School and his Ph.D from the Yale Political Science Department where he has taught since 1984 and served as chair from 1999 to 2004.

Shapiro is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a past fellow of the Carnegie Corporation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cape Town and Nuffield College, Oxford.

He is the author of a new book, Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror, published by the Princeton University Press.

Other books by Shapiro are The Flight From Reality in the Human Sciences, and Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth (with Michael Graetz). His current research concerns the relations between democracy and the distribution of income and wealth.