Clark Neily

Clark Neily is senior vice president for criminal justice at the Cato Institute. His areas of interest include constitutional law, overcriminalization, coercive plea bargaining, police accountability, and gun rights. Before joining Cato in 2017, Neily was a senior attorney and constitutional litigator at the Institute for Justice and director of the Institute’s Center for Judicial Engagement. He is an adjunct professor at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia School of Law, where he teaches constitutional litigation and public‐​interest law. Neily served as co‐​counsel in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Plan II (with concentrations in philosophy and Russian) from the University of Texas at Austin, and he also received his law degree from the University of Texas, where he was Chief Articles Editor of the Texas Law Review. Neily is the author of Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government, and he also contributed a chapter to libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty.