Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author. She is a recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize. Mac Donald’s work at City Journal has covered a range of topics, including higher education, immigration, policing, homelessness and homeless advocacy, criminal-justice reform, and race relations. Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and The New Criterion.
Mac Donald’s newest book is When Race Trumps Merit. Other previous works include The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture; New York Times bestseller The War on Cops; The Burden of Bad Ideas; The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan than Today’s; and Are Cops Racist?
A nonpracticing lawyer, Mac Donald clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and was an attorney-advisor in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a volunteer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She has frequently testified before U.S. House and Senate Committees. In 1998, Mac Donald was appointed to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s task force on the City University of New York. She has received numerous awards for her writing.
A frequent guest on FOX News and other TV and radio programs, Mac Donald holds a B.A. in English from Yale University, graduating with a Mellon Fellowship to Cambridge University, where she earned an M.A. in English and studied in Italy through a Clare College study grant. She holds a J.D. from Stanford University Law School.
At the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation’s annual meeting, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called Mac Donald, “the greatest thinker on criminal justice in America today.”
