ZadekpediaThe Cato Supreme Court Review is a publication associated with the Cato Institute, where it is edited by a figure within the institute’s constitutional studies program. On The Bob Zadek Show it appears chiefly as a credential: Bob Zadek introduces his guests by naming their position as editor-in-chief of the Review, and the publication’s institutional home is given as the Cato Institute.
Ilya Shapiro as editor-in-chief
In a May 2016 episode on the Supreme Court, Bob Zadek closed his interview by identifying his guest: Ilya Shapiro was a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, editor-in-chief at the Cato Supreme Court Review, the author of many books, and a frequent witness before Congress Ilya Shapiro on the Supreme Court in the Balance (2016). The same identification recurs in a March 2017 episode on the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch, where Bob Zadek again introduced Shapiro as a senior fellow of constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and, “importantly,” as editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review Judge Gorsuch on the Hot Seat (2017). In that introduction Bob Zadek also noted that Shapiro had co-authored Religious Liberties for Corporations: Hobby Lobby, the Affordable Care Act, and the Constitution in 2014, had testified before Congress on numerous occasions, had appeared on all major media, and had last appeared on the show in May of 2016.
The Review’s title thus functioned in these episodes as part of a longer introduction establishing the guest’s standing to discuss the Supreme Court. Bob Zadek’s framing of the 2017 episode was that the nomination and hoped-for confirmation of Gorsuch was a topic of near-first importance in American political life, and he described the Senate’s questioning of Gorsuch as a “Kabuki theater of make-believe interview” and a political event, a show trial of sorts. Shapiro agreed the moment was important, saying that as President Obama would say, they were in a teachable moment about the Supreme Court.
Trevor Burrus as editor-in-chief
By March 2021 the editorship had passed to Trevor Burrus, at least as described on the show. Introducing an episode on rent control, Bob Zadek welcomed Trevor Burrus as a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and as editor-in-chief — “yes, the man at the top” — of the Cato Supreme Court Review Escaping the Statrix: Trevor Burrus’s Rent Control Red Pill (2021). Bob Zadek said Burrus had studied rent control in the courts and economically for quite some time, and had asked him to join the show to explain what is wrong and nothing that is right with rent control.
The 2021 introduction places the Review’s editorial leadership within the same Cato Institute constitutional studies milieu as the 2016 and 2017 introductions, though the center is named differently across the episodes: Shapiro is placed in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, while Burrus is placed at the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies.
Across episodes
Three episodes touch on the Cato Supreme Court Review, all through the same device: Bob Zadek naming its editor-in-chief when introducing a guest. Ilya Shapiro holds the title in the 2016 and 2017 episodes; Trevor Burrus holds it in the 2021 episode. The episodes show no development in how the Review itself is described — no account of its contents, its editorial process, or the transition between editors — only the recurrence of the title as a credential.