Recent landmark decisions—from the U.S. Supreme Court’s ban on TikTok to the Romanian Constitutional Court’s annulment of the first round of the 2024 presidential election—have brought the interplay of technology, law, and sovereignty into sharp focus.  

Our next discussion in the Transylvania Lectures series aims to explore how courts and lawmakers grapple with foreign influence campaigns on social media, balancing the need to protect national integrity with constitutional safeguards for free expression and due process.  

Our guest speaker will be Dr Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Previously he was executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute. Shapiro is the author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (2025) and Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020), coauthor of Religious Liberties for Corporations? (2014), and editor of 11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review (2008-18). Shapiro has testified many times before Congress and state legislatures and has filed more than 500 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court. He holds an AB from Princeton University, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a JD from the University of Chicago. 

His partner in discussion will be Dr János Székely, assistant professor at Sapientia University in Kolozsvár/Cluj. 

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