Heather Mac Donald

Heather Mac Donald is a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal. She also is a recipient of 2005 Bradley Prize for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement. Heather's work at City Journal has canvassed a range of topics including homeland security, immigration, policing and "racial" profiling, homelessness and homeless advocacy, educational policy, the New York courts, and business improvement districts. Ms. Mac Donald's writings have also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, The New Republic, Partisan Review, The New Criterion, Public Interest, and Academic Questions. Her book The Burden of Bad Ideas—a collection of essays from the pages of City Journal—details the effects of the sixties' counterculture's destructive march through America's institutions. Her latest book, Are Cops Racist?—another City Journal anthology—investigates the workings of the police, the controversy over so-called racial profiling, and the anti-profiling lobby's harmful effects on black Americans. A non-practicing lawyer, Ms. Mac Donald has clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, has been an attorney-advisor in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and a volunteer with the Natural Resource Defense Fund in New York City. She has testified before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Committee of the Judiciary of the U.S. House of Representatives; the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims; the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; and the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. In 1998, she was appointed to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's task force on the City University of New York, thanks in large part to her City Journal essays on education. The New Jersey State Law Enforcement Officers Association conferred its Civilian Valor Award on her in 2004. She is also a frequent guest on Fox News, CNN, and other television and radio programs. Ms. Mac Donald received her B.A. in English from Yale University, graduating Summa Cum Laude with a Mellon Fellowship to Cambridge University, where she earned her M.A. in English and studied in Italy through a Clare College study grant. Her J.D. is from Stanford University Law School. Heather Mac Donald lives and works in New York City.