Manny Klausner opened his law firm in downtown Los Angeles in 1996, after practicing at the Los Angeles office of Kindel & Anderson for three decades. He has been engaged in complex and significant litigation involving constitutional law, election law, media law, and business litigation matters. From 2000 to 2021, Klausner served as outside General Counsel to the Individual Rights Foundation, the legal arm of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Klausner is a graduate of UCLA and New York University School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden Scholar and Associate Managing Editor of the N.Y.U. Law Review. He received an LL.M. from N.Y.U. in 1963, as a Ford Foundation Fellow in Comparative Law, and he studied at the University of Copenhagen on combined Ford Foundation, Fulbright, and Danish Government grants. In 1964-1965, Klausner was a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School.Klausner is active in the Federalist Society, and he served as Chairman of the Federalist Society's National Practice Group on Free Speech and Election Law for ten years. Klausner previously served as editor and publisher of Reason magazine, and he co-founded Reason Foundation. He serves as a trustee and legal advisor to Reason Foundation and heads Reason's activities in submitting briefs amicus curiae in significant Supreme Court cases. Klausner has been credited for filing the first brief raising the academic-mismatch argument, in a racial preference case, in the U.S. Supreme Court — in Reason Foundation's amicus curiae brief in the University of Michigan cases in 2003.Klausner was a founding director of Institute for Justice in 1991. He is a recipient of the 1982 Lawyer-of-the-Year Award from the Constitutional Rights Foundation and the Los Angeles County Bar Association; he received the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Defender of Liberty Award in 2012; and he received the Lawyer-of-the-Year Award from the Federalist Society's Los Angeles Lawyers Chapter in 2013.