Ira Karoll, Esquire

Adjunct Professor of Law

Biography

Ira Karoll is an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, teaching a class on the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses.  He is also in-house counsel at a publicly traded company.  

For over three years, Ira served in the U.S. Department of Justice as a Deputy Associate Attorney General, as Special Counsel to the United States Attorney, and as an Assistant United States Attorney.  In those roles, he worked on various religious liberty issues, including drafting religious liberty regulations for 9 Executive Agencies, training DOJ employees nationally on religious liberty in land use, serving on the Working Group for the Attorney General’s Religious Liberty Task Force, and serving as the Religious Liberty Coordinator for Western Pennsylvania.  

Before the DOJ, Ira was an associate in Jones Day’s Pittsburgh office for over 8 years, working on business and tort litigation.  He was part of the team that represented religious entities in nationwide litigation challenging government regulations that violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  He was involved in those cases from drafting the complaints to the injunction hearings and through the appeals, including an emergency application, cert petition, merits briefing, and preparation for oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court.  

Ira also clerked for the Honorable Thomas M. Hardiman on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.