Engineering After graduating from Princeton, Schlafly briefly worked as a device physicist for
Intel in
Santa Clara, California until 1983, when he became a
microelectronics engineer at the
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Schlafly later worked for
Bell Labs before enrolling at
Harvard Law School. After law school, Schlafly served as an adjunct professor at
Seton Hall Law School. Schlafly was an
associate for the
Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz law firm in
New York City before moving to private practice. Additionally, he is General Counsel at the
Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and led its unsuccessful Supreme Court challenge to the
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In 2010, Schlafly wrote an article for the
Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons about the economic effects of the legislation. In 2010, Schlafly took the role of lead counsel for a group seeking to recall US Senator
Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey. The group, associated with the
Tea Party movement, argued that the
US Constitution permits a
recall election for federal offices without explicitly so providing. On November 18, 2010, the
New Jersey Supreme Court rejected Schlafy's arguments, finding that the New Jersey provision violated the U.S. Constitution. Later that year, Schlafly represented the group RecallND in
RecallND v. Jaeger before the
North Dakota Supreme Court in another effort to recall Democratic Senator
Kent Conrad.
Conservapedia Schlafly created the
wiki-based Conservapedia in November 2006 to counter what he perceived as a liberal bias present in Wikipedia. He felt the need to start the project after reading a student's assignment written using
Common Era dating notation, rather than the
Anno Domini system that he preferred. Although he was "an early Wikipedia enthusiast", as reported by Shawn Zeller of
Congressional Quarterly, Schlafly became concerned about perceived
bias after Wikipedia editors repeatedly undid his edits to the article about the
2005 Kansas evolution hearings. Schlafly expressed hope that Conservapedia would become a general resource for American educators and a counterpoint to the
liberal bias that he perceived in Wikipedia. The site has been accused of spreading
misinformation on scientific subjects, such as
HIV/AIDS denialism,
the abortion-breast cancer hypothesis,
climate change denial,
relativity denial, and
vaccine/autism connections, and has advocated
Young Earth creationism,
Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories that the
January 6 United States Capitol attack was staged. Additionally, it features extensive criticisms of
atheism,
feminism,
homosexuality, and the
Democratic Party. In 2009, Schlafly appeared on
The Colbert Report to discuss his
Conservative Bible Project, a project hosted on Conservapedia that aims to rewrite English translations of the
Bible in order to remove or alter terms advancing a "liberal bias".
Dialogue with Richard Lenski Richard Lenski, an
evolutionary biologist known for his work on the
E. coli long-term evolution experiment, was contacted by Schlafly in 2008 regarding a set of results that showed one population of
E. coli evolved the novel trait of being able to metabolize
citrate. Conservapedia supports
creationism and objects to evolution, so Schlafly disputed that bacteria could evolve via beneficial
mutations. The correspondence was commented on across the Internet. Schlafly was criticized by Lenski on
Ars Technica, among other sites, for not reading Lenski's paper properly, for not understanding the experimental data he requested, and for not taking notice of people on Conservapedia itself who considered the paper well researched.
Trademark lawsuit against Saint Louis Brewery In 2011, Schlafly led a lawsuit on behalf of the family of his activist mother, Phyllis, to block
The Saint Louis Brewery from acquiring a trademark on the name "Schlafly". In 2018, the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of The Saint Louis Brewery. ==Personal life==