David Yerushalmi

After completing his undergraduate studies with a B.S. in public policy studies and criminal justice, summa cum laude, Mr. Yerushalmi received his Juris Doctorate from Arizona State University College of Law in 1984 as the recipient of the Most Outstanding Graduate Award. After graduation, Mr. Yerushalmi worked as a lawyer specializing in commercial litigation in the Los Angeles office of the law firm of Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP (then known as LeBoeuf, Lamb, Leiby & Macrae).

Mr. Yerushalmi is licensed to practice law in Washington, D.C., New York, California and Arizona.

Mr. Yerushalmi is General Counsel to the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., one of the nation's leading national security think tanks founded by former Reagan administration official Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., and is co-founder of and senior counsel to the American Freedom Law Center, a nation-wide public interest law firm and public policy think tank.

Mr. Yerushalmi is today considered an expert on national security matters, especially as they relate to Islamic law and its intersection with Islamic terrorism. In this capacity, he designed and co-authored a ground-breaking peer reviewed empirical investigation on sharia-adherence and the promotion of violent, jihadist literature in U.S. mosques published in the Middle East Quarterly (Summer 2011) and then republished in a more detailed format in Perspectives on Terrorism, the journal of the prestigious Terrorism Research Initiative. This research and scholarship on sharia was earlier the focus of a 2008 monograph published by the McCormick Foundation and the Center for Security Policy entitled, “Shariah, Law and 'Financial Jihad': How Should America Respond?” Just recently, Mr. Yerushalmi was listed by Forward Magazine as one of the top 50 Jewish leaders in 2011 for his work shaping the policy initiatives countering the threat from sharia.

In 2010, Mr. Yerushalmi participated as a co-author and member of Team 'B' in the seminal work on counter-terrorism entitled, Shariah: The Threat To America, An Exercise in Competitive Analysis, Report of Team 'B' II, published by the Center for Security Policy, and he has also produced and narrated a one-hour CLE program for legal professionals addressing the requirement of proper disclosure in sharia-compliant financial products. That same year, Mr. Yerushalmi drafted what has become known as the American Laws for American Courts Act, which has been enacted into law by several states and is pending in many others. This legislation, crafted especially for states, is an effort to insulate state courts from the growing tendency to embrace constitutionally offensive foreign laws, including sharia.

In Mr. Yerushalmi's role as a staunch defender of the Constitution and federalism, he was co-counsel in one of the most important court challenges to the federal law mandating health insurance commonly referred to as “Obamacare” (Thomas More Law Center, et al. v. Obama, et al.,) and in a novel challenge to the U.S. government's takeover of AIG insofar as AIG is the world's dominant promoter of sharia-compliant insurance (Murray v. Geithner, et al.,). Mr. Yerushalmi also co-authored a scholarly article published in the Duke University Press's Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, entitled, "Wearing the Crown of Solomon? Chief Justice Roberts and the Affordable Care Act 'Tax'".

In Mr. Yerushalmi's role as an advocate of legal, economic, and political reform in the Middle East and in the former republics of the Soviet Union, he has been interviewed and written about in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Reason Magazine, and appeared on local, national, and international radio and television programs.