John E. Kramer has directed the Institute for Justice’s communications since 1992.  His strategic media relations work—coupled with IJ’s litigation—has protected homes and small businesses from eminent domain abuse and secured the rights of entrepreneurs to earn an honest living when the government sought to shut them out.  Kramer’s work helped ensure that First Amendment protections were extended to the internet, and he directed a successful PR effort that helped strike down a federal law that made it a felony to compensate bone marrow donors.

Applying market-based principles, he has helped the Institute for Justice and dozens of organizations across the Freedom Movement to personalize, humanize and dramatize their stories of individual liberty thereby more effectively conveying them through the mainstream media.  Kramer has directed the media relations in 11 landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases.

His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The New York Times, among other news outlets and was featured in the 2017 movie Little Pink House, a major Hollywood movie starring Catherine Keener, which tells the behind-the-scenes story of IJ’s Kelo eminent domain case.  His work spotlighting eminent domain abuse was featured by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes.

In 2018, Kramer received The Thomas Roe Award, the highest honor presented by the State Policy Network.  In 2014, New Mexico State University selected him as a distinguished alumnus, an honor given to fewer than 450 alumni since the award’s inception in 1956.

He is an accomplished oil painter, and Kramer’s acclaimed novel, Blythe—an allegory on the spread of AIDS across society and the search for a cure—was released in 2017.  That novel is now being turned into an opera titled, Isabella.

Kramer lives in Arlington, Virginia with his wife, Holly, and their cat, Keiko.