[2] Spiro graduated from Harvard University in 1982, where he majored in history and wrote his senior honors thesis on France's relations with Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
For his first several years out of law school, Spiro circulated among various government and NGO positions in DC, spending two years in the State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser and two more as a law clerk for DC Circuit judge Stephen F. Williams and then Supreme Court Associate Justice David Souter.
[4] After spending 1992 and 1993 in private practice at Shea & Gardner, he joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow, and then the Clinton administration's National Security Council as Director for Democracy.
[6] Spiro criticized traditional methods of ascribing nationality — jus soli and jus sanguinis — for their increasing disassociation with the reality of who participates in the American political and social community, and argued that the ultimate effect would be a decline in the importance of countries and citizenship laws.
[9] At Home in Two Countries: The Past and Future of Dual Citizenship (New York University Press, 2016) describes the evolution of legal treatment and public attitudes towards multiple nationality in the United States, including milestones such as the Expatriation Act of 1868 and the Supreme Court case Afroyim v. Rusk, as well as Spiro's own experience of acquiring German citizenship.