Jeffery J. Ventrella

Professor of Law, Trinity Law School

Biography

Dr. Jeffery J. Ventrella serves as Visiting Professor of Law for Trinity Law School, concentrating on Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence and leading Trinity's Center for Public Legal Theology. Following a successful career as a “partner” serving clients in “Big Law” for 15 years, Jeff then served for nearly 23 years as Senior Counsel and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs and Training at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), including serving on ADF’s Executive Team for many years.

After joining ADF in 2000, he designed the curriculum for a number of ADF training programs, including the Blackstone Legal Fellowship (BLF), a unique training and professional development program for law students. He also helped design ADF International’s Areté Academy Europe, Areté Academy Asia, and Areté Latin America, which provide training for exceptional international advocates and cultural leaders who are on a path to future leadership in a variety of disciplines.

Academically, Ventrella has diverse experience: He has served as a research Fellow and a member of an ad hoc graduate thesis committee for the Department of Philosophy and Constitutional Law at the University of the Free State, South Africa. And, he continues to publish both popular and scholarly pieces and lectures widely.

He is also a distinguished Fellow of Law and Culture for the Center for Cultural Leadership and a Fellow with the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity. In 2014, TruthXchange appointed him Senior Fellow. As an approved speaker for the Federalist Society, he serves as an appointed member of the society’s executive committee – guiding its Religious Liberties Practice Group as well as the Society's Family and Parental Rights Network. Dr. Ventrella is also an elected member of The Philadelphia Society.

His book The Cathedral Builder: Pursuing Cultural Beauty (2007) served for many years (until 2022) as part of the BLF Core Curriculum Project. In addition, he also edited the Fellowship’s Curriculum and conceptualized and served as founding curator for ADF’s speech journal, Clarion. He is the author of numerous published monographs and has contributed to and/or edited about twelve books.

Ventrella received a bachelor’s degree in music education, magna cum laude, from the University of Northern Colorado, where he specialized in trumpet performance. He holds a Doctorate (Ph.D.) in church and state studies from Whitefield Theological Seminary and earned his juris doctorate from the University of California Hastings College of the Law, where he served as Production Editor of the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly.

He has practiced law since 1985 and is a member of the state bar of Idaho serving on its Professionalism & Ethics Section as well as its Diversity Section. He is also admitted to practice before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Married since 1986, he and his wife enjoy their five adult children and numerous grandchildren.

Paul J. Ray

Of Counsel, Covington & Burling LLP

Biography

The Honorable Paul J. Ray is currently Of Counsel at Covington & Burling LLP where he advises clients on regulatory opportunities and challenges and helps them formulate and execute advocacy strategies for their regulatory policy priorities before the executive branch and Congress.

During the first Trump Administration, Paul held various senior positions at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, including as acting, and then Senate-confirmed, head of the office. As OIRA Administrator (the "regulations czar"), Paul supervised the review of hundreds of regulations from across the government, drafted numerous executive orders governing the regulatory process, and led the Administration’s regulatory reform effort. As a result of this experience, Paul is well-positioned to help clients understand and achieve regulatory policy priorities in the context of the government’s regulatory agenda and ongoing reform efforts.

Most recently, Paul was also the Director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation. In that role, he supervised the formulation of the Foundation’s economic and regulatory policy recommendations and provided technical assistance to congressional committees and staff regarding legislative changes to the regulatory process. In addition to his role at The Heritage Foundation, Paul also served as a Senior Advisor at a strategic advisory firm. Before his time in government, Paul practiced law at a law firm in Washington, specializing in administrative law matters.

Prior to his role at the White House, Paul was Counselor to the Secretary at the U.S. Department of Labor. There he led departmental efforts in high-profile rulemakings and helped formulate the Department’s legal positions and strategy.

Paul served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and as a law clerk to the Honorable Debra Livingston of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Paul is a thought leader in the conservative legal movement and is a frequent commentator and speaker on regulatory policy and reform matters, including at law schools, professional gatherings, and other venues. He is the Chairman of Innovations in Peacebuilding International and the Regulatory Process Working Group of the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project and a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States. Paul is also an adjunct lecturer at the Hillsdale College School of Government.

Roger Severino

Vice President of Domestic and Economic Policy, The Heritage Foundation

Biography

Roger Severino is Vice President of Economic and Domestic Policy, and the Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

Severino is a national authority on civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, the administrative state, and information privacy, particularly as applied to health care law and policy. Find his tweets at @RogerSeverino_.

Severino spearheaded the HHS Accountability Project while a Senior Fellow at EPPC from 2021 to 2023. Previously, Severino was Director of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights, where he led a team of over 250 staff enforcing our nation’s civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, and health information privacy laws. He served from 2017 to 2021 and was the longest-serving OCR director of the past three decades.

Prior to joining HHS, Severino served for two years as Director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at Heritage, advocating for life, family, and religious-freedom policies. Before that, he was a trial attorney for seven years at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division where he enforced the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Severino started his legal career at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where he was Legal Counsel and Chief Operations Officer and defended the rights of people of all faiths under federal and international law.

Severino has been profiled in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The Hill and has appeared on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS, among others. In 2020, The New York Times dubbed him and his wife Carrie, “a conservative power couple” to be reckoned with.

Severino holds a JD from Harvard Law School, a master’s degree in public policy, with highest distinction, from Carnegie Mellon University, and a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Southern California. He was appointed by President Trump to the Administrative Conference of the United States and is a member of the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Virginia bars.

As OCR director, Severino founded the federal government’s first division dedicated exclusively to conscience and religious freedom compliance and enforcement. He enforced the Weldon Amendment for the first time against a state (California) after it coerced families and religious organizations into paying for abortion insurance coverage, leading to a $200 million federal funding disallowance. He also enforced laws protecting pro-life pregnancy resource centers from discrimination by states hostile to their message and enforced laws prohibiting forced participation in abortions by medical professionals.

With respect to civil rights, Severino protected older persons and people with disabilities from being denied life-saving care due to discriminatory “quality of life” judgments, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also achieved a landmark sexual harassment resolution with Michigan State University in the wake of the Larry Nassar sexual assault scandal and protected the rights of non-English speakers to have equal access to health and human services.

In the area of health privacy, he secured the largest HIPAA monetary settlement in history and achieved the largest number of enforcement resolutions both in a single year and across four years. He also facilitated the transformational use of Skype, Zoom, and Facetime for delivery of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

His regulatory reform activities resulted in a comprehensive conscience protection regulation and proposed a life-affirming disability rights regulation. He achieved regulatory savings of $3.6 billion in health care industry costs over five years and identified and proposed an additional $3.2 billion in cost savings from the repeal of ineffective and unnecessary regulatory burdens.

Severino is a Spanish speaker who teaches salsa and west coast swing in his spare time.