Justin E. Dillon

Partner, KaiserDillon PLLC

Biography

A former Assistant United States Attorney with dozens of trials under his belt, Justin Dillon now uses his years of litigation and investigative experience to defend clients in Title IX and campus discipline cases and in complex, high-stakes white-collar criminal investigations.

Justin has gained nationwide attention for his work representing students and professors in campus misconduct cases, which he and his firm have handled at more than 100 schools nationwide. Along with his partner Chris Muha, he co-authored Title IX Hearings and Litigation: A Practitioner’s Guide, published by The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and available here to any member of FIRE’s Legal Network.

While most of his cases are successfully resolved on campus, Justin is not afraid to take it all the way to court—he was the first lawyer in the country to win summary judgment against a university in a campus sexual assault case, and he has never lost a lawsuit against a college.

In his white-collar practice, Justin has successfully defended the General Counsel of a public company in a foreign-bribery investigation, helped a government contractor avoid criminal charges after a lengthy federal investigation, and represented numerous individuals and small-business owners.

Justin also frequently represents government employees under investigation for alleged ethical or criminal misconduct, including a former Cabinet secretary, a former Senate-confirmed head of a federal agency, and many other federal employees and federal prosecutors. He has extensive experience with Offices of Inspector General and the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR). He is also the former white-collar crime columnist for the website Above the Law; a collection of his columns is available here.

Earlier in his career, Justin worked for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and later spent five and a half years as a federal prosecutor in Washington, DC, where he led more than 100 Grand Jury investigations, tried more than 60 criminal cases, and handled more than a dozen appeals.

Justin has been recognized by Chambers & Partners in Litigation: White-Collar Crime & Government Investigations in Washington, DC. He has also been recognized by Best Lawyers© in the category Criminal Defense: White-Collar; named by Super Lawyers as one of the Top Rated White Collar Crime Attorneys in Washington, D.C.; and selected by Washingtonian Magazine as one of Washington’s Best Lawyers in Criminal Defense.

Kenneth L. Marcus

Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law

Biography

Hon. Kenneth L. Marcus is an internationally recognized expert in civil and human rights, as well as a leader in the fight against anti-Semitism on and off university campuses. He is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, the leading civil rights legal organization fighting against anti-Semitism. The New York Times has called him “The Man Who Helped Redefine Campus Anti-Semitism.” He been described, in that paper, as “the single most effective and respected force” to combat anti-Semitism.

During his public service career, Marcus served as Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education for Civil Rights; Staff Director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; and General Deputy Assistant U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.

In academia, he serves as Professorial Lecturer in Law at George Washington University. He formerly held the Lillie and Nathan Ackerman Chair in Equality and Justice in America at the City University of New York’s Bernard M. Baruch College, served as Visiting Research Professor of Political Science at Yeshiva University, and was a Board of Visitors member George Mason University and Distinguished Senior Fellow at that university’s law school. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism and previously served as Associate Editor of the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism.

Marcus is also author of The Definition of Anti-Semitism (Oxford University Press) and Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America (Cambridge University Press). He has published widely in academic journals as well as in more popular venues such as The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Newsweek, USA Today, and Politico. He is a graduate of Williams College and the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.

Earlier in his career, he was a litigation partner in two major law firms, where he conducted complex commercial and constitutional litigation. He also serves as Chairman emeritus of the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy Civil Rights Practice Group.

Scott Schneider

Owner, Schneider Education & Employment Law PLLC

Biography

Scott Schneider is the owner and founder of Schneider Education & Employment Law and has advised companies and educational institutions nationwide on a variety of complex legal issues with a focus on particularly sensitive matters like institutional response to sexual misconduct.

Prior to founding Schneider Education & Employment Law, Scott was an equity partner in two major national law firms and served as in-house counsel for Tulane University.

He is a prominent litigator as well as a sought-after advisor on Title IX, labor and employment law issues, and various risk management concerns. He has led numerous investigations of serial sex abuse allegations, allegations of misconduct involving senior leadership and other acts of institutional misconduct. He has also handled various high-profile program reviews of institutional response to sexual misconduct, racial discrimination, athletics department ethics and compliance, and treatment of at-risk employees and students.

Scott has provided training nationally to thousands of personnel on a variety of issues, including Title IX; labor and employment law; faculty hiring, promotion and tenure processes; and Greek Life risk management. Scott also provides expert witness testimony on matters dealing with institutional response to allegations of sexual misconduct.

Scott regularly presents to national organizations, including the National Association of College and University Attorneys (NACUA), the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), the Association for Student Conduct Administration (ASCA) Gehring Academy, the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA), the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International (ACUHO-I), EDUCAUSE and various associations of independent schools.

Additionally, Scott previously served as an award-winning professor at Tulane University, where he taught courses on higher education and labor and employment law and created the Tulane University Law School’s Title IX certification program. Scott has been retained by the National Center for Campus Public Safety to serve as a faculty member for its Trauma-Informed Sexual Assault Investigation and Adjudication training program for campus officials. Scott also serves on the faculty for the State University of New York’s Student Conduct Institute where he provides training on informal resolution and restorative justice.

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.