Partner, Dechert LLP
In a career spanning both private and public practice, Steven A. Engel is a leading litigator and counselor, acting as an advocate in high-profile trial and appellate matters and advising clients on their most sensitive and complex legal issues. Mr. Engel is the Chair of Dechert’s Appellate and Regulatory Litigation Group and has appeared in courts across the country, handling a wide range of civil litigation matters, including administrative law, commercial litigation, constitutional law and securities cases. He regularly counsels clients on challenges to agency regulations and in connection with government, congressional and internal investigations.
Until January 2021, Mr. Engel served as the Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. As the head of the office, Mr. Engel served as the chief counsel to the Attorney General and the principal legal adviser to the Executive Branch, providing legal advice to the President and cabinet secretaries on the most critical constitutional and statutory questions, including matters pertaining to national security, administrative law, criminal law, congressional oversight, and executive orders. In December 2020, Mr. Engel was awarded the Department of Justice’s highest honor, the Edmund J. Randolph Award, for outstanding service to the Department.
Before his appointment as Assistant Attorney General in 2017, Mr. Engel had been a partner at Dechert since 2009 and previously served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. Mr. Engel clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court for Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for Judge Alex Kozinski.
Mr. Engel is a member of the Advisory Committee on Rules for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the Administrative Conference of the United States. He has been an Adjunct Professor at the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University and the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America and was formerly the Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. He has been nationally ranked as a leading lawyer in The Legal 500 USA and Benchmark Litigation. Mr. Engel has frequently commented on legal subjects in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and has appeared on national news programs as a legal analyst, including on MSNBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and the Fox Business Network. Mr. Engel has testified on several occasions before committees of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.
Distinguished Senior Fellow and Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Edward Whelan is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and holds EPPC’s Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies. He is the longest-serving President in EPPC’s history, having held that position from March 2004 through January 2021.
Mr. Whelan directs EPPC’s program on The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture. His areas of expertise include constitutional law and the judicial confirmation process. As a contributor to National Review Online’s Bench Memos blog, he has been a leading commentator on nominations to the Supreme Court and the lower courts and on issues of constitutional law. He has written essays and op-eds for leading newspapers—including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post—opinion journals, and academic symposia and law reviews. The National Law Journal has named Mr. Whelan among its “Champions and Visionaries” in the practice of law in D.C.
Mr. Whelan is co-editor of three volumes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s work: Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived (Crown Forum, 2017), a New York Times bestselling collection of speeches by Justice Scalia; On Faith: Lessons from an American Believer (Crown Forum, 2019), a collection of Justice Scalia’s writings on faith and religion; and The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law (Crown Forum, 2020), a collection of Justice Scalia’s views on legal issues.
Mr. Whelan, a lawyer and a former law clerk to Justice Scalia, has served in positions of responsibility in all three branches of the federal government. From just before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, until joining EPPC in 2004, Mr. Whelan was the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. In that capacity, he advised the White House Counsel’s Office, the Attorney General and other senior DOJ officials, and departments and agencies throughout the executive branch on difficult and sensitive legal questions. Mr. Whelan previously served on Capitol Hill as General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In addition to clerking for Justice Scalia, he was a law clerk to Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
In 1981 Mr. Whelan graduated with honors from Harvard College and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He received his J.D. magna cum laude in 1985 from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Board of Editors of the Harvard Law Review.
For more on Mr. Whelan’s background, see this interview.
Activism Associate, Institute for Justice
Andrew Meleta is an Activism Associate at the Institute for Justice. He joined the Activism team in 2018 and focuses on municipal regulation and policy and its effect on entrepreneurship. He also co-leads IJ’s Cities Work initiative. Before joining IJ, Andrew worked at the Cato Institute as a fundraising research assistant and as a policy research intern for the Manhattan Institute and Cato. He graduated from George Mason University in 2017 with a B.S. in economics and data analysis. In his free time, Andrew spends time traveling, riding trains, and running.
City Policy Associate, Institute for Justice
Alex Montgomery is IJ’s City Policy Associate. In that role, he produces internal reports and external research products to support activism campaigns.
Currently, Alex’s main focus is fighting for reforms at the grassroots to protect people’s right to earn an honest living. He’s especially interested in reducing red tape that inhibits entrepreneurship, learning from regulatory best-practices in cities across the country.
Alex previously worked at IJ as a Maffucci Fellow. Prior to joining the team, he was a summer fellow at the D.C.-based Hertog Foundation. Born and raised in Western North Carolina, he received his B.A. in Political Science and English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Vice President for Litigation & General Counsel, Goldwater Institute
Jon Riches is the Vice President for Litigation for the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation and General Counsel for the Institute. He litigates in federal and state trial and appellate courts in the areas of economic liberty, regulatory reform, free speech, taxpayer protections, public labor issues, government transparency, and school choice, among others.
Jon has developed and authored several pieces of legislation, including the landmark Right to Earn a Living Act, which provides some of the greatest protections in the country to job-seekers and entrepreneurs facing arbitrary licensing regulations. He also developed legislation eliminating deference to administrative agencies in Arizona—a first-of-its-kind regulatory reform that can serve as a model for the rest of the country.
His work at the Institute has been covered by national media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CBS This Morning, Bloomberg News, and Politico. Jon is also a member of the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project: State and Local Working Group.
Prior to joining the Goldwater Institute, Jon served on active duty in the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps. While on active duty, Jon represented hundreds of clients, litigated dozens of court-martial cases, and advised commanders on a vast array of legal issues.
He previously clerked for Sen. Jon Kyl on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, worked for the Rules Committee in the Arizona State Senate, and clerked in the Office of Counsel to the President at the White House. Jon received his B.A. from Boston College, where he graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He earned his J.D. from the University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law.
Jon served as a presidentially appointed Panel Member on the Federal Service Impasses Panel. He is an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve and an Adjunct Professor at Arizona State University School of Law. Jon is a native of Phoenix.
President, Defending Education
Nicole Neily is the president and founder of Defending Education, a national membership organization that gives parents, students, and others the resources and support they need to advocate for their children’s education. She is also the executive director of PDE Action, a 501(c)4 advocacy organization.
Defending Education champions equal protection and combats race and sex-based discrimination in both the court of law and the court of public opinion, and has successfully sued school districts and the US Department of Education in federal court; facilitated tens of thousands of comments submitted to the Federal Register; filed dozens of federal OCR and EEOC complaints, as well as over two thousand public records requests since its launch in 2021. The organization regularly releases deep-dive education investigations, recently covering political spending by teachers’ unions, biased accreditation agencies, and ethnic studies curriculum in both K-12 and universities.
Prior to launching Defending Education, Nicole created Speech First, a campus free speech organization that sued 6 public universities under her leadership; she has also worked as president of the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity; as executive director and senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum; and at the Cato Institute. She is the mother of two school-aged children and serves on the board of a public university.
Environmental Law Attorney, DLA Piper
Garrett Kral is an attorney in DLA Piper’s Washington, DC, office, and a member of the Regulatory and Government Affairs Practice Group. His practice includes regulatory counseling, enforcement defense, and complex civil litigation on matters arising under major federal environmental statutes.
Garrett builds on a strong background in environmental science, a familiarity with technical processes involved in industrial operations, and valuable insights gained by serving in each branch of the federal government. With this experience, he advances the business objectives of Fortune 500 companies while limiting exposure and risk. Garrett is regarded as a strategic advisor to such clients on matters of environmental law and policy.
Founder, CGCN Law, PLLC
Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, University of San Diego School of Law
B.A. 1965, Williams College
LL.B. 1968, Yale University
Professor of Law, University of Colorado Law School
Paul Campos left a position with a Chicago law firm to begin his teaching career at Colorado Law School in 1990. As a scholar, he has focused on constitutional law and legal theory. His graduate studies in English literature, which culminated in a thesis on Shakespeare's King Lear, provided him with rigorous training in literary theory that has been helpful in his current work in constitutional interpretation. He has written several well-regarded law review articles in this area, including "Against Constitutional Theory," published in the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, and "Advocacy in Scholarship," published in the California Law Review. Both of these articles have been noted as major critiques of the political and normative orientation of current constitutional theory. Professor Campos' regular column for the Rocky Mountain News (distributed by the Scripps Howard News Service), written for a general audience on political, social, and legal issues, has developed a considerable following. A packed house, drawn by his provocative take on a wide range of topics, attended his presentation of the 27th Annual Austin W. Scott, Jr. Lecture entitled "The Obesity Myth & The Lewinsky Scandal," which was based on his latest book project. His second book, Jurismania: The Madness of American Law, critiques the American legal system. Professor Campos also served as the first director of CU law school's Byron R. White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law.
Wallace Stevens Professor of Law Emeritus, Oliver Ellsworth Research Professor, University of Connecticut
David McIntosh is a leader for the principles of limited constitutional government and individual freedom. He is president of the Club for Growth, the leading advocate for economic liberty.
Former Congressman David McIntosh represented Indiana's 2nd Congressional District in the United States Congress from 1995-2001. As a Freshman, David chaired the Subcommittee on Regulatory Relief. He passed the Congressional Review Act and held extensive oversight and field hearings to build a record of public support for regulatory relief initiatives in energy, biotechnology, pharmaceutical, healthcare, transportation and technology sectors. Another issue that he championed was the elimination of the marriage penalty in the Federal Tax Code.
David served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to Attorney General Edwin Meese III, and as special assistant to President Reagan for Domestic Affairs. During the first Bush administration, he served as executive director of the President's Council on Competitiveness and assistant to the Vice President. The Competitiveness Council coordinated the cost/benefit review of major regulations and promoted legal reform measures.
David is a co-founder of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy and serves on the Board of Directors. He remains active with several free market and conservative think tanks and grassroots organizations. David has also had stints at the Hudson Institute and as a Professor of Economics at Ball State School of Business.
Prior to the Club for Growth, David was a partner at Mayer Brown, LLP in Washington, DC.
David graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1983, and Yale University, BA, cum laude, in 1980. He and his wife, Ruthie, are the proud parents of Ellie age 17 and Davey age 13.
David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Frederick Schauer is David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, and previously was Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Schauer is the author of The Law of Obscenity (BNA, 1976), Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry (Cambridge, 1982), Playing By the Rules: A Philosophical Examination of Rule-Based Decision-Making in Law and in Life (Oxford, 1991), Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes (Harvard, 2003), Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning (Harvard, 2009), and The Force of Law (Harvard, 2015). The editor of Karl Llewellyn, The Theory of Rules (Chicago, 2011), and a founding editor of Legal Theory, he has chaired the Section on Constitutional Law of the Association of American Law Schools and the Committee on Philosophy and Law of the American Philosophical Association. In 2005 he wrote the Foreword to the Harvard Law Review’s Supreme Court issue, and has written widely on freedom of speech, constitutional interpretation, evidence, legal reasoning, and the philosophy of law.
Associate Professor, UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law
Zvi S. Rosen is an Associate Professor at UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law and the Faculty Director of the Franklin Pierce Society for Intellectual Property. He has served as a Assistant Professor at the Southern Illinois University School of Law, as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, and as a Visiting Scholar and Professorial Lecturer in Law at George Washington University School of Law.
In 2015-2016, he was the Abraham L. Kaminstein Scholar in Residence at the U.S. Copyright Office. Mr. Rosen received his J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law in 2005 and LLM in Intellectual Property in 2006 from the George Washington University Law School. He has practiced at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP as well as smaller firms and his own practice, and clerked for the Hon. Thomas B. Bennett of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Alabama. He has written extensively on the development of modern copyright and trademark law, as well as on bankruptcy law.
Senior Adviser, Crito Capital
Dr. Oonagh McDonald, CBE is currently a senior adviser to Crito Capital, a private placement company based in New York.
A former British Member of Parliament, she became an international expert in financial regulation, after losing her seat in the General Election, 1987. She worked with the Asian Development Bank, advising regulatory authorities in a number of countries, including Sri Lanka and Indonesia. More recently, she has worked with USAID in Ukraine and Moldova. She has served as a non-executive director on the board of both financial services companies and regulatory authorities. In 1998, she was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire), a national honor by the Queen for her work in financial regulation.
She is the author of numerous articles and seven books, of which the most recent are: “Holding bankers to account: A decade of market manipulation, regulatory failures and regulatory reforms” (Manchester University Press, 2019) and “Cryptocurrencies: Money, Trust and Regulation” (Agenda Publishing, 2021).
Executive Director, Coin Center
Jerry Brito is executive director of Coin Center, a non-profit research and advocacy center focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency technologies such as Bitcoin.
Now, steel yourself for some serious signaling and credentialism:
Jerry lives in Annandale, Virginia, with his wife Kathleen, daughter Penny Lane, and their dog Jerkface.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit
Stephanos Bibas is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Judge Bibas was previously a professor of law and criminology at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. As director of the Penn Law Supreme Court Clinic, he argued six cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and filed briefs in dozens of others. He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University in 1989 with a B.A. in political theory and from Oxford University in 1991 with a B.A. in jurisprudence. He then earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1994.
After graduating from Yale Law, Judge Bibas clerked for Judge Patrick Higginbotham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court and was a litigation associate at Covington & Burling LLP in Washington, D.C. Thereafter, Judge Bibas served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he successfully prosecuted the world’s leading expert in Tiffany stained glass for hiring a grave robber to steal priceless Tiffany windows from cemeteries. Before his tenure at Penn Law, Judge Bibas taught at the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Iowa College of Law and was a research fellow at Yale Law School. He has published two books and seventy scholarly articles.
John Paul Stevens Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law
Andrew Koppelman is John Paul Stevens Professor of Law, Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science, and Philosophy Department Affiliated Faculty at Northwestern University. He received the Walder Award for Research Excellence from Northwestern, the Hart-Dworkin award in legal philosophy from the Association of American Law Schools, and the Edward S. Corwin Prize from the American Political Science Association. His scholarship focuses on issues at the intersection of law and political philosophy. He has written more than 100 scholarly articles and eight books, most recently Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed, (St. Martin’s Press). His column appears regularly at The Hill. You can find his recent work at andrewkoppelman.com.
Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA School of Law
Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), as well as the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA School of Law. He recently retired from teaching at UCLA, after 30 years there, and is now focusing on research.
Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (8th ed. 2023), and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed. 2016), as well as over 100 academic law journal articles, mostly on First Amendment law. He is a member of The American Law Institute; the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Free Speech Law; and the creator and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a leading legal blog founded in 2002 (hosted at the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017 and now at Reason Magazine).
Executive Director, International Center for Law & Economics
Ian Adams joined ICLE as Executive Director in April 2020. He is responsible for ICLE’s strategic planning, programmatic implementation, and organizational growth. Ian’s substantive policy work focuses on the disruptive impact of burgeoning technologies on law and regulation, with a particular concentration on automation and the future of work, privacy and insurance.
Earlier in his career, Ian was Vice President of Policy at TechFreedom. Before that, he worked as Associate Vice President of Government Affairs at the R Street Institute and held staff roles in the California and Oregon state legislatures. Ian is also a public policy attorney at the international law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP.
Ian is a graduate of Seattle University, with bachelor’s degrees in history and philosophy, and received his juris doctor from the University of Oregon. He is a member of the California, District of Columbia, and Illinois bars.
March 2022 Virtual DC Lunch with Ed Whelan
Steven A. Engel, Edward Whelan
Join us virtually on Tuesday, March 1 to hear our speakers discuss the Supreme Court nomination....
Explainer Episode 34 – Institute for Justice's "Barriers to Business" Report
Andrew Meleta, Alex Montgomery, Jonathan Riches
Regulatory Transparency Project's Fourth Branch Podcast
"To better understand the challenges small businesses face and to offer recommendations," Institute for Justice's...
Litigation Update: Thomas Jefferson High Litigation
Nicole Neily
Last year, Thomas Jefferson High School (TJ), ranked #1 in the nation for academic excellence,...
Courthouse Steps Oral Argument: West Virginia v. EPA
Garrett Kral, Justin Schwab
On February 28, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear West Virginia v. EPA, one...
Panel III: What is Originalism? [Archive Collection]
Lawrence Alexander, Paul Campos, Richard S. Kay, David M. McIntosh, Frederick Schauer
1995 National Student Symposium
On April 7-9, 1995, the Federalist Society held its fourteenth annual National Student Symposium at...
Courthouse Steps Decision: Unicolors, Inc v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, LP
Zvi Rosen
Join us virtually to hear a discussion on the Supreme Court's recent decision in Unicolors,...
The Constitutionalism of Frederick Douglass| Image of an American [The FedSoc Films Podcast]
In this episode of the FedSoc Films Podcast, we discuss the constitutional interpretation of Frederick...
Deep Dive Episode 210 – Cryptocurrencies: Money, Trust and Regulation
Oonagh Ann McDonald, Jerry Brito
Regulatory Transparency Project's Fourth Branch Podcast
Dr. Oonagh McDonald’s latest book, “Cryptocurrencies: Money, Trust and Regulation,” discusses the nature of money, the...
Freedom of Thought on Campus: Discussion and Debate at Georgetown
Stephanos Bibas, Andrew Koppelman, Eugene Volokh
Is open discussion and debate essential to the function of the university? Many universities, including...
Tech Roundup Episode 14 – Telematics in Cars and the Regulation of Auto Insurance
Ian David Adams
Regulatory Transparency Project's Fourth Branch Podcast
Ian Adams joined the podcast to break down the policy aspects of a recent Twitter...