Legal Director & General Counsel, Criminal Justice Legal Foundation
Kent S. Scheidegger has been the Legal Director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation since December 1986. He also served as Chairman of the Criminal Law Practice Group of the Federalist Society 2003 to 2005. His articles on criminal and constitutional law have been published in law reviews, national legal publications, and congressional reports. Legal arguments authored by Mr. Scheidegger have been cited and incorporated in several precedent-setting United States Supreme Court decisions.
After receiving a degree in physics with honors from New Mexico State University in 1976, Mr. Scheidegger served for six years in the United States Air Force as a Nuclear Research Officer. He took his law degree with distinction from the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in 1982 and practiced civil law in Northern California. He was general counsel of California Cooler, Inc. from 1984 until 1986, when he joined the Foundation.
Professor of Law, University of North Carolina School of Law
Andy Hessick joined the Carolina Law faculty in 2016 and serves Judge John J. Parker Distinguished Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Strategy. His teaching and research interests include federal courts, administrative law, remedies, and criminal sentencing. His work has appeared in, among other places, the California Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the William and Mary Law Review. His work has been cited by the Supreme Courts of Connecticut, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah; various federal district and circuit courts; and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hessick received his J.D. from Yale Law School, at which he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. After law school, he clerked for Judge Reena Raggi on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Judge A. Raymond Randolph on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He then served as a Bristow Fellow in the U.S. Solicitor General’s office and practiced litigation at Kellogg Huber Hansen Todd Evans & Figel PLLC in Washington, D.C. He previously taught at the University of Utah and Arizona State University and was a visiting assistant professor at Boston University.
Professor of Law and Associate Dean, Boston College Law School; Nonresident Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute, Boston College Law School
Professor Lyons is a Professor and Associate Dean at Boston College Law School. He specializes in telecommunications and tech policy, energy, and administrative law. Before joining the faculty, he practiced at the firm of Munger, Tolles and Olson in Los Angeles. He also clerked for the Judge Cynthia Holcomb Hall of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Professor Lyons is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he has written over 250 blog posts on tech policy issues, including net neutrality, telecommunications regulation, First Amendment issues with tech regulation, and generative AI.
Dr. John Eastman is the former Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service and former Dean at Chapman University's Dale E. Fowler School of Law, where he had been a member of the faculty since 1999, specializing in Constitutional Law, Legal History, and Property. He is a founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute that he founded in 1999. He has a Ph.D. in Government from the Claremont Graduate School and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, and a B.A. in Politics and Economics from the University of Dallas. He serves as the Chairman of the Board of the National Organization for Marriage.
Prior to joining the Chapman law faculty, Dr. Eastman served as a law clerk to the Honorable Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States, and to the Honorable J. Michael Luttig, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and practiced law with the national law firm of Kirkland & Ellis. Dr. Eastman has also represented numerous clients in important constitutional law matters and has argued before the Supreme Court. On behalf of the Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, he has participated as amicus curiae before the Supreme Court of the United States, U.S. Courts of Appeals, and State Supreme Courts in more than one hundred cases of constitutional significance, including Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (the school vouchers case), Kelo v. New London, Ct. (eminent domain), and Van Orden v. Perry (the 10 Commandments case). He has also appeared as an expert legal commentator on numerous television and radio programs, including C-SPAN, Fox News, PBS, NewsHour, and The O'Reilly Factor.
Dr. John Eastman is the former Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service and former Dean at Chapman University's Dale E. Fowler School of Law, where he had been a member of the faculty since 1999, specializing in Constitutional Law, Legal History, and Property. He is a founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute that he founded in 1999. He has a Ph.D. in Government from the Claremont Graduate School and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, and a B.A. in Politics and Economics from the University of Dallas. He serves as the Chairman of the Board of the National Organization for Marriage.
Prior to joining the Chapman law faculty, Dr. Eastman served as a law clerk to the Honorable Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States, and to the Honorable J. Michael Luttig, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and practiced law with the national law firm of Kirkland & Ellis. Dr. Eastman has also represented numerous clients in important constitutional law matters and has argued before the Supreme Court. On behalf of the Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, he has participated as amicus curiae before the Supreme Court of the United States, U.S. Courts of Appeals, and State Supreme Courts in more than one hundred cases of constitutional significance, including Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (the school vouchers case), Kelo v. New London, Ct. (eminent domain), and Van Orden v. Perry (the 10 Commandments case). He has also appeared as an expert legal commentator on numerous television and radio programs, including C-SPAN, Fox News, PBS, NewsHour, and The O'Reilly Factor.
Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame Law School
Gerard V. Bradley is Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches Legal Ethics and Constitutional Law. At Notre Dame he directs (with John Finnis) the Natural Law Institute and co-edits The American Journal of Jurisprudence, an international forum for legal philosophy. Bradley has been a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, in Princeton, New Jersey. He served for many years as President of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.
Bradley received his B.A and J.D. degrees from Cornell University, graduating Summa cum laude from the law school in 1980. After serving in the Trial Division of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office he joined the law faculty at the University of Illinois. He moved to Notre Dame in 1992. Bradley has published over one hundred scholarly articles and reviews. His most recent books are an edited collection of essays titled, Challenges to Religious Liberty in the Twenty-First Century (published by Cambridge University Press in 2012), Essays on Law, Religion, and Morality and Unquiet Americans: U.S. Catholics and the Common Good (both to be published in 2014.) He is currently working on a book about regulating obscenity in the Internet Age.
Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
ILYA SOMIN is Professor of Law at George Mason University and the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, democratic theory, federalism, and migration rights. He is the author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom (Oxford University Press, revised and expanded edition, 2022), Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (Stanford University Press, revised and expanded second edition, 2016), and The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain (University of Chicago Press, 2015, rev. paperback ed., 2016), coauthor of A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and co-editor of Eminent Domain: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Democracy and Political Ignorance has been translated into Italian and Japanese.
Somin’s work has appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Critical Review, and others. Somin has also published articles in a variety of popular press outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, CNN, NBC, The Atlantic, USA Today, Boston Globe, US News and World Report, South China Morning Post, National Law Journal and Reason. He has been quoted or interviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, The Economist, the Christian Science Monitor, the Financial Times, The Guardian, the Associated Press, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, BBC, Reuters, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Al Jazeera, and the Voice of America, among other media.
Somin’s writings have been cited in decisions by the United States Supreme Court, multiple state supreme courts and lower federal courts, and the Supreme Court of Israel. He is co-counsel for the plaintiffs in VOS Selections, Inc. v. Trump, a case challenging the constitutionality of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. Somin has testified on the use of drones for targeted killing in the War on Terror before the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights. In 2009, he testified on property rights issues at the United States Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Somin writes regularly for the popular Volokh Conspiracy law and politics blog, now affiliated with Reason magazine (previously affiliated with the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017). From 2006 to 2013, he served as Co-Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review, one of the country’s top-rated law and economics journals.
Somin has served as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has also been a visiting professor or scholar at the Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Hamburg, Germany, the University of Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Uriel Reichman University in Israel, and Zhengzhou University in China. He is a University Affiliate of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and an affiliated faculty member of the George Mason University Institute for Immigration Research. Before joining the faculty at George Mason, Somin was the John M. Olin Fellow in Law at Northwestern University Law School in 2002-2003. In 2001-2002, he clerked for the Hon. Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Professor Somin earned his B.A., Summa Cum Laude, at Amherst College, M.A. in Political Science from Harvard University, and J.D. from Yale Law School.
Partner, Arnold & Porter
John Elwood is the head of Arnold & Porter’s Appellate and Supreme Court practice. He has argued before the Supreme Court nine times, and appeared before most of the federal courts of appeals. He has successfully argued cases across a broad cross-section of subjects, with particular experience in environmental law, the False Claims Act, government contracting, and federal criminal law
Mr. Elwood’s work has earned him recognition as one of Washington’s top Supreme Court lawyers (Washingtonian, 2013), as one of “a small group of lawyers” with an “outsized influence at the U.S. Supreme Court” (Reuters, 2014), and as one of the country’s most innovative lawyers (Financial Times, 2014). Chambers USA reports that “[t]he much-admired John Elwood is praised for his advocacy skills” (2013), and describes Mr. Elwood as “phenomenal” (2014), “incredibly talented” (2012), and “a much-loved and widely respected lawyer who is quick on his feet” (2010).
Before joining the firm, Mr. Elwood served in senior-level positions in the U.S. Department of Justice. Beginning as an Assistant to the Solicitor General, and continuing with the firm, he has briefed more than 20 merits cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, and has briefed approximately 135 cases at the certiorari stage. As the senior Deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel, he advised the White House and federal agencies on a range of constitutional, statutory, and regulatory issues.
Lecturer in Law, University of Chicago Law School
Robert Gasaway is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He was formerly a Partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP in their Washington office. He has represented and advised corporate clients on a wide variety of matters before federal courts, state courts, federal administrative agencies, and federal and state legislative bodies. Mr. Gasaway focuses his practice on appellate litigation, representing clients in the preparation of integrated, multiforum trial and appellate strategies in high-risk sets of related cases.
Judge, United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina
A native of Kingston, Jamaica, Myers was a Chancellors Scholar at the UNC School of Law, where he graduated with high honors in 1998. Upon graduation from law school, he clerked in Washington, D.C., for the Hon. David Sentelle on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and then entered private practice as a litigator for O'Melveny & Myers, LLP, in Los Angeles California. After two years with the White Collar Criminal Law and Environmental and regulatory Compliance Practice Group, he left private practice in January 2002 to become an Assistant United States Attorney in the Central District of California. In September, 2002, he transferred to the Eastern District of North Carolina in Raleigh, where he prosecuted white collar and violent crimes, and headed the district's Violent Crimes Task Force for Wilmington and New Hanover and Pender Counties.
Myers joined the UNC Law School faculty in July 2004, where he taught Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Ethics, and a seminar on White Collar Crime. He was confirmed to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina in 2019.
Associate Professor
Prof. DeBoer joined Faulkner Law School in 2011 as an associate professor of law. He has served as a law clerk to the Honorable Brent E. Dickson of the Indiana Supreme Court and the Honorable Theresa L. Springmann of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Indiana. He practiced at Rothgerber Johnson & Lyons LLP (CO) in the health law, labor and employment, litigation, and religious institutions practice groups, and he taught at the law schools at Liberty University (VA) and Valparaiso University (IN). He is admitted to the practice of law in Indiana and Colorado and in various federal district and appellate courts.
Professor DeBoer graduated with a B.A. summa cum laude from Liberty University and with a M.A.R. summa cum laude from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary. After earning an M.Div. from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (NC), he attended Valparaiso University School of Law where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Valparaiso University Law Review and graduated with a J.D. magna cum laude. Later he graduated from Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis with an LL.M. summa cum laude in health law, policy, and bioethics.
Professor DeBoer’s teaching and research interests include administrative law, contracts, criminal law/procedure, employment law, federal courts, health care law, jurisprudence, law and religion, state constitutional law, and torts. He and his wife, Jennifer, have four children.
Supreme Court to Consider Oklahoma Execution Method - Podcast
Kent Scheidegger
Criminal Law & Procedure Practice Group Podcast
On Wednesday, April 29, 2015, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Glossip v. Gross....
Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Association - Post-Decision SCOTUScast
F. Andrew Hessick
SCOTUScast 5-4-15 featuring Andy Hessick
On March 9, 2015, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Perez v. Mortgage Bankers...
Oneok v. Learjet - Post-Decision SCOTUScast
Daniel Lyons
SCOTUScast 4-29-15 featuring Daniel Lyons
On April 21, 2015, the Supreme Court decided Oneok, Inc. v. Learjet. The question in...
Obergefell v. Hodges - Post-Argument SCOTUScast
John C. Eastman
SCOTUScast 4-28-15 featuring John Eastman
On April 28, 2015, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Obergefell v. Hodges. This...
The Gay Marriage Cases: A Recap of the Supreme Court Oral Argument - Podcast
John C. Eastman
Federalism & Separation of Powers Practice Group Podcast
The long-anticipated gay marriage cases have now been argued in the Supreme Court. The questions...
The Gay Marriage Cases: A Preview of the Supreme Court Oral Argument - Podcast
Gerard V. Bradley, Ilya Somin
Federalism & Separation of Powers Practice Group Podcast
On January 16, 2015, the Supreme Court granted cert in four same-sex marriage cases from...
Horne v. Department of Agriculture - Post-Argument SCOTUScast
John P. Elwood
SCOTUScast 4-24-15 featuring John Elwood
On April 23, 2015, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Horne v. Department of...
Murray Energy: The Limits of EPA Authority - Podcast
Robert R. Gasaway
Environmental Law & Property Rights Practice Group Podcast
In what has become a highly visible challenge to the EPA’s authority under the Clean...
Johnson v. United States - Post-Argument SCOTUScast
Richard E. Myers
SCOTUScast 4-24-15 featuring Richard Myers
On April 20, 2015, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Johnson v. United States....
M&G Polymers USA v. Tackett - Post-Decision SCOTUScast
Michael DeBoer
SCOTUScast 4-23-15 featuring Michael DeBoer
On January 26, 2015, the Supreme Court issued its decision in M&G Polymers USA, LLC...