Supreme Court & Appellate Litigation Chair, Lex Politica; Of Counsel, Alliance Defending Freedom
Erin Morrow Hawley serves as Chair of Lex Politica's Supreme Court and Appellate Practice overseeing the firm’s strategic appellate litigation and critical motions practice in the trial courts. Erin is an experienced litigator who represents clients in constitutional, regulatory, and appellate matters in federal and state courts throughout the country.
Erin has represented dozens of clients before the Supreme Court of the United States, served as lead counsel in high-profile cases raising novel constitutional and statutory issues, and authored numerous successful petitions for certiorari and briefs in opposition. She has argued in state and federal appellate and trial courts throughout the country, including the Supreme Court of the United States. Erin represents diverse clients in high-stakes litigation from state governments to faith-based nonprofits to Fortune 100 companies. She possesses expertise on a wide range of subject matters including administrative law, the First Amendment, religious liberty, federal jurisdiction, federal preemption, equitable jurisdiction, tax law, the Affordable Care Act, and Title IX.
Erin represents clients in cases where public communications strategy is paramount. She is a sought-after speaker and writer, has testified multiple times before Congress, and is a frequent presenter on constitutional and administrative law issues, including at the Oxford Union, the National Federalist Society Convention, and university campuses across the country. She is a frequent commentator to media outlets, including Fox News, MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, WORLD, USA Today, the Federalist, and the Hill.
Erin previously oversaw Alliance Defending Freedom’s--where she still serves as Of Counsel--litigation strategies to empower women and protect the dignity of life, defend pregnancy centers’ First Amendment rights from government overreach, and safeguard Americans’ freedoms from the ever-encroaching administrative state.
United States Senator, Missouri
U.S. SENATOR JOSH HAWLEY TOOK OFFICE IN JANUARY 2019.
Raised in rural Missouri, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley previously served as Missouri’s Attorney General. There he earned a reputation for taking on the big and the powerful to protect Missouri workers and families. He has battled big government and big business, special interests, organized crime, and anyone who would threaten the well-being of Missourians.
A native of small town Lexington, Missouri in rural Lafayette County, Senator Hawley graduated from Rockhurst High School in Kansas City. After graduating from Stanford University in 2002 and Yale Law School in 2006, he moved back home to mid-Missouri with his wife, Erin, where they started a family. They are the proud parents of two young boys, Elijah and Blaise.
Senator Hawley is recognized as one of the nation’s leading constitutional lawyers. He has litigated at the Supreme Court of the United States, the federal courts of appeals, and in state court, fighting for the people’s liberties. He previously fought Obamacare at the Supreme Court — and won — as one of the lead attorneys in the landmark Hobby Lobby case. He was also a lead attorney in the Hosanna-Tabor case at the Supreme Court, protecting the rights of churches.
As Attorney General, he fought the Washington overreach threatening farms and family businesses, including the Waters of the United States Rule and the Clean Power Plan. Senator Hawley has also taken on big opioid manufacturers, challenging their unethical marketing practices that helped create an epidemic of opioid abuse. He cracked down on human trafficking in Missouri, leading the largest anti-trafficking bust in Missouri history. And he stood up to big tech, launching investigations of the most powerful companies in the world—Google and Facebook—to protect Missourians, their data, and the First Amendment.
The youngest Senator in America, Senator Hawley serves on the Senate Committees on the Judiciary; Armed Services; Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs; Small Business and Entrepreneurship; and the Special Committee on Aging.
Professor of Law, Notre Dame Law School
Professor Dan Kelly teaches and writes in the areas of property law, remedies, and wills, trusts, and estates. He is also a co-founder and co-director (with Professor Margaret Brinig) of the Notre Dame Law and Economics Program. A member of the American Law Institute, Kelly serves as an associate reporter for the Restatement (Fourth) of Property. During spring 2016, he was a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.
Kelly’s research focuses on the economic analysis of property law, including the assembly of land for economic development, the sharing and division of property among multiple parties through contracts, leases, and trusts, and the transfer of wealth at death. He has presented two articles at the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum: “Strategic Spillovers,” published in the Columbia Law Review, and “The Right to Include,” published in the Emory Law Journal. His research on the government’s use of eminent domain has appeared in the Cornell Law Review, Harvard Law Review Forum, Supreme Court Economic Review, and Research Handbook on the Economic Analysis of Property Law. And he has written several articles on wills, trusts, and fiduciary law, including “Toward Economic Analysis of the Uniform Probate Code” and “Restricting Testamentary Freedom: Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Justifications.”
Kelly has served as a referee for a number of journals, law reviews, and university presses, including the American Law & Economics Review, European Association of Law & Economics, Harvard Law Review, Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, Journal of Legal Analysis, Review of Law & Economics, Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Chicago Press, Yale Law Journal, and Yale University Press. He is a frequent lecturer on property at the Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) Law Institute. At Notre Dame, he also serves as a faculty advisor for the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) Program, a faculty fellow at the Research Program on Law and Market Behavior, and a member of the Faculty Board on Athletics.
Before joining the NDLS faculty, Kelly was a clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, an attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and a fellow at Yale and Harvard Law School. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Notre Dame.
Associate Dean for Faculty Development; Diane and M.O. Miller II Research Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame Law School
Randy Kozel joined the Law School faculty in 2011. He was named the Distinguished Teacher of the Year by the Class of 2014. He also directs the Notre Dame Program on Constitutional Structure.
Kozel teaches and researches in fields including constitutional law, federal courts, information privacy, and contract law, with a particular focus on the role of precedent in legal decision making. His recent scholarship exploring the connection between precedent and interpretive philosophy has been published or is forthcoming in journals including the Northwestern University Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, the Vanderbilt Law Review, and the Texas Law Review. His book, entitled Settled Versus Right: A Theory of Precedent, makes the case for using precedent to bridge interpretive disagreements.
Kozel received his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where he was the Articles Committee Chair of the Harvard Law Review. He served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and for Judge Alex Kozinski at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. He has also practiced as a litigator with a large law firm and as Special Counsel to the General Counsel at General Electric Company.
Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law
James Lindgren is a law professor at Northwestern University, with a BA from Yale and a JD and a PhD in (quantitative) sociology from the University of Chicago. He is a cofounder of the Section on Scholarship of the Association of American Law Schools and a former chair of its Section on Social Science and the Law. He has published in the Yale Law Journal and the Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, California, Northwestern, Georgetown, and UCLA Law Reviews, among others. His work includes "Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal " (Yale Law Journal, 2002) and "Term Limits for the Supreme Court: Life Tenure Reconsidered " (Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 2006). In Evans v. US (1992), the US Supreme Court adopted Lindgren's view of the overlap of bribery and federal extortion. He blogs at the Washington Post.
Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Constitutional Law Center, Stanford Law School
Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and Faculty Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, he served as a Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was nominated by President George W. Bush, a Republican, and confirmed by a Democratic Senate by unanimous consent. McConnell has previously held chaired professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah, and visiting professorships at Harvard and NYU. He teaches courses on constitutional law, constitutional history, First Amendment, and interpretive theory. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law and theory, especially church and state, equal protection, and separation of powers. His book, “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution,” was published by Princeton University Press in 2020, based on the Tanner Lectures in Human Values, which he delivered at Princeton in 2019. His latest book, co-authored with Nathan Chapman, “Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience,” was published by Oxford University Press in mid-2023. McConnell has argued sixteen cases in the United States Supreme Court, most recently Carney v. Adams (2020). defending a provision of the Delaware Constitution requiring political balance on that state’s courts. More recently, he was co-counsel in Gonzalez v. Google. He earned his B.A. from Michigan State University and his J.D. from the University of Chicago, and has received honorary degrees from Notre Dame University and Michigan State. He served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. and D.C. Circuit Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright. He has been Assistant General Counsel of the Office of Management & Budget, Assistant to the Solicitor General of the Department of Justice, and a member of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board. He is Senior of Counsel to the law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, and is co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Review Board.
Assistant Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School
Minor Myers joined the faculty at Brooklyn Law School after serving as a visiting assistant professor of law at the school from 2007 to 2009, teaching corporate law and property. His research interests include corporate law and local government law, and his most recent scholarship addresses the decisions of corporate special litigation committees.
Previously, Professor Myers was in private practice in the corporate and litigation departments at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Peter W. Hall and then Judge Ralph K. Winter of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
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).
Supreme Court & Appellate Litigation Chair, Lex Politica; Of Counsel, Alliance Defending Freedom
Erin Morrow Hawley serves as Chair of Lex Politica's Supreme Court and Appellate Practice overseeing the firm’s strategic appellate litigation and critical motions practice in the trial courts. Erin is an experienced litigator who represents clients in constitutional, regulatory, and appellate matters in federal and state courts throughout the country.
Erin has represented dozens of clients before the Supreme Court of the United States, served as lead counsel in high-profile cases raising novel constitutional and statutory issues, and authored numerous successful petitions for certiorari and briefs in opposition. She has argued in state and federal appellate and trial courts throughout the country, including the Supreme Court of the United States. Erin represents diverse clients in high-stakes litigation from state governments to faith-based nonprofits to Fortune 100 companies. She possesses expertise on a wide range of subject matters including administrative law, the First Amendment, religious liberty, federal jurisdiction, federal preemption, equitable jurisdiction, tax law, the Affordable Care Act, and Title IX.
Erin represents clients in cases where public communications strategy is paramount. She is a sought-after speaker and writer, has testified multiple times before Congress, and is a frequent presenter on constitutional and administrative law issues, including at the Oxford Union, the National Federalist Society Convention, and university campuses across the country. She is a frequent commentator to media outlets, including Fox News, MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, WORLD, USA Today, the Federalist, and the Hill.
Erin previously oversaw Alliance Defending Freedom’s--where she still serves as Of Counsel--litigation strategies to empower women and protect the dignity of life, defend pregnancy centers’ First Amendment rights from government overreach, and safeguard Americans’ freedoms from the ever-encroaching administrative state.
United States Senator, Missouri
U.S. SENATOR JOSH HAWLEY TOOK OFFICE IN JANUARY 2019.
Raised in rural Missouri, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley previously served as Missouri’s Attorney General. There he earned a reputation for taking on the big and the powerful to protect Missouri workers and families. He has battled big government and big business, special interests, organized crime, and anyone who would threaten the well-being of Missourians.
A native of small town Lexington, Missouri in rural Lafayette County, Senator Hawley graduated from Rockhurst High School in Kansas City. After graduating from Stanford University in 2002 and Yale Law School in 2006, he moved back home to mid-Missouri with his wife, Erin, where they started a family. They are the proud parents of two young boys, Elijah and Blaise.
Senator Hawley is recognized as one of the nation’s leading constitutional lawyers. He has litigated at the Supreme Court of the United States, the federal courts of appeals, and in state court, fighting for the people’s liberties. He previously fought Obamacare at the Supreme Court — and won — as one of the lead attorneys in the landmark Hobby Lobby case. He was also a lead attorney in the Hosanna-Tabor case at the Supreme Court, protecting the rights of churches.
As Attorney General, he fought the Washington overreach threatening farms and family businesses, including the Waters of the United States Rule and the Clean Power Plan. Senator Hawley has also taken on big opioid manufacturers, challenging their unethical marketing practices that helped create an epidemic of opioid abuse. He cracked down on human trafficking in Missouri, leading the largest anti-trafficking bust in Missouri history. And he stood up to big tech, launching investigations of the most powerful companies in the world—Google and Facebook—to protect Missourians, their data, and the First Amendment.
The youngest Senator in America, Senator Hawley serves on the Senate Committees on the Judiciary; Armed Services; Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs; Small Business and Entrepreneurship; and the Special Committee on Aging.
Professor of Law, Notre Dame Law School
Professor Dan Kelly teaches and writes in the areas of property law, remedies, and wills, trusts, and estates. He is also a co-founder and co-director (with Professor Margaret Brinig) of the Notre Dame Law and Economics Program. A member of the American Law Institute, Kelly serves as an associate reporter for the Restatement (Fourth) of Property. During spring 2016, he was a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.
Kelly’s research focuses on the economic analysis of property law, including the assembly of land for economic development, the sharing and division of property among multiple parties through contracts, leases, and trusts, and the transfer of wealth at death. He has presented two articles at the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum: “Strategic Spillovers,” published in the Columbia Law Review, and “The Right to Include,” published in the Emory Law Journal. His research on the government’s use of eminent domain has appeared in the Cornell Law Review, Harvard Law Review Forum, Supreme Court Economic Review, and Research Handbook on the Economic Analysis of Property Law. And he has written several articles on wills, trusts, and fiduciary law, including “Toward Economic Analysis of the Uniform Probate Code” and “Restricting Testamentary Freedom: Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Justifications.”
Kelly has served as a referee for a number of journals, law reviews, and university presses, including the American Law & Economics Review, European Association of Law & Economics, Harvard Law Review, Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, Journal of Legal Analysis, Review of Law & Economics, Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Chicago Press, Yale Law Journal, and Yale University Press. He is a frequent lecturer on property at the Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) Law Institute. At Notre Dame, he also serves as a faculty advisor for the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) Program, a faculty fellow at the Research Program on Law and Market Behavior, and a member of the Faculty Board on Athletics.
Before joining the NDLS faculty, Kelly was a clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, an attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and a fellow at Yale and Harvard Law School. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Notre Dame.
Associate Dean for Faculty Development; Diane and M.O. Miller II Research Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame Law School
Randy Kozel joined the Law School faculty in 2011. He was named the Distinguished Teacher of the Year by the Class of 2014. He also directs the Notre Dame Program on Constitutional Structure.
Kozel teaches and researches in fields including constitutional law, federal courts, information privacy, and contract law, with a particular focus on the role of precedent in legal decision making. His recent scholarship exploring the connection between precedent and interpretive philosophy has been published or is forthcoming in journals including the Northwestern University Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, the Vanderbilt Law Review, and the Texas Law Review. His book, entitled Settled Versus Right: A Theory of Precedent, makes the case for using precedent to bridge interpretive disagreements.
Kozel received his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where he was the Articles Committee Chair of the Harvard Law Review. He served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and for Judge Alex Kozinski at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. He has also practiced as a litigator with a large law firm and as Special Counsel to the General Counsel at General Electric Company.
Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law
James Lindgren is a law professor at Northwestern University, with a BA from Yale and a JD and a PhD in (quantitative) sociology from the University of Chicago. He is a cofounder of the Section on Scholarship of the Association of American Law Schools and a former chair of its Section on Social Science and the Law. He has published in the Yale Law Journal and the Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, California, Northwestern, Georgetown, and UCLA Law Reviews, among others. His work includes "Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal " (Yale Law Journal, 2002) and "Term Limits for the Supreme Court: Life Tenure Reconsidered " (Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 2006). In Evans v. US (1992), the US Supreme Court adopted Lindgren's view of the overlap of bribery and federal extortion. He blogs at the Washington Post.
Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Constitutional Law Center, Stanford Law School
Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and Faculty Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, he served as a Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was nominated by President George W. Bush, a Republican, and confirmed by a Democratic Senate by unanimous consent. McConnell has previously held chaired professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah, and visiting professorships at Harvard and NYU. He teaches courses on constitutional law, constitutional history, First Amendment, and interpretive theory. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law and theory, especially church and state, equal protection, and separation of powers. His book, “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution,” was published by Princeton University Press in 2020, based on the Tanner Lectures in Human Values, which he delivered at Princeton in 2019. His latest book, co-authored with Nathan Chapman, “Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience,” was published by Oxford University Press in mid-2023. McConnell has argued sixteen cases in the United States Supreme Court, most recently Carney v. Adams (2020). defending a provision of the Delaware Constitution requiring political balance on that state’s courts. More recently, he was co-counsel in Gonzalez v. Google. He earned his B.A. from Michigan State University and his J.D. from the University of Chicago, and has received honorary degrees from Notre Dame University and Michigan State. He served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. and D.C. Circuit Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright. He has been Assistant General Counsel of the Office of Management & Budget, Assistant to the Solicitor General of the Department of Justice, and a member of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board. He is Senior of Counsel to the law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, and is co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Review Board.
Assistant Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School
Minor Myers joined the faculty at Brooklyn Law School after serving as a visiting assistant professor of law at the school from 2007 to 2009, teaching corporate law and property. His research interests include corporate law and local government law, and his most recent scholarship addresses the decisions of corporate special litigation committees.
Previously, Professor Myers was in private practice in the corporate and litigation departments at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Peter W. Hall and then Judge Ralph K. Winter of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
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).
Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Randy Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He has argued before the United States Supreme Court, tried murder cases to juries as a prosecutor in Chicago, and appeared as a prosecutor in the feature film Inalienable. He is the author of numerous books, including Restoring the Lost Constitution, The Structure of Liberty, Our Republican Constitution, and The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. He has published two memoirs, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, and Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago. He is currently working on a new book, Freedom and Flourishing: Libertarianism for the Real World.
Professor of Law and Jamie L. Whitten Chair in Law and Government, University of Mississippi School of Law
Christopher Green (https://law.olemiss.edu/faculty-directory/christopher-green/) is Professor of Law and Jamie L. Whitten Chair in Law and Government at the University of Mississippi, where he has taught since 2006. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School, and has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. He clerked for Judge Rhesa H. Barksdale on the Fifth Circuit and is the author of Equal Citizenship, Civil Rights, and the Constitution: The Original Sense of the Privileges or Immunities Clause (2015) and a large number of articles and essays on constitutional theory and the Fourteenth Amendment, including the two-part Original Sense of the (Equal) Protection Clause and Clarity and Reasonable Doubt in Early State-Constitutional Judicial Review. He is an affiliated scholar with the University of San Diego Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism.
United States Senator, Missouri
U.S. SENATOR JOSH HAWLEY TOOK OFFICE IN JANUARY 2019.
Raised in rural Missouri, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley previously served as Missouri’s Attorney General. There he earned a reputation for taking on the big and the powerful to protect Missouri workers and families. He has battled big government and big business, special interests, organized crime, and anyone who would threaten the well-being of Missourians.
A native of small town Lexington, Missouri in rural Lafayette County, Senator Hawley graduated from Rockhurst High School in Kansas City. After graduating from Stanford University in 2002 and Yale Law School in 2006, he moved back home to mid-Missouri with his wife, Erin, where they started a family. They are the proud parents of two young boys, Elijah and Blaise.
Senator Hawley is recognized as one of the nation’s leading constitutional lawyers. He has litigated at the Supreme Court of the United States, the federal courts of appeals, and in state court, fighting for the people’s liberties. He previously fought Obamacare at the Supreme Court — and won — as one of the lead attorneys in the landmark Hobby Lobby case. He was also a lead attorney in the Hosanna-Tabor case at the Supreme Court, protecting the rights of churches.
As Attorney General, he fought the Washington overreach threatening farms and family businesses, including the Waters of the United States Rule and the Clean Power Plan. Senator Hawley has also taken on big opioid manufacturers, challenging their unethical marketing practices that helped create an epidemic of opioid abuse. He cracked down on human trafficking in Missouri, leading the largest anti-trafficking bust in Missouri history. And he stood up to big tech, launching investigations of the most powerful companies in the world—Google and Facebook—to protect Missourians, their data, and the First Amendment.
The youngest Senator in America, Senator Hawley serves on the Senate Committees on the Judiciary; Armed Services; Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs; Small Business and Entrepreneurship; and the Special Committee on Aging.
George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
John O. McGinnis is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He also has an MA degree from Balliol College, Oxford, in philosophy and theology. Professor McGinnis clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. From 1987 to 1991, he was deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. He is the author of Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Government Through Technology (Princeton 2013) and Originalism and the Good Constitution (Harvard 2013) (with M. Rappaport). He is a past winner of the Paul Bator award given by the Federalist Society to an outstanding academic under 40. He has been listed by the United States on the roster of panelists who may be called upon to decide World Trade Organization Disputes.
Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
B.A., Yale; J.D., University of Chicago. Lee Liberman Otis is the Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President at the Federalist Society. She also serves as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference (ACUS), and as the co-chair of the National Constitution Center's Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board. She previously was a special assistant and an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, General Counsel of the Department of Energy, an associate in the appellate section of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, an associate counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and a law clerk to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. She also served as an assistant professor of law at George Mason, where she taught legislation, federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, civil procedure, and appellate advocacy. Ms. Otis has been an important member of the Federalist Society team since the organization’s beginnings. Together with David McIntosh, she led the effort to start what became the Chicago chapter of the Society. She also helped organize the Society’s first conference at Yale, its second conference at Chicago, and its first Lawyers Division chapter in Washington DC, as well as the effort to incorporate the Society, recruit its permanent staff, and obtain its early funding. She was a Founding Director of the Federalist Society.
Executive Director, Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, The Ohio State University
Professor Lee J. Strang serves as the inaugural executive director of the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at The Ohio State University.
Initiated in 2023 by the state of Ohio, the Chase Center will be an academic home at Ohio State for teaching, research, and programing on the foundations of the American constitutional order and its impact on society. As executive director, Professor Strang is responsible for organizing the center, overseeing the hiring and appointment of the center’s faculty, developing curriculum, and delivering student and academic programming. He also holds a faculty appointment in the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State.
Professor Strang is a nationally recognized legal scholar who has published dozens of articles in leading journals in the fields of constitutional law and interpretation, property law, and religion and the First Amendment. He co-edits the textbook Federal Constitutional Law, and his most recent book, Originalism’s Promise: A Natural Law Account of the American Constitution is the first book-length, natural law justification for originalism. He currently is writing on civic thought and leadership, and he is finalizing a book on the history of American Catholic legal education (with John M. Breen).
Before joining Ohio State, Professor Strang served as the inaugural director of the University of Toledo’s Institute of American Constitutional Thought & Leadership. He joined the Toledo College of Law faculty in 2008, was granted tenure in 2010, and was named John W. Stoepler Professor of Law & Values in 2015. The University of Toledo awarded Professor Strang its Outstanding Faculty Research and Scholarship Award in 2017. Before that, he was a visiting professor at Michigan State University College of Law. A graduate of the University of Iowa, where he was articles editor of the Iowa Law Review and Order of the Coif, Professor Strang holds an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School.
Professor Strang has been a visiting scholar at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution and a visiting fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. In 2016, he was appointed to the Ohio Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and reappointed as chair in 2023.
Prior to teaching, Professor Strang served as a judicial clerk for Judge Alice M. Batchelder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He was also an associate for Jenner & Block LLP in Chicago, where he practiced in general and appellate litigation.
Professor Strang is a frequent presenter at scholarly conferences. He is the president of the Board of Trustees of Northwest Ohio Classical Academy, Ohio’s first classical charter school. He is also a regular participant in debates at law schools across the country, a contributor to the media, and a speaker to political, civic, and religious groups.
Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Randy Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He has argued before the United States Supreme Court, tried murder cases to juries as a prosecutor in Chicago, and appeared as a prosecutor in the feature film Inalienable. He is the author of numerous books, including Restoring the Lost Constitution, The Structure of Liberty, Our Republican Constitution, and The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. He has published two memoirs, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, and Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago. He is currently working on a new book, Freedom and Flourishing: Libertarianism for the Real World.
Professor of Law and Jamie L. Whitten Chair in Law and Government, University of Mississippi School of Law
Christopher Green (https://law.olemiss.edu/faculty-directory/christopher-green/) is Professor of Law and Jamie L. Whitten Chair in Law and Government at the University of Mississippi, where he has taught since 2006. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School, and has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. He clerked for Judge Rhesa H. Barksdale on the Fifth Circuit and is the author of Equal Citizenship, Civil Rights, and the Constitution: The Original Sense of the Privileges or Immunities Clause (2015) and a large number of articles and essays on constitutional theory and the Fourteenth Amendment, including the two-part Original Sense of the (Equal) Protection Clause and Clarity and Reasonable Doubt in Early State-Constitutional Judicial Review. He is an affiliated scholar with the University of San Diego Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism.
United States Senator, Missouri
U.S. SENATOR JOSH HAWLEY TOOK OFFICE IN JANUARY 2019.
Raised in rural Missouri, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley previously served as Missouri’s Attorney General. There he earned a reputation for taking on the big and the powerful to protect Missouri workers and families. He has battled big government and big business, special interests, organized crime, and anyone who would threaten the well-being of Missourians.
A native of small town Lexington, Missouri in rural Lafayette County, Senator Hawley graduated from Rockhurst High School in Kansas City. After graduating from Stanford University in 2002 and Yale Law School in 2006, he moved back home to mid-Missouri with his wife, Erin, where they started a family. They are the proud parents of two young boys, Elijah and Blaise.
Senator Hawley is recognized as one of the nation’s leading constitutional lawyers. He has litigated at the Supreme Court of the United States, the federal courts of appeals, and in state court, fighting for the people’s liberties. He previously fought Obamacare at the Supreme Court — and won — as one of the lead attorneys in the landmark Hobby Lobby case. He was also a lead attorney in the Hosanna-Tabor case at the Supreme Court, protecting the rights of churches.
As Attorney General, he fought the Washington overreach threatening farms and family businesses, including the Waters of the United States Rule and the Clean Power Plan. Senator Hawley has also taken on big opioid manufacturers, challenging their unethical marketing practices that helped create an epidemic of opioid abuse. He cracked down on human trafficking in Missouri, leading the largest anti-trafficking bust in Missouri history. And he stood up to big tech, launching investigations of the most powerful companies in the world—Google and Facebook—to protect Missourians, their data, and the First Amendment.
The youngest Senator in America, Senator Hawley serves on the Senate Committees on the Judiciary; Armed Services; Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs; Small Business and Entrepreneurship; and the Special Committee on Aging.
George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
John O. McGinnis is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He also has an MA degree from Balliol College, Oxford, in philosophy and theology. Professor McGinnis clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. From 1987 to 1991, he was deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. He is the author of Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Government Through Technology (Princeton 2013) and Originalism and the Good Constitution (Harvard 2013) (with M. Rappaport). He is a past winner of the Paul Bator award given by the Federalist Society to an outstanding academic under 40. He has been listed by the United States on the roster of panelists who may be called upon to decide World Trade Organization Disputes.
Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
B.A., Yale; J.D., University of Chicago. Lee Liberman Otis is the Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President at the Federalist Society. She also serves as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference (ACUS), and as the co-chair of the National Constitution Center's Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board. She previously was a special assistant and an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, General Counsel of the Department of Energy, an associate in the appellate section of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, an associate counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and a law clerk to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. She also served as an assistant professor of law at George Mason, where she taught legislation, federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, civil procedure, and appellate advocacy. Ms. Otis has been an important member of the Federalist Society team since the organization’s beginnings. Together with David McIntosh, she led the effort to start what became the Chicago chapter of the Society. She also helped organize the Society’s first conference at Yale, its second conference at Chicago, and its first Lawyers Division chapter in Washington DC, as well as the effort to incorporate the Society, recruit its permanent staff, and obtain its early funding. She was a Founding Director of the Federalist Society.
Executive Director, Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, The Ohio State University
Professor Lee J. Strang serves as the inaugural executive director of the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at The Ohio State University.
Initiated in 2023 by the state of Ohio, the Chase Center will be an academic home at Ohio State for teaching, research, and programing on the foundations of the American constitutional order and its impact on society. As executive director, Professor Strang is responsible for organizing the center, overseeing the hiring and appointment of the center’s faculty, developing curriculum, and delivering student and academic programming. He also holds a faculty appointment in the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State.
Professor Strang is a nationally recognized legal scholar who has published dozens of articles in leading journals in the fields of constitutional law and interpretation, property law, and religion and the First Amendment. He co-edits the textbook Federal Constitutional Law, and his most recent book, Originalism’s Promise: A Natural Law Account of the American Constitution is the first book-length, natural law justification for originalism. He currently is writing on civic thought and leadership, and he is finalizing a book on the history of American Catholic legal education (with John M. Breen).
Before joining Ohio State, Professor Strang served as the inaugural director of the University of Toledo’s Institute of American Constitutional Thought & Leadership. He joined the Toledo College of Law faculty in 2008, was granted tenure in 2010, and was named John W. Stoepler Professor of Law & Values in 2015. The University of Toledo awarded Professor Strang its Outstanding Faculty Research and Scholarship Award in 2017. Before that, he was a visiting professor at Michigan State University College of Law. A graduate of the University of Iowa, where he was articles editor of the Iowa Law Review and Order of the Coif, Professor Strang holds an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School.
Professor Strang has been a visiting scholar at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution and a visiting fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. In 2016, he was appointed to the Ohio Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and reappointed as chair in 2023.
Prior to teaching, Professor Strang served as a judicial clerk for Judge Alice M. Batchelder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He was also an associate for Jenner & Block LLP in Chicago, where he practiced in general and appellate litigation.
Professor Strang is a frequent presenter at scholarly conferences. He is the president of the Board of Trustees of Northwest Ohio Classical Academy, Ohio’s first classical charter school. He is also a regular participant in debates at law schools across the country, a contributor to the media, and a speaker to political, civic, and religious groups.
Partner, Covington & Burling LLP
Thomas Barnett is a partner in the Washington, DC office and co-chair of the firm's Antitrust & Consumer Law Practice Group. He specializes in global antitrust and competition law practice and works closely with the firm’s white collar practice on criminal antitrust enforcement and investigative matters.
Mr. Barnett recently served as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. He headed the Antitrust Division from 2005 to 2008, having previously served in the Division as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Enforcement from 2004 to 2005. During his tenure, Mr. Barnett was involved in some of the largest and most complicated criminal matters in the Division’s history, including investigations and prosecutions that involved coordination with multiple competition authorities in other jurisdictions. In the merger area, Mr. Barnett oversaw the review of all mergers investigated by the Division and supervised more than 30 cases filed in federal district court. He also oversaw an active competition advocacy program that included numerousamicusbriefs filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on antitrust issues and comments to a wide range of federal and state agencies. He argued before the U.S. Supreme Court asamicuson behalf of the United States inBell Atlantic Corp. v. Twomblyand testified several times before Congressional committees.
While at the Antitrust Division, Mr. Barnett worked with international antitrust authorities throughout the world and served in leadership positions in key international competition organizations, such as chairing the Working Party on International Cooperation and Enforcement of the OECD Competition Committee and serving on the Steering Committee of the International Competition Network.
Mr. Barnett received the Edmund Randolph Award, the U.S. Department of Justice’s highest honor, for his service in the Division.
Prior to 2004, Mr. Barnett was a leader in the firm’s Antitrust & Consumer Law Practice Group. He counseled Fortune 500 companies on all aspects of antitrust law and was involved in mergers and acquisitions, government antitrust investigations, and antitrust litigation involving a wide range of industries. He served as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, teaching a course on antitrust and intellectual property issues in sports in 2001 and 2003, and as a co-teacher of an advanced antitrust seminar at the University of Virginia Law School multiple times between 1991 and 2004.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Judge Carlos Bea serves as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He received his Bachelor's Degree from Stanford University in 1956 and his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1958. Judge Bea was born in San Sebastian, Spain, and immigrated with his family to Cuba in 1939. In 1952, he represented Cuba on the Cuban National basketball team in the Helsinki Olympics. Judge Bea became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1958. He engaged in private practice in San Francisco, principally in the area of civil trials (jury and non-jury), from 1959-75 at Dunne, Phelps & Mills and from 1975-90 at Carlos Bea, A Law Corporation. He taught courses in civil litigation advocacy at Hastings College of Law and Stanford Law School. From 1990 to 2003, Judge Bea served as a judge of the San Francisco Superior Court. He was nominated by President George W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and was confirmed in 2003.
Judge Bea and his wife Louise reside in San Francisco, where they raised their four sons, Sebastian, Alexander, Nicholas, and Dominic.
President, Cass & Associates, PC
Ronald A. Cass is Dean Emeritus of Boston University School of Law (where he was Dean from 1990-2004), President of Cass & Associates, PC, former Vice-Chairman and Commissioner of the U.S. International Trade Commission, former faculty member at Boston University School of Law and the University of Virginia Law School, and Distinguished Senior Fellow at the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. Dean Cass also sits as an arbitrator for commercial, international, and intellectual property rights disputes, and is a former United States member of the Panel of Conciliators of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. He is a member of the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States and has received seven presidential appointments, spanning Presidents Ronald Reagan to Donald J. Trump.
As a law professor, lecturer, and scholar, Dean Cass has been teaching and writing about a wide array of legal issues on topics such as administrative law and regulation, antitrust, constitutional law, communications, intellectual property, international trade, separation of powers, and legal process. He has published more than 160 scholarly books, chapters, articles, and papers, including a leading casebook on administrative law. Dean Cass has taught judges as well as students in schools of law, economics, business, and public policy and has held academic appointments in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
In addition to his academic work, Dean Cass has participated in numerous important legal cases as an amicus, consultant, or expert, and has advised businesses, law firms, investment funds, and government agencies on a range of trade, antitrust, intellectual property, and regulatory issues. He has a broad range of affiliations with professional groups, and has received numerous honors, fellowships and awards.
Dean Cass is a graduate of the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago Law School.
Principal, DeGroot Legal
Mr. DeGroot represents businesses in complex litigation, focusing on licensing, insurance, intellectual property, contract disputes, and toxic torts. He has experience in cases involving fraud, breach of contract, unfair competition, patents, business torts, mergers and acquisitions, creditors’ rights, and bankruptcy. He has extensive experience in all aspects of civil litigation, both in federal and state courts, including prejudgment remedies, discovery, trial, appeals, arbitration and mediation.
Mr. DeGroot works with clients in a variety of industries, including financial institutions, insurance, software, construction, semiconductors, and real estate.
Partner, Covington & Burling LLP
Thomas Barnett is a partner in the Washington, DC office and co-chair of the firm's Antitrust & Consumer Law Practice Group. He specializes in global antitrust and competition law practice and works closely with the firm’s white collar practice on criminal antitrust enforcement and investigative matters.
Mr. Barnett recently served as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. He headed the Antitrust Division from 2005 to 2008, having previously served in the Division as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Enforcement from 2004 to 2005. During his tenure, Mr. Barnett was involved in some of the largest and most complicated criminal matters in the Division’s history, including investigations and prosecutions that involved coordination with multiple competition authorities in other jurisdictions. In the merger area, Mr. Barnett oversaw the review of all mergers investigated by the Division and supervised more than 30 cases filed in federal district court. He also oversaw an active competition advocacy program that included numerousamicusbriefs filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on antitrust issues and comments to a wide range of federal and state agencies. He argued before the U.S. Supreme Court asamicuson behalf of the United States inBell Atlantic Corp. v. Twomblyand testified several times before Congressional committees.
While at the Antitrust Division, Mr. Barnett worked with international antitrust authorities throughout the world and served in leadership positions in key international competition organizations, such as chairing the Working Party on International Cooperation and Enforcement of the OECD Competition Committee and serving on the Steering Committee of the International Competition Network.
Mr. Barnett received the Edmund Randolph Award, the U.S. Department of Justice’s highest honor, for his service in the Division.
Prior to 2004, Mr. Barnett was a leader in the firm’s Antitrust & Consumer Law Practice Group. He counseled Fortune 500 companies on all aspects of antitrust law and was involved in mergers and acquisitions, government antitrust investigations, and antitrust litigation involving a wide range of industries. He served as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, teaching a course on antitrust and intellectual property issues in sports in 2001 and 2003, and as a co-teacher of an advanced antitrust seminar at the University of Virginia Law School multiple times between 1991 and 2004.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Judge Carlos Bea serves as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He received his Bachelor's Degree from Stanford University in 1956 and his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1958. Judge Bea was born in San Sebastian, Spain, and immigrated with his family to Cuba in 1939. In 1952, he represented Cuba on the Cuban National basketball team in the Helsinki Olympics. Judge Bea became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1958. He engaged in private practice in San Francisco, principally in the area of civil trials (jury and non-jury), from 1959-75 at Dunne, Phelps & Mills and from 1975-90 at Carlos Bea, A Law Corporation. He taught courses in civil litigation advocacy at Hastings College of Law and Stanford Law School. From 1990 to 2003, Judge Bea served as a judge of the San Francisco Superior Court. He was nominated by President George W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and was confirmed in 2003.
Judge Bea and his wife Louise reside in San Francisco, where they raised their four sons, Sebastian, Alexander, Nicholas, and Dominic.
President, Cass & Associates, PC
Ronald A. Cass is Dean Emeritus of Boston University School of Law (where he was Dean from 1990-2004), President of Cass & Associates, PC, former Vice-Chairman and Commissioner of the U.S. International Trade Commission, former faculty member at Boston University School of Law and the University of Virginia Law School, and Distinguished Senior Fellow at the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. Dean Cass also sits as an arbitrator for commercial, international, and intellectual property rights disputes, and is a former United States member of the Panel of Conciliators of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. He is a member of the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States and has received seven presidential appointments, spanning Presidents Ronald Reagan to Donald J. Trump.
As a law professor, lecturer, and scholar, Dean Cass has been teaching and writing about a wide array of legal issues on topics such as administrative law and regulation, antitrust, constitutional law, communications, intellectual property, international trade, separation of powers, and legal process. He has published more than 160 scholarly books, chapters, articles, and papers, including a leading casebook on administrative law. Dean Cass has taught judges as well as students in schools of law, economics, business, and public policy and has held academic appointments in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
In addition to his academic work, Dean Cass has participated in numerous important legal cases as an amicus, consultant, or expert, and has advised businesses, law firms, investment funds, and government agencies on a range of trade, antitrust, intellectual property, and regulatory issues. He has a broad range of affiliations with professional groups, and has received numerous honors, fellowships and awards.
Dean Cass is a graduate of the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago Law School.
Principal, DeGroot Legal
Mr. DeGroot represents businesses in complex litigation, focusing on licensing, insurance, intellectual property, contract disputes, and toxic torts. He has experience in cases involving fraud, breach of contract, unfair competition, patents, business torts, mergers and acquisitions, creditors’ rights, and bankruptcy. He has extensive experience in all aspects of civil litigation, both in federal and state courts, including prejudgment remedies, discovery, trial, appeals, arbitration and mediation.
Mr. DeGroot works with clients in a variety of industries, including financial institutions, insurance, software, construction, semiconductors, and real estate.
Vice President and Director of Litigation, EdChoice
Thomas M. Fisher served as a Deputy Attorney General for 22 years and as Indiana’s first Solicitor General from 2005-2023. In that role he handled high profile litigation for the State, defended state statutes against constitutional attack, advised the Attorney General on a range of legal policy issues, and managed the State’s U.S. Supreme Court docket. A two-time recipient of the National Association of Attorneys General Best Brief Award, Fisher has argued five times before the High Court.
His U.S. Supreme Court experience also includes authorship of dozens of cert-stage and merits-stage amicus curiae briefs on a wide range of issues. In addition, Fisher has argued dozens of important and high-profile cases before both the Indiana Supreme Court and the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Fisher is a Fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers and was recently named a Sagamore of the Wabash by Governor Eric Holcomb.
A native Hoosier, Fisher is a graduate of Wabash College and Indiana University Maurer School of Law, where he serves as an Adjunct Professor of Law.
United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit
David Frank Hamilton is a United States federal judge, currently serving on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He previously was the Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit
Judge Sykes was nominated to the Seventh Circuit by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate in 2004. Prior to her appointment to the federal bench, Judge Sykes served as a justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Governor Tommy G. Thompson appointed her in September 1999 to fill a mid-term vacancy on the state supreme court, and she was elected to a full ten-year term in April 2000. From 1992-1999, Judge Sykes served on the state trial bench in Milwaukee County (elected in 1992 and re-elected in 1998). From 1985-1992, Judge Sykes practiced law with the Milwaukee firm of Whyte & Hirschboeck, S.C., and from 1984-1985, was a law clerk to Federal Judge Terence T. Evans.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee area, Judge Sykes earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 1980 and a law degree from Marquette University Law School in 1984. Between college and law school, Judge Sykes worked as a reporter for The Milwaukee Journal.
Judge Sykes has two sons.
Vice President and Director of Litigation, EdChoice
Thomas M. Fisher served as a Deputy Attorney General for 22 years and as Indiana’s first Solicitor General from 2005-2023. In that role he handled high profile litigation for the State, defended state statutes against constitutional attack, advised the Attorney General on a range of legal policy issues, and managed the State’s U.S. Supreme Court docket. A two-time recipient of the National Association of Attorneys General Best Brief Award, Fisher has argued five times before the High Court.
His U.S. Supreme Court experience also includes authorship of dozens of cert-stage and merits-stage amicus curiae briefs on a wide range of issues. In addition, Fisher has argued dozens of important and high-profile cases before both the Indiana Supreme Court and the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Fisher is a Fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers and was recently named a Sagamore of the Wabash by Governor Eric Holcomb.
A native Hoosier, Fisher is a graduate of Wabash College and Indiana University Maurer School of Law, where he serves as an Adjunct Professor of Law.
United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit
David Frank Hamilton is a United States federal judge, currently serving on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He previously was the Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit
Judge Sykes was nominated to the Seventh Circuit by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate in 2004. Prior to her appointment to the federal bench, Judge Sykes served as a justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Governor Tommy G. Thompson appointed her in September 1999 to fill a mid-term vacancy on the state supreme court, and she was elected to a full ten-year term in April 2000. From 1992-1999, Judge Sykes served on the state trial bench in Milwaukee County (elected in 1992 and re-elected in 1998). From 1985-1992, Judge Sykes practiced law with the Milwaukee firm of Whyte & Hirschboeck, S.C., and from 1984-1985, was a law clerk to Federal Judge Terence T. Evans.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee area, Judge Sykes earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 1980 and a law degree from Marquette University Law School in 1984. Between college and law school, Judge Sykes worked as a reporter for The Milwaukee Journal.
Judge Sykes has two sons.
Deputy Secretary of Transportation, US Department of Transportation
Steven G. Bradbury was sworn in as the Deputy Secretary of Transportation on March 13, 2025, following his confirmation by the U.S. Senate on March 11, 2025. In this role, he oversees the Department’s operating administrations and spearheads initiatives to ensure a safe, efficient, and modern transportation system that strengthens economic productivity and global competitiveness. Deputy Secretary Bradbury also assists Secretary Duffy in managing the Department’s activities, including its workforce of over 58,000 employees and an annual budget exceeding $109 billion.
Bradbury previously served as the 23rd General Counsel of the Department of Transportation from 2017 to 2021, as the Acting Deputy Secretary from 2019, and as Acting Secretary of Transportation in 2021. As General Counsel, he was the chief legal officer, advising on all legal matters and ensuring the integrity and compliance of the Department’s policies and programs.
Before rejoining DOT, Bradbury was a Distinguished Fellow at The Heritage Foundation from December 2022 to March 2025. He has extensive experience in the public and private sector, having served as Principal Deputy and Acting Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice and as a partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP and Dechert LLP. Earlier in his career, he clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and Judge James L. Buckley.
Bradbury holds a J.D., magna cum laude, from the University of Michigan Law School and a B.A. in English from Stanford University.
Director and Founder, Shurat HaDin
Since 1997, Israeli activist attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner has been leading the struggle to fight the Palestinian and Islamic terrorist organizations in the courtroom. As the director of the Israel based civil rights group, Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center, she is currently representing hundreds of terror victims in lawsuits and legal actions against the HAMAS, Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian Authority, the PLO, Hizbollah, Iran, Syria, Egypt, North Korea, UBS, The Arab Bank, Bank of China, and LCB. The cases, being litigated in the Israeli, American, Canadian and European courts, allow the victims of terrorism to fight back.
A mother of six, including triplets, Darshan-Leitner is a graduate of the Bar-Ilan University Law Faculty and holds an MBA from Manchester University. She regularly appears in the media including Israeli talk show programs, Voice of Israel radio, CNN, the BBC, European television, the Jerusalem Report and many American, Canadian and European publications.
Executive Vice President, The Federalist Society
Dean Reuter is Executive Vice President at the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. He has served in two federal government agency Offices of the Inspector General, as Counsel to the Inspector General and Deputy Inspector General, responsible for policing the use of federal funds granted and contracted through those agencies. As such, he helped conduct and oversee criminal investigations across the country. He is the principal author of the non-fiction book, The Hidden Nazi: The Untold Story of America's Deal with the Devil, and editor of Liberty’s Nemesis: The Unchecked Expansion of the State and Confronting Terror: 9/11 and the Future of American National Security. He was appointed by the President and served as Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and recently served as an appointee on the U.S. Commission on Presidential Scholars. He is a graduate of Hood College (BA with Honors) and the University of Maryland School of Law.
Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Federal Courts, Georgetown Law
Stephen I. Vladeck is a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and is a nationally recognized expert on the federal courts; the Supreme Court; national security law; and military justice.
Vladeck is author of the New York Times bestselling book, “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic,” which won the 2023 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the 2024 ABA Silver Gavel Award for Media and the Arts. Vladeck is also a highly regarded appellate advocate, having argued three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and over a dozen before various lower federal civilian and military courts. He has received numerous awards for his influential and widely cited legal scholarship, his prolific popular writing, his teaching, and his service to the legal profession—including the 2024 University of Texas President’s Research Impact Award and his selection by the Order of the Coif to serve as its Distinguished Visiting Professor for 2025.
Vladeck is CNN’s Supreme Court analyst and editor and author of “One First,” a popular weekly newsletter about the Supreme Court. Together with Bobby Chesney, Vladeck co-hosts the popular and award-winning “National Security Law Podcast.” He is also a co-author of Aspen Publishers’ leading national security law and counterterrorism law casebooks. And he is a member of the Board of Trustees of EarthJustice—the nation’s premier nonprofit public interest environmental law organization.
Vladeck graduated from Yale Law School in 2004—where he was executive editor of the Yale Law Journal and won the Harlan Fiske Stone Prize for outstanding moot court oralist and shared the Potter Stewart Prize for best moot court team performance. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the Honorable Rosemary Barkett on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He earned a B.A. summa cum laude with Highest Distinction in History and Mathematics from Amherst College in 2001—where he wrote his senior thesis on “Leipzig’s Shadow: The War Crimes Trials of the First World War and Their Implications from Nuremberg to the Present.” A native New Yorker and hopeless Mets fan, Vladeck lives in the District with his wife, Karen (Founder and Managing Partner of Risepoint Search Partners); their daughters, Madeleine and Sydney; and their eleven-year-old pug, Roxanna.
Deputy Secretary of Transportation, US Department of Transportation
Steven G. Bradbury was sworn in as the Deputy Secretary of Transportation on March 13, 2025, following his confirmation by the U.S. Senate on March 11, 2025. In this role, he oversees the Department’s operating administrations and spearheads initiatives to ensure a safe, efficient, and modern transportation system that strengthens economic productivity and global competitiveness. Deputy Secretary Bradbury also assists Secretary Duffy in managing the Department’s activities, including its workforce of over 58,000 employees and an annual budget exceeding $109 billion.
Bradbury previously served as the 23rd General Counsel of the Department of Transportation from 2017 to 2021, as the Acting Deputy Secretary from 2019, and as Acting Secretary of Transportation in 2021. As General Counsel, he was the chief legal officer, advising on all legal matters and ensuring the integrity and compliance of the Department’s policies and programs.
Before rejoining DOT, Bradbury was a Distinguished Fellow at The Heritage Foundation from December 2022 to March 2025. He has extensive experience in the public and private sector, having served as Principal Deputy and Acting Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice and as a partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP and Dechert LLP. Earlier in his career, he clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and Judge James L. Buckley.
Bradbury holds a J.D., magna cum laude, from the University of Michigan Law School and a B.A. in English from Stanford University.
Director and Founder, Shurat HaDin
Since 1997, Israeli activist attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner has been leading the struggle to fight the Palestinian and Islamic terrorist organizations in the courtroom. As the director of the Israel based civil rights group, Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center, she is currently representing hundreds of terror victims in lawsuits and legal actions against the HAMAS, Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian Authority, the PLO, Hizbollah, Iran, Syria, Egypt, North Korea, UBS, The Arab Bank, Bank of China, and LCB. The cases, being litigated in the Israeli, American, Canadian and European courts, allow the victims of terrorism to fight back.
A mother of six, including triplets, Darshan-Leitner is a graduate of the Bar-Ilan University Law Faculty and holds an MBA from Manchester University. She regularly appears in the media including Israeli talk show programs, Voice of Israel radio, CNN, the BBC, European television, the Jerusalem Report and many American, Canadian and European publications.
Executive Vice President, The Federalist Society
Dean Reuter is Executive Vice President at the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. He has served in two federal government agency Offices of the Inspector General, as Counsel to the Inspector General and Deputy Inspector General, responsible for policing the use of federal funds granted and contracted through those agencies. As such, he helped conduct and oversee criminal investigations across the country. He is the principal author of the non-fiction book, The Hidden Nazi: The Untold Story of America's Deal with the Devil, and editor of Liberty’s Nemesis: The Unchecked Expansion of the State and Confronting Terror: 9/11 and the Future of American National Security. He was appointed by the President and served as Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and recently served as an appointee on the U.S. Commission on Presidential Scholars. He is a graduate of Hood College (BA with Honors) and the University of Maryland School of Law.
Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Federal Courts, Georgetown Law
Stephen I. Vladeck is a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and is a nationally recognized expert on the federal courts; the Supreme Court; national security law; and military justice.
Vladeck is author of the New York Times bestselling book, “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic,” which won the 2023 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the 2024 ABA Silver Gavel Award for Media and the Arts. Vladeck is also a highly regarded appellate advocate, having argued three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and over a dozen before various lower federal civilian and military courts. He has received numerous awards for his influential and widely cited legal scholarship, his prolific popular writing, his teaching, and his service to the legal profession—including the 2024 University of Texas President’s Research Impact Award and his selection by the Order of the Coif to serve as its Distinguished Visiting Professor for 2025.
Vladeck is CNN’s Supreme Court analyst and editor and author of “One First,” a popular weekly newsletter about the Supreme Court. Together with Bobby Chesney, Vladeck co-hosts the popular and award-winning “National Security Law Podcast.” He is also a co-author of Aspen Publishers’ leading national security law and counterterrorism law casebooks. And he is a member of the Board of Trustees of EarthJustice—the nation’s premier nonprofit public interest environmental law organization.
Vladeck graduated from Yale Law School in 2004—where he was executive editor of the Yale Law Journal and won the Harlan Fiske Stone Prize for outstanding moot court oralist and shared the Potter Stewart Prize for best moot court team performance. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the Honorable Rosemary Barkett on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He earned a B.A. summa cum laude with Highest Distinction in History and Mathematics from Amherst College in 2001—where he wrote his senior thesis on “Leipzig’s Shadow: The War Crimes Trials of the First World War and Their Implications from Nuremberg to the Present.” A native New Yorker and hopeless Mets fan, Vladeck lives in the District with his wife, Karen (Founder and Managing Partner of Risepoint Search Partners); their daughters, Madeleine and Sydney; and their eleven-year-old pug, Roxanna.
Young Legal Scholars Paper Presentations
Erin M. Hawley, Josh Hawley, Daniel B. Kelly, Randy J. Kozel, James T. Lindgren, Michael W. McConnell, Minor Myers, Eugene Volokh
15th Annual Faculty Conference
On January 4, 2013, at the 15th Annual Faculty Conference in New Orleans, LA, the...
Young Legal Scholars Paper Presentations
Erin M. Hawley, Josh Hawley, Daniel B. Kelly, Randy J. Kozel, James T. Lindgren, Michael W. McConnell, Minor Myers, Eugene Volokh
15th Annual Faculty Conference
On January 4, 2013, at the 15th Annual Faculty Conference in New Orleans, LA, the...
Panel 1: Roundtable on Judicial Deference v. Judicial Engagement
Randy E. Barnett, Elizabeth Price Foley, Christopher R. Green, Josh Hawley, John O. McGinnis, Lee Liberman Otis, Lee J. Strang
15th Annual Faculty Conference
The Federalist Society's Facutly Division hosted this roundtable discussion on "Judicial Deference v. Judicial Engagement"...
Panel 1: Roundtable on Judicial Deference v. Judicial Engagement
Randy E. Barnett, Elizabeth Price Foley, Christopher R. Green, Josh Hawley, John O. McGinnis, Lee Liberman Otis, Lee J. Strang
15th Annual Faculty Conference
The Federalist Society's Facutly Division hosted this roundtable discussion on "Judicial Deference v. Judicial Engagement"...
Internet Search, Antitrust and Speech
Thomas O. Barnett, Carlos T. Bea, Ronald A. Cass, David DeGroot
The Corporations, Securities & Antitrust Practice Group, the Free Speech & Election Law Practice Group, and the San Francisco Lawyers Chapter
As the technology sector continues to thrive, scrutiny of internet search engine results also continues....
Internet Search, Antitrust and Speech
Thomas O. Barnett, Carlos T. Bea, Ronald A. Cass, David DeGroot
The Corporations, Securities & Antitrust Practice Group, the Free Speech & Election Law Practice Group, and the San Francisco Lawyers Chapter
As the technology sector continues to thrive, scrutiny of internet search engine results also continues....
The Death of Jurisprudence?
Thomas M. Fisher, David Hamilton, Diane S. Sykes
Indianapolis Lawyers Chapter
The Indianapolis Lawyers Chapter hosted this discussion on Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III's book, Cosmic...
The Death of Jurisprudence?
Thomas M. Fisher, David Hamilton, Diane S. Sykes
Indianapolis Lawyers Chapter
The Indianapolis Lawyers Chapter hosted this discussion on Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III's book, Cosmic...
Private Attorneys and the War on Terror
Steven Gill Bradbury, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Dean Reuter, Stephen I. Vladeck
International & National Security Law Practice Group
As the War on Terror enters its second decade, the private legal community is left...
Private Attorneys and the War on Terror
Steven Gill Bradbury, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Dean Reuter, Stephen I. Vladeck
International & National Security Law Practice Group
As the War on Terror enters its second decade, the private legal community is left...