Attorney, Rathje Woodward LLC
Brian Murray is a first-chair trial and appellate lawyer with a nationwide practice, practicing at Rathje Woodward LLC. A former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, he represents companies and individuals in complex commercial litigation, class actions and civil government enforcement and regulatory matters. In addition, Brian has briefed over a hundred appeals, and has personally argued over 30 of them — including cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, nearly every federal court of appeals, and a number of state supreme and intermediate appellate courts. Brian also served as Deputy to the Associate Attorney General for the United States Department of Justice. In this senior leadership office at the DOJ, Brian counseled Department and executive branch principals and helped formulate policies and strategies for investigating, litigating, and resolving civil regulatory and enforcement matters. Brian relies on his deep experience in guiding his clients through pressing legal challenges.
Brian is routinely called upon to present clients’ most complex and business-critical matters to tribunals nationwide. Notable first-chair jury trial wins include a full defense verdict in a sprawling civil rights class action against the City of Chicago. Key appellate wins include a victory at the Supreme Court that changed the course of CERCLA law, and multiple wins in courts across the country for pharmaceutical companies combatting consumer fraud claims related to drug pricing. Other engagements over the last twenty years have included matters involving environmental, consumer fraud, RICO, antitrust, Title VII, the FAA, and other statutory and common-law claims; enforcement litigation involving the False Claims Act, environmental, and constitutional claims; and other complex civil matters.
Brian has taught Complex Litigation and Class Actions at the University of Chicago Law School for almost a decade. He is a member of the Seventh Circuit Bar Association, the Chicago-Lincoln and Robert Jones American Inns of Court, and the Illinois Appellate Lawyers’ Association. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and on PBS’s Chicago Tonight.
William D. Warren Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
Stephen Bainbridge is the William D. Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, where he currently teaches Business Associations, Advanced Corporation Law, and Mergers and Acquisitions. In past years, he has also taught Corporate Finance, Securities Regulation, Unincorporated Business Associations and Catholic Social Thought and the Law. Professor Bainbridge previously taught at the University of Illinois Law School (1988-1996). He has also taught at Harvard Law School as the Joseph Flom Visiting Professor of Law and Business (2000-2001), and as a visiting professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne (2005 and 2007) and at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo (1999).
In 2008, Bainbridge received the UCLA School of Law's Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 1990, the graduating class of the University of Illinois College of Law voted him "Professor of the Year."
Professor Bainbridge is a prolific scholar, whose work covers a variety of subjects, but with a strong emphasis on the law and economics of public corporations. He has written over 100 law review articles which have appeared in such leading journals as the Harvard Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and Vanderbilt Law Review. Bainbridge has also written 19 books, including seven in multiple editions. His most recent books include: Outsourcing the Board: How Board Service Providers Can Improve Corporate Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2018) (with M. Todd Henderson); Business Associations: Cases and Materials on Agency, Partnerships, and Corporations (Foundation Press, 10th ed., 2018) (with Klein and Ramseyer); Mergers and Acquisitions: A Transactional Perspective (Foundation Press, 2017) (with Iman Anabtawi).
According to Gregory Sisk and Brian Leiter’s rankings of law professors by scholarly impact, Professor Bainbridge was the third most-frequently cited scholar in corporate and securities law for the period 2013-2017. According to Hein Online, Bainbridge is the 29th most frequently cited scholar in their database of legal publications over the last 10 years and the 23rd most cited for the period January 2018 through August 2019. In SSRN.com’s ranking of the top 3000 legal authors by all-time downloads, Bainbridge is ranked 10th. By that metric, he is the highest ranked member of the UCLA law school faculty. In SSRN.com’s ranking of the top 3000 legal authors by all-time citations to their work, Bainbridge is ranked 55th. By that metric, he is the second highest ranked member of the UCLA law school faculty.
Professor Bainbridge has been a Salvatori Fellow with the Heritage Foundation, a member of the American Bar Association’s Committee on Corporate Laws, a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Markets and Morality, and Chair of the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society’s Corporations, Securities & Antitrust Practice Group.
In May 2014, Professor Bainbridge was the Cameron Fellow at the University of Auckland Faculty of Law. He was the Francis G. Pileggi Distinguished Lecturer in Law at Widener University School of Law in September 2005, and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Maryland School of Law in November 2005.
In 2008, 2011, and 2012, Professor Bainbridge was named by the National Association of Corporate Directors' Directorship magazine to its list of the 100 most influential people in the field of corporate governance.
His blog, ProfessorBainbridge.com, was named by the ABA Journal as one of the Top 100 Law Blogs of 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, and 2012.
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.
Senior Vice President and Litigation Director, Institute for Justice
Dana Berliner serves as Senior Vice President and Litigation Director at the Institute for Justice, where she has worked as a lawyer since 1994.
The focus of Dana’s litigation at IJ has been property rights. She successfully represented the Community Youth Athletic Center, a boxing gym and mentoring program for at-risk youth, which challenged the city of National City’s authorization of taking the CYAC’s property for private development; the California Court of Appeal ruled in 2013 that the authorization of eminent domain was invalid and that National City had violated California’s Public Records Act. Dana also represented the home and business owners in Norwood, Ohio, who, on July 26, 2006, secured a unanimous ruling from the Ohio Supreme Court that the city could not take their property for a privately owned shopping mall and “lifestyle center.” Along with co-counsel Scott Bullock, she represented the homeowners in Kelo v. New London, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cities could condemn property because other uses may produce an increase in tax dollars and jobs. Dana, along with many others at IJ, worked to turn the nationwide outrage caused by the decision into new state statutes, constitutions and judicial decisions that cut back on eminent domain abuse. She secured a ruling that the Village of Port Chester, N.Y., violated due process in its use of eminent domain to secure waterfront property. Since 2008, Dana has been recognized every year as a “Best Lawyer” in eminent domain and condemnation law by the publication Best Lawyers in America.
On issues of free speech and economic liberty, Dana successfully defended Carla Main and Encounter Books, who wrote and published a book about eminent domain abuse in Texas and across the country, against a defamation suit brought by a developer who stood to receive property taken by eminent domain. She secured a victory in favor of two New Orleans entrepreneurs in a federal First Amendment challenge to the city of New Orleans’ ban on sidewalk book vending. As trial counsel, Dana also secured a ruling that the Nevada Transportation Services Authority violated the rights of several would-be limousine entrepreneurs by subjecting them to an onerous and arbitrary licensing process that gave undue power to existing companies opposing competition. And she successfully represented an aspiring teacher of African hair braiding in Mississippi, as well as two of her students, challenging restrictions on learning and teaching African hair braiding in Mississippi.
In 2012, Dana became IJ’s Litigation Director. She now oversees all of IJ’s litigation, helping other attorneys craft both their major legal theories and their day-to-day litigation strategies. And she helps to set the litigation directions that IJ will take. In 2016, Dana began her role as IJ’s Senior Vice President.
Dana authored Opening the Floodgates: Eminent Domain Abuse in the Post-Kelo World, a report on the use and threatened use of eminent domain for private development in the year since the Kelo decision. Dana also authored Public Power, Private Gain: A Five-Year, State-by-State Report Examining the Abuse of Eminent Domain, the first-ever nationwide study on the abuse of eminent domain, released in 2003.
Dana has been quoted in The New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, NPR and The Washington Post as well as on various radio and television broadcasts, including 60 Minutes.
Dana received her law and undergraduate degrees from Yale University where she was a member of the Yale Law Journal and represented clients through the legal services program. After law school, she clerked for Judge Jerry Smith on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Dana Berliner is a member of the DC and Pennsylvania bars.
Founding Partner, Boyden Gray & Associates
Ambassador C. Boyden Gray is the founding partner of Boyden Gray & Associates, a law and strategy firm in Washington, D.C., focused on constitutional and regulatory issues.
Mr. Gray worked in the White House for twelve years, first as counsel to the Vice President during the Reagan administration and then as White House Counsel to President George H.W. Bush. In the Reagan administration, he was Counsel to the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief, for which he wrote the original Executive Order 12291 requiring cost-benefit analysis and White House review of regulations (later renumbered as current EO 12866). In the George H.W. Bush Administration, Mr. Gray was in charge of judicial selection and was also instrumental in the enactment of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, the Energy Policy Act of 1992, and a cap-and-trade system for acid rain emissions. In 1993, he received the Presidential Citizens Medal. Under President George W. Bush, Mr. Gray was U.S. Ambassador to the European Union and U.S. Special Envoy to Europe for Eurasian Energy.
Mr. Gray practiced law for 25 years at the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and was chairman of the Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section of the American Bar Association from 2000 to 2002. Early in his career, Mr. Gray helped to develop the Business Roundtable and served as its first counsel. He is an adjunct professor at Antonin Scalia Law School and a former adjunct professor at NYU Law School (teaching energy and environmental law). Mr. Gray is on the Board of Directors of the Atlantic Council, the Federalist Society, Reason Foundation, and the Trust for the National Mall.
Mr. Gray earned his A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard, where he was an editor of the Crimson, and his J.D. with high honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was editor-in-chief of the Law Review. Mr. Gray served in the United States Marine Corps, and after law school, he clerked for Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
President, Center for Individual Rights
Todd Gaziano is the President of the Center for Individual Rights. Mr. Gaziano received his J.D. in 1988 from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics. He received his B.A. from West Virginia University, summa cum laude in 1985. He was selected as a Truman Scholar from West Virginia while an undergraduate.
Mr. Gaziano’s previous legal work includes service as a law clerk for U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Judge Edith Jones, as an attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, as a chief subcommittee counsel in the U.S. House of Representatives, as a Houston trial attorney, and as a chief corporate legal officer. He also served a six-year term as commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (2008-2013), where he helped conduct oversight and investigations of civil rights agencies.
For most of the last 25 years, Mr. Gaziano was a legal scholar and public interest law leader, promoting individual liberty in the Supreme Court and Congress. From 1997 to 2013, he was the founding director of the Edwin Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation. From 2014 until he joined CIR, he was the Chief of Legal Policy and Strategic Research, and Director of the Center for the Separation of Powers, at Pacific Legal Foundation.
Senior Attorney, Institute for Free Speech
Charles “Chip” Miller joined the Institute for Free Speech as a Senior Attorney in May 2023, where he has handled cases in the 1st, 5th, and 10th Circuits, District Courts in Maine, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Texas and Utah, and State Supreme Courts in Alaska and Connecticut, as well as amicus briefs in SCOTUS and the First Circuit. At IFS, Miller's work focuses on Campaign Finance, Donor Privacy, Political Speech and Freedom of the Press. Miller previously served as Ohio’s Deputy Attorney General, where he directed major litigation. Before joining the state AG’s office as General Counsel, he served as a judge for the First Appellate District of Ohio and had also served as a “visiting judge” on the Ohio Supreme Court. Prior to entering public service, Miller spent over 10 years at Keating, Muething & Klekamp, PLL as a litigation partner arguing cases before the Sixth Circuit and the Ohio Supreme Court.
Miller has extensive litigation and appellate experience and has spearheaded important regulatory matters. His previous work includes advancing innovative protections of free expression and competition in the digital sphere.
Miller is a graduate of Boston University College of Law and clerked for Justice Maureen O’Connor at the Ohio Supreme Court. Among other honors, Miller was selected to represent Boston University at the National First Amendment Moot Court.
Gay Marriage and the Federal Judicial Confirmation Process
David S. Petron, Brian J. Murray
Last year saw momentous advances in civil rights for homosexual persons. First, in Lawrence v....
A Comment on the SEC’s Shareholder Access Proposal
Stephen Bainbridge
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC, or the “Commission”) recently proposed a dramatic shakeup in...
An Uncertain Trumpet: Delaware Hears the Call of Corporate Governance Reform
Daniel Fisher
Delaware, the home of 60% of the Fortune 500, is synonymous with corporate activity and...
The SEC’s Proposed Shareholder Nomination Rules: A Dialogue
Joseph McLaughlin
Americans are traditionally wary of large aggregations of economic power. The antitrust laws are one...
Supreme Court Preview: Fine-Tuning Miranda
Kent Scheidegger
For its October 2003 term, the United States Supreme Court accepted four cases relating to...
Berman and Beyond: The Misuse of Blight Laws and Eminent Domain
Dana Berliner
One of the primary methods used by government to take property through eminent domain for...
Controlling the “Fourth Branch”: The Fight Against Agency Capture May be a Losing Battle
C. Boyden Gray
Separation-of-powers issues will always confront politicians, judges and policymakers because the principle of the separation...
Is There a Duty to Make Judicial Recess Appointments?
Todd F. Gaziano
The constitutional separation of powers is lubricated by the comity each branch owes to the...
Salerno v. Chevron: What to Do About Statutory Challenges
Stuart Buck
The Chevron standard for judging agency statutory interpretations is ubiquitous in administrative law cases. The...
Basel II Moves Global Banking Toward Self-Regulation
Charles M. Miller
The Basel II Capital Accord is designed to improve the international flow of capital while...