Managing Partner and Co-Founder, EducationCounsel
With extensive background in providing legal, policy, strategic planning, and advocacy services to educators throughout the country, Mr. Coleman focuses principally on issues of access, diversity, inclusion, and institutional quality in post-secondary education.
Mr. Coleman is a 1984 honors graduate of Duke University School of Law and a 1981 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Virginia. Mr. Coleman served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights from June 1997 until January 2000, following his tenure as Senior Policy Advisor to the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights. He has testified before the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; he has served as an adjunct professor at two law schools and at two graduate schools of education. He currently teaches at the USC Rossier School of Education.
He is a current member of GLSEN’s Board of Directors; a Board member of the National Council for State Authorization Reciprocity (NC-SARA); and a Board member of the Lab School of Washington, which serves students with learning differences. He is a past Chairperson of the Board of Directors for the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Mr. Coleman leads the legal and policy work of the College Board's Access and Diversity Collaborative that he helped establish in 2004, and has been a principal author of numerous amicus briefs filed in federal courts on issues associated with the educational benefits of student diversity and the consideration of race in admissions, as well as the rights of transgender students to a non-discriminatory school environments.
Professor of Law, University of San Diego School of Law (Retired)
Gail Heriot is a recently retired law professor from the University of San Diego. She also served as a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 2007 to 2025. She is also the chairman of the board of the American Civil Rights Project and the chair emerita of the Civil Rights practice group at the Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy.
Professor Heriot is a prolific writer in the area of civil rights. She is the author of many law review articles. She is also the editor (along with Maimon Schwarzschild) of the 2021 anthology, A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education. Her upcoming book is entitled, Why We Walk on Eggshell: How Our Civil Rights Laws Helped Bring About the Woke Era—And the Trump Era, Too.
Her writings for a general audience have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the National Review and many other newspapers and magazines.
In 1996, she co-chaired the successful “Yes on Proposition 209” campaign, which amended the California Constitution to prohibit state-sponsored discrimination or preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin. In 2020, she co-chaired the “No on Proposition 16” campaign, which successfully prevented Proposition 209’s repeal.
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law
Hon. Kenneth L. Marcus is an internationally recognized expert in civil and human rights, as well as a leader in the fight against anti-Semitism on and off university campuses. He is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, the leading civil rights legal organization fighting against anti-Semitism. The New York Times has called him “The Man Who Helped Redefine Campus Anti-Semitism.” He been described, in that paper, as “the single most effective and respected force” to combat anti-Semitism.
During his public service career, Marcus served as Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education for Civil Rights; Staff Director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; and General Deputy Assistant U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.
In academia, he serves as Professorial Lecturer in Law at George Washington University. He formerly held the Lillie and Nathan Ackerman Chair in Equality and Justice in America at the City University of New York’s Bernard M. Baruch College, served as Visiting Research Professor of Political Science at Yeshiva University, and was a Board of Visitors member George Mason University and Distinguished Senior Fellow at that university’s law school. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism and previously served as Associate Editor of the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism.
Marcus is also author of The Definition of Anti-Semitism (Oxford University Press) and Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America (Cambridge University Press). He has published widely in academic journals as well as in more popular venues such as The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Newsweek, USA Today, and Politico. He is a graduate of Williams College and the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.
Earlier in his career, he was a litigation partner in two major law firms, where he conducted complex commercial and constitutional litigation. He also serves as Chairman emeritus of the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy Civil Rights Practice Group.
Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil Rights, University of North Carolina School of Law
Theodore M. Shaw is the Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina School of Law at Chapel Hill. Professor Shaw teaches Civil Procedure and Advanced Constitutional Law/Fourteenth Amendment. Before joining the faculty of UNC Law School, from 2008-2014 Professor Shaw taught at Columbia University Law School, where he was Professor of Professional Practice. During that time he was also “Of Counsel” to the law firm of Norton Rose Fulbright (formerly Fulbright & Jaworski, LLP). His practice involved civil litigation and representation of institutional clients on matters concerning diversity and civil rights.
Professor Shaw was the fifth Director-Counsel and President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., for which he worked in various capacities over the span of twenty-six years. He has litigated education, employment, voting rights, housing, police misconduct, capital punishment and other civil rights cases in trial and appellate courts, and in the United States Supreme Court.From 1982 until 1987, he litigated education, housing, and capital punishment cases and directed LDF's education litigation docket. In 1987, under the direction of LDF's third Director-Counsel, Julius Chambers, Mr. Shaw relocated to Los Angeles to establish LDF's Western Regional Office. In 1990, Mr. Shaw left LDF to join the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School, where he taught Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure and Civil Rights. While at Michigan, he played a key role in initiating a review of the law school's admissions practices and policies, and served on the faculty committee that promulgated the admissions program that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger.
In 1993, Mr. Shaw returned to LDF as Associate Director-Counsel, and in 2004, he became LDF's fifth Director-Counsel. Mr. Shaw's legal career began as a Trial Attorney in the Honors Program of the United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C., where he worked from 1979 until 1982.
Mr. Shaw has testified on numerous occasions before Congress and before state and local legislatures. His human rights work has taken him to Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America. In addition to teaching at Columbia and at Michigan Law School, Professor Shaw held the 1997-1998 Haywood Burns Chair at CUNY School of Law at Queens College and the 2003 Phyllis Beck Chair at Temple Law School. He was a visiting scholar at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia in 2008-2009. He is a member of the faculty of the Practicing Law Institute (PLI).
Mr. Shaw served on the Obama Transition Team after the 2008 presidential election, as team leader for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.
Partner, Jones Day
Eric Dreiband represents clients in investigations, litigation, and counseling in civil rights, employment discrimination, whistleblower, wage and hour, and other matters. Prior to rejoining Jones Day in 2021, Eric served as the 18th Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and he also served as the 12th General Counsel of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Under Eric's leadership, DOJ's Civil Rights Division set enforcement records for prosecutions of law enforcement officers and sexual harassment, religious liberty, and servicemember cases; charged the highest number of hate crimes cases in decades; significantly expanded resources for human trafficking prosecutions; prosecuted race and other forms of illegal discrimination in education, employment, housing, lending, and voting; reached historic disability rights settlements with several states; opposed unlawful COVID-19-related civil liberty restrictions; and successfully litigated to protect the Constitutional and civil rights of all people in the United States.
As EEOC general counsel, Eric led the Commission's litigation of the federal employment antidiscrimination laws, and he issued the Regional Attorneys' Manual, which established the policies of EEOC's litigation program. Eric also served at the Department of Labor (DOL) as deputy wage and hour administrator and directed DOL's enforcement of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and other laws.
From 1997 to 2000, Eric served as a prosecutor in the Office of Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr.
Eric has spoken and written extensively about civil rights and other employment laws, and he has testified about these subjects before committees of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
Partner, Steptoe & Johnson LLP
Stewart Baker is a partner in the law firm of Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C. From 2005 to 2009, he was the first Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security. His law practice covers cybersecurity, data protection, homeland security, and travel and foreign investment regulation; he has been awarded one patent.
Mr. Baker has been General Counsel of the National Security Agency and General Counsel of the commission that investigated WMD intelligence failures prior to the Iraq war. He is the author of Skating on Stilts, a book on terrorism, cybersecurity, and other technology issues; he also hosts the weekly Cyberlaw Podcast.
Researcher, International Computer Science Institute and Lecturer, UC Berkeley
Nicholas Weaver received a B.A. in Astrophysics and Computer Science in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2003 both from the University of California at Berkeley. Although his dissertation was on novel FPGA architectures, he also was highly interested in Computer Security, including postulating the possibility of very fast computer worms in 2001.
In 2003, he joined the International Computer Science Institute, first as a postdoc and then as a staff researcher. His primary research focus is on network security, notably worms, botnets, and other internet-scale attacks, and network measurement. Other areas have included both hardware acceleration and software parallelization of network intrusion detection, defenses for DNS resolvers, and tools for detecting ISP-introduced manipulations of a user's network connection. He is also a lecturer in the Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley.
President, Committee for Justice
Curt Levey is President of the Committee For Justice, an organization devoted to advancing constitutionally limited government and individual liberty. He is a veteran of Supreme Court and other judicial confirmation battles and serves on the executive committee of the Federalist Society's Civil Rights Practice Group.
After graduating Harvard Law School with honors and clerking for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Mr. Levey served as Director of Legal & Public Affairs at the Center for Individual Rights (CIR). There he worked on landmark Supreme Court cases, including the University of Michigan affirmative action cases and the successful constitutional challenge to the Violence Against Women Act. After CIR, Mr. Levey headed the Title IX policy group at the U.S. Department of Education.
Before attending law school, Mr. Levey earned an M.S. and B.A. in computer science from Brown University and worked in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). He invented a new type of AI technology, for which he wrote a successful patent application.
Senior Research Fellow (Wolfson College); Fellow (Lauterpacht Centre for International Law), Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge
Over twenty years' experience as legal adviser, advocate, and strategist in complex multi-jurisdiction matters across several substantive fields, including public international law, international investment protection, trade law, and law of the sea. Academic writings on international arbitration, international organizations, use of force, State immunity, State succession, recognition of States, artificial intelligence, law & technology.
Stevenson Bernard Professor, George Washington University Law School
The Honorable F. Scott Kieff is the Stevenson Bernard Professor at George Washington University Law School and a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
He served as Commissioner of the U.S. International Trade Commission from 2013-2017. He also served during the Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations in the part-time leadership of the national security defense-intelligence community.
He was previously a professor of law and medicine at Washington University in Saint Louis and a Senior Fellow at Hoover. A former law clerk to U.S. Circuit Judge Giles S. Rich, he is a graduate of Penn Law School and MIT, where he studied molecular biology and microeconomics. He was elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2012 and the Academia Europaea in 2024.
His private sector work through Kieff Strategies LLC (www.kieffstrategies.com) provides neutral services including mediation and compliance, and expert services including crisis management, advising, and testimony.
Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Dr. Meltzer is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., where he is an expert on international trade law and policy issues, including digital trade, emerging technologies and AI. At Brookings, Meltzer leads the Digital Economy and Trade Project and co-leads the Forum for Cooperation on AI. Meltzer has testified before the U.S. Congress, the U.S. International Trade Commission and the European Parliament on trade issues. He has been an expert witness in litigation on data flows and privacy issues in the EU and a consultant to the World Bank on trade and privacy matters. He is also a member of Australia’s National Data Advisory Council. Meltzer teaches digital trade law at Melbourne University Law School and at the University of Toronto Law School, where he is an adjunct professor. Meltzer also teaches ecommerce and digital trade at the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office diplomatic academy. Before joining Brookings, Meltzer was posted as a diplomat at the Australian Embassy in Washington D.C. and prior to that was an international trade negotiator in Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Meltzer has appeared in print and news media, including the Economist, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Bloomberg, MSNBC, CBS, Fox, the Asahi Shimbun and China Daily. Meltzer holds an S.J.D. and LL.M. from the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor and law and commerce degrees from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
CoFounder, RightsClick
Steven’s extensive background in IP law and policy began as an attorney for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, after which, he served as senior counsel for Policy and International Affairs at the U.S. Copyright Office and then as Chief Intellectual Property Counsel for the Global Intellectual Property Center of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Before co-founding RightsClick, he started the IP consultancy Sentinel Worldwide, and teaches copyright law at George Washington University Law School.
Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School
Professor Nicholas Bagley teaches and writes in the areas of administrative law, regulatory theory, and health law. Prior to joining the Law School faculty, he was an attorney with the appellate staff in the Civil Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he argued a dozen cases before the U.S. Courts of Appeals and acted as lead counsel in many more. Professor Bagley also served as a law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court and to the Hon. David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit. Professor Bagley holds a BA in English from Yale University and received his JD, summa cum laude, from New York University School of Law. Before entering law school, he joined Teach For America and taught eighth-grade English at a public school in South Bronx. Professor Bagley's work has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law. In 2012, he was the recipient of the Law School's L. Hart Wright Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is a frequent contributor to The Incidental Economist, a prominent health policy blog.
Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law, Columbia Law School; CEO, New Civil Liberties Alliance
Philip Hamburger is the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and Chief Executive Officer at the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Before coming to Columbia, he was the John P. Wilson Professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
He writes on constitutional law and its history—with particular emphasis on religious liberty, freedom of speech and the press, judicial office, administrative power, and unconstitutional conditions.
His books are Separation of Church and State (Harvard 2002), Law and Judicial Duty (Harvard 2008), Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (Chicago 2014), The Administrative Threat (Encounter 2017), and Liberal Suppression: Section 501(c)(3) and the Taxation of Speech (Chicago 2018). A forthcoming book is Purchasing Submission: Conditions, Power, and Freedom (Harvard 2021).
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has served on the board of directors of the American Society for Legal History. He has twice received the Sutherland Prize for the most significant contribution to English legal history, and has been awarded the Henry Paolucci - Walter Bagehot Book Award, the Hayek Book Prize, and the Bradley Prize.
Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
Hon. Jennifer Mascott served as Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Separation of Powers Institute at The Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law before her appointment to the federal bench. On July 16, 2025, President Donald J. Trump nominated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (Delaware), and she was confirmed on October 9, 2025.
Prior to her confirmation, Judge Mascott wrote extensively in administrative and constitutional law, statutory interpretation, and the separation of powers. Her scholarship—published in leading journals including the Stanford Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, and Supreme Court Review—was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and multiple federal courts. She also contributed Supreme Court commentary for NBC Universal.
Before joining Catholic Law, she was an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of The C. Boyden Gray Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. In 2022 she became co-author of Beermann, Cass & Diver’s Administrative Law: Cases and Materials (9th ed.). In 2023 she received the Justice Joseph Story Award for excellence in scholarship, teaching, and advancing the rule of law.
Judge Mascott also served as a Council Member of the ABA’s Administrative Law Section and as a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States. She frequently testified before Congress on executive power, regulatory reform, and judicial jurisdiction, and participated in multiple Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
From 2019 to 2021, she took leave from academia to serve as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and later as Associate Deputy Attorney General, where she argued federal cases and assisted with Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation. Earlier in her career, she clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and for then-Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit.
Judge Mascott earned her J.D. summa cum laude from the George Washington University Law School and her B.A. from the same institution.
William K. Townsend Professor of Law, Yale Law School
Nicholas R. Parrillo is Townsend Professor of Law at Yale, with a secondary appointment as Professor of History. His research and teaching focus on administrative law and government bureaucracy and extend to legal history, remedies, and legislation. He has received the ABA’s award for the year’s best scholarship in administrative law and the Law and Society Association’s Hurst Prize for the year’s best book in legal history.
Parrillo’s Yale Law Journal article finding new originalist evidence of broad congressional delegations to agencies was discussed in the Solicitor General’s winning brief in the Supreme Court’s latest nondelegation case and in the en banc 5th Circuit opinion in that case. His Harvard Law Review article on how the judiciary handles the federal government’s disobedience to court orders has been discussed in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Parrillo also authored a study that provided the empirical basis for best practices adopted by the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) on the federal government’s ubiquitous but controversial use of guidance documents. Peer scholars at Jotwell, in selecting the “best new scholarship” in law, selected each of these three publications (one of them twice). Parrillo’s most recent article, invited for GW’s annual administrative law issue, reveals and analyzes dramatic variation among industries in their willingness to sue their federal health-and-safety regulators.
Parrillo has testified before Congress, been quoted by the Supreme Court, is a senior fellow of ACUS, and has been an instructor at the New York Historical Society’s graduate institute and an invited speaker before the 2nd Circuit Judicial Conference, the U.S. Department of Justice (in 2019 and again in 2024), the ACLU’s national legal staff, and the Federalist Society’s national convention (two times). He is a recipient of the Law School’s annual teaching award.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit
Judge Rao was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in March 2019. She graduated from Yale College in 1995 and the University of Chicago Law School in 1999. Following graduation, she served as a law clerk to Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and, in the 2001 October Term, as law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. Between her clerkships, Judge Rao served as counsel for nominations and constitutional law to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In 2002, she joined the international arbitration group of Clifford Chance LLP in London, England. From 2005-2006, she served as Special Assistant and Associate White House Counsel to President George W. Bush. From 2006 to 2017, Judge Rao was a professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, where she taught constitutional law, legislation and statutory interpretation, and the history and foundations of the administrative state. In 2014, she founded the Center for the Study of the Administrative State, a non-profit Center that promotes academic scholarship and public policy debates about administrative law. In July 2017, she was appointed to serve as the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management Budget. She served in this position until her appointment to the D.C. Circuit.
Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History at Northwestern University School of Law
Stephen Presser is a leading American legal historian and expert on shareholder liability for corporate debts. He is frequently an invited witness before committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives on issues of constitutional law. He holds a joint appointment with the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management and also teaches in Northwestern's history department.
Civil Rights in the New Administration
Art Coleman, Gail L. Heriot, Kenneth L. Marcus, Theodore M. Shaw, Eric Dreiband
Civil Rights Practice Group
The Biden Administration has signaled, in various respects, that it would take a new course...
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State Judiciaries and the Anticommandeering Doctrine
In the 1992 case New York v. United States, the Supreme Court applied the anticommandeering...
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Court Grants Certiorari in Mississippi Abortion Case, Dismisses Title X Cases
Yesterday, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. It will be...
Deep Dive Episode 179 – Artificial Intelligence and Bias
Stewart A. Baker, Nicholas Weaver, Curt Levey
Regulatory Transparency Project's Fourth Branch Podcast
It is hard to find a discussion of artificial intelligence these days that does not...
Trade and Its Cross-Cutting Equities: New Horizons, New Challenges
Thomas D. Grant, F. Scott Kieff, Joshua Meltzer, Steven M. Tepp
Intellectual Property and International & National Security Law Practice Groups
The Trump Administration re-focused U.S. trade policy on the interests of several sectors of the...
Non-Delegation? Or No Divesting? Art. I, Sec. 1 at the Founding and Today
Nicholas Bagley, Philip A. Hamburger, Jenn L. Mascott, Nicholas R. Parrillo, Neomi Rao
Administrative Law & Regulation and Federalism & Separation of Powers Practice Groups
Whether as the result of hyper-partisanship or as a residue of the constitutional design for...
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Cash Bail Reform: Agreements and Disagreements on How to Do It Right
A new Federalist Society Review article by Craig Trainor draws upon his rich experience as a...
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Don’t Fear Volatility in Cryptocurrency Prices; Fear Regulations that Will Harm America’s Crypto Lead
After a massive runup since the beginning of the year, the cryptocurrency market finally experienced...
If the Framers Despaired, Should We?
Stephen B. Presser
Federalist Society Review, Volume 22
A review of Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders, by Dennis...
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A Section 230 Textual Wind Blows in from the West
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act stands at the center of technology debates....