President and CEO, The Buckeye Institute
Robert Alt is the President and Chief Executive Officer of The Buckeye Institute where he has catalyzed exponential growth since he took the organization’s helm in 2012. He has since founded Buckeye’s renowned Economic Research Center and established its impactful Legal Center.
Alt is a distinguished scholar and attorney with particular expertise in legal policy, criminal justice, national security, and constitutional law. He previously worked for former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III, regularly provides commentary on television and radio programs, and his writings have appeared in countless outlets.
In 2004, Alt spent five months in Iraq as an embedded war correspondent.
Alt has testified before Congress multiple times—including at the confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan—the Federal Election Commission regarding matters of constitutional and administrative law, and numerous state legislatures.
Alt serves as an officer on the boards of The Philadelphia Society and the Federalist Society’s Columbus Lawyers Chapter. He taught national security law, criminal law, and legislation at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, as well as constitutional law and political parties and interest groups at Ashland University.
Alt earned his Doctor of Law degree from The University of Chicago Law School, where he was Symposium Editor and the winner of the Mulroy Prize for Excellence in Appellate Advocacy as well as research assistant to Professor Richard Epstein. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Alice Batchelder on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Alt graduated with his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and political science magna cum laude from Azusa Pacific University where he also won the Outstanding Senior Award in Political Science.
Alt is an accomplished high-altitude alpinist and endurance athlete who has successfully climbed 6.75 of the famed Seven Summits of the World including Mount Everest. He is the creator of PROFOUND CLIMBING™ and a frequent speaker across the country and around the world on legal and public policy topics as well as effective leadership, management, decision-making, and teamwork in contexts ranging from extraordinary life/death situations to ordinary professional/business settings.
Partner, Baker & Hostetler LLP
Prior to joining BakerHostetler, Allen spent 15 years at the center of the national debate over political regulation. At the FEC, he worked across party lines to restore a key regulatory player to functioning order after years of neglect and partisan gridlock. Those efforts led to the first adoption of a new regulation in over a decade, reform of the commission’s investigations and interagency practices, and more than 150 Statements of Reasons interpreting the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). Substantively, Allen prioritized developments at the edges of the FEC’s jurisdiction, particularly those cases where federal election rules conflict with broader principles of corporate, administrative, and constitutional law.
Previously, Allen spent nearly a decade representing organizations across the political spectrum in First Amendment challenges to state and federal laws governing civil society. His practice emphasized motions and appeals, including a dozen arguments before federal appellate and state supreme courts, and appearances before regulatory agencies. In addition to purely campaign finance matters, Allen's cases included the first federal lawsuit in decades addressing the constitutional scope of lobbying laws, litigation establishing the standard for constitutional challenges to FECA under that statute’s specialized review procedures and the successful defense of a state attorney general leading to the invalidation of an FEC regulation.
Vice President, Policy & Litigation, Common Cause
Paul Seamus Ryan joined Common Cause as Vice President for Policy and Litigation in October 2016 and has specialized in political law for more than 20 years. He is former Deputy Executive Director of the Campaign Legal Center (2004-16) and Political Reform Project Director at the Center for Governmental Studies (1999-2004). Paul has litigated before courts throughout the nation and has testified as an expert on election law before Congress as well as state and local governments. He has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and other news outlets, and is quoted regularly by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other news publications. Paul is a graduate of the UCLA School of Law (2001) and the University of Montana (1998).
Partner, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP
Derek Shaffer has deep experience litigating a wide range of complex matters, including cases involving governmental entities and unsettled questions of constitutional and statutory law.
Mr. Shaffer is Co-Chair of the firm’s Government & Regulatory Litigation practice as well as its National Appellate Litigation practice and has served as lead attorney or otherwise played central roles in many high-profile trial and appellate matters. To date, he has litigated for and against various states and has handled cases before numerous tribunals, including the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. courts of appeals and district courts, state supreme courts, administrative tribunals, and regulatory boards. He has particular expertise handling disputes against the United States and its agencies as well as against regulators at the state and local levels.
In litigation between private parties, Mr. Shaffer has handled a variety of high-stakes matters involving a diverse array of subject matter. Among other things, he has vindicated First Amendment rights to public expression in defending against defamation claims. He helped obtain a series of path-breaking decisions that have helped shape patent law. He has led the defense of parallel class actions in federal and state courts. He won appellate precedent establishing the inability of private arbitrators to compel document production from a third party outside of a hearing.
Mr. Shaffer is comfortable handling all phases of litigation – through inception, discovery, trial, and appeal. And he no less accomplished building factual records and examining witnesses in trial courts throughout the United States than he is arguing legal questions before the highest appellate tribunals.
Senior Attorney, Pacific Legal Foundation
Glenn Roper joined Pacific Legal Foundation in 2019. Based in Colorado, he litigates across the country on behalf of individuals and organizations to advance the principles of individual freedom, separation of powers, and the rule of law.
With experience in both private practice and government, Roper has seen the dangers posed to liberty when agencies, bureaucrats, and politicians ignore individual rights in favor of expediency or advancing a political agenda. His interest in combating those dangers spans PLF’s practice areas, including equal protection, separation of powers, environmental law, property rights, and the First Amendment.
Although he grew up in California’s Central Valley, Roper has spent most of his career in the Mountain West. Immediately prior to joining PLF, he served as Deputy Solicitor General in Colorado’s Office of the Attorney General, where he handled select appellate and constitutional litigation on behalf of the State and its agencies and officials. Before joining the Attorney General’s Office, Roper was a partner in a Denver law firm, where he focused on complex civil litigation, e-discovery, and appellate matters. He previously served as Deputy Associate Counsel in the White House Counsel’s Office for President George W. Bush and as a law clerk to Judge David M. Ebel of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. He graduated first in his class from Brigham Young University Law School.
Attorney, Writer and Consultant
Dennis Saffran is an appellate attorney and political and policy writer based in Queens, NY. He has served as chief of appellate litigation for Nassau County, NY, chief lawyer of the New York State Division of Housing, and a Special Assistant to the New York State Attorney General, and was the founder of the New York office and then national Executive Director of the Center for the Community Interest, a public interest group that supported anti-crime and quality-of-life initiatives like those of the Giuliani and Bloomberg Administrations in New York City.
Dennis has litigated constitutional and municipal law cases in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, the New York State Court of Appeals, and other appellate courts, and has submitted amicus briefs to the Supreme Court and other courts supporting the plaintiffs in the landmark case of Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, as well as in the pending case before SCOTUS of Chiles v. Salazar concerning the constitutionality of bans on so-called "conversion therapy." He has also written on legal, political and public policy issues for various publications including the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News and New York Post, Newsweek, RealClear Policy and Quillette, and has been a guest on various television and radio news and talk shows.
In 2001 and 2013, Dennis was the Republican candidate for the New York City Council from Northeast Queens, one of the few competitive districts in the city, receiving 48% of the vote and losing by a 1% margin in 2001 in the closest election in the city that year.
Dennis grew up in Queens and is an honors graduate of Forest Hills High School, Harvard College and New York University Law School. He and his wife Jane Stewart Saffran live in Douglaston, NY, where they raised their two children: Kristina, the founder of Equip, a telehealth treatment program for eating disorders, and Nick, a senior editor at the Manhattan Institute.
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.
President, Harned Strategies LLC
Karen Harned is President at Harned Strategies LLC. Previously, she served as Executive Director of the National Federation of Independent Business Small Business Legal Center, a post she held from 2002-2022. Prior to joining the Legal Center, Ms. Harned was an attorney at a Washington, D.C. law firm specializing in food and drug law, where she represented several small and large businesses and their respective trade associations before Congress and federal agencies. She also served as Assistant Press Secretary to U.S. Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma from August of 1989 to March of 1993. Ms. Harned received her B.A. from the University of Oklahoma in 1989 and her J.D. from The George Washington University National Law Center in 1995. She is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia.
As Executive Director of the NFIB Small Business Legal Center, Ms. Harned commented regularly on small business cases before federal and state courts, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court. She has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business, NBC Nightly News, CNN, CNBC and MSNBC, as well as National Public Radio, CBS Radio, and radio outlets across the country. Her opinion editorials and articles regarding healthcare, lawsuit abuse, regulation, and other issues important to small business have been published in newspapers and other publications nationwide.
Ms. Harned has testified before Congress on the small business impact of regulation and the civil justice system. Additionally, she has conducted numerous webinars and legal compliance seminars for small business owners across the country on issues relating to employment law, including unionization and immigration.
Instructor of Accounting, University of Central Florida College of Business
Professor F. E. Guerra-Pujol was born in Los Angeles, Calif., to Francisco Guerra and Oilda Pujol. He attended college at the University of California at Santa Barbara, graduating with highest honors, and received his Juris Doctorate from Yale Law School. After practicing business law for several years, Professor Guerra-Pujol began his academic career at the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico. He is currently teaching at the University of Central Florida. His areas of research include markets, property rights and the philosophy of law. He is also the author of many scholarly papers, journal articles and book chapters, including “Gödel’s Loophole,” “A Bayesian Model of Litigation” and “The Poker-Litigation Game.” You can access his work here:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=649450
Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
ILYA SOMIN is Professor of Law at George Mason University and the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, democratic theory, federalism, and migration rights. He is the author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom (Oxford University Press, revised and expanded edition, 2022), Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (Stanford University Press, revised and expanded second edition, 2016), and The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain (University of Chicago Press, 2015, rev. paperback ed., 2016), coauthor of A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and co-editor of Eminent Domain: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Democracy and Political Ignorance has been translated into Italian and Japanese.
Somin’s work has appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Critical Review, and others. Somin has also published articles in a variety of popular press outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, CNN, NBC, The Atlantic, USA Today, Boston Globe, US News and World Report, South China Morning Post, National Law Journal and Reason. He has been quoted or interviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, The Economist, the Christian Science Monitor, the Financial Times, The Guardian, the Associated Press, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, BBC, Reuters, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Al Jazeera, and the Voice of America, among other media.
Somin’s writings have been cited in decisions by the United States Supreme Court, multiple state supreme courts and lower federal courts, and the Supreme Court of Israel. He is co-counsel for the plaintiffs in VOS Selections, Inc. v. Trump, a case challenging the constitutionality of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. Somin has testified on the use of drones for targeted killing in the War on Terror before the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights. In 2009, he testified on property rights issues at the United States Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Somin writes regularly for the popular Volokh Conspiracy law and politics blog, now affiliated with Reason magazine (previously affiliated with the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017). From 2006 to 2013, he served as Co-Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review, one of the country’s top-rated law and economics journals.
Somin has served as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has also been a visiting professor or scholar at the Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Hamburg, Germany, the University of Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Uriel Reichman University in Israel, and Zhengzhou University in China. He is a University Affiliate of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and an affiliated faculty member of the George Mason University Institute for Immigration Research. Before joining the faculty at George Mason, Somin was the John M. Olin Fellow in Law at Northwestern University Law School in 2002-2003. In 2001-2002, he clerked for the Hon. Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Professor Somin earned his B.A., Summa Cum Laude, at Amherst College, M.A. in Political Science from Harvard University, and J.D. from Yale Law School.
Director, Damon Key Leong Kupchak Hastert
Robert H. Thomas is a land use and appellate lawyer, and focuses on regulatory takings, eminent domain, water rights, and election and political law cases. He has tried cases and appeals in Hawaii, California, and the federal courts. For a list of reported cases in which he’s been involved, go here.
Robert is also the inaugural Joseph T. Waldo Visiting Chair in Property Rights Law at the William & Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he teaches courses on eminent domain, property rights, and other property-related courses.
Robert received his LLM, with honors, from Columbia Law School where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and his JD from the University of Hawaii School of Law where he served as editor of the Law Review. Robert taught law at the University of Santa Clara School of Law, and was an exam grader and screener for the California Committee of Bar Examiners.
He was the Chair (2017-18) of the American Bar Association’s Section on State & Local Government Law, was the long-time Chair of the Section’s Eminent Domain Law Committee, and currently chairs the Regulatory Takings Committee.
He is the Hawaii member of Owners’ Counsel of America, a national network of the most experienced eminent domain and property rights lawyers. Membership in OCA is by invitation only, and is limited to a single attorney from each state. He is also the Co-Planning Chair of the American Law Institute-CLE’s annual three-day conference on condemnation law, Eminent Domain and Land Valuation Litigation. Robert is also the Managing Attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation Hawaii Center, and is listed in Best Lawyers in Eminent Domain and Condemnation Law, and Land Use & Zoning Law, and in Super Lawyers in Appellate Law, Land Use/Zoning, and Government/Cities/Municipalities.
He is also a frequent speaker on land use and eminent domain issues in Hawaii and nationwide. Robert regularly publishes scholarly and practical articles in his area of practice. For a partial list, go here. His blog on land use, property, and takings law, inversecondemnation.com, is one of the most widely-read blogs on those subjects.
Vice President of Law & Policy, Property and Environment Research Center
Jonathan Wood is vice president of law and policy at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). An attorney, Jonathan has litigated environmental and property-rights cases in the Supreme Court of the United States, federal and state appellate courts, and trial courts across the country. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, National Review, Reason, and other outlets. And his research has been published in journals such as Environmental Law Reporter, Yale Journal on Regulation Notice & Comment, Pace Environmental Law Review, and California Western Law Review.
Prior to coming to PERC, Jonathan was a senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, where he litigated cases concerning the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, and other federal environmental laws. He was co-counsel for forest landowners in Weyerhaeuser Co. v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in which the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that private land could not be arbitrarily regulated as critical habitat under the ESA. He also led a successful effort to reform regulation of threatened species to better align the incentives of private landowners with the interests of rare species.
Jonathan has testified before several congressional committees on wildlife conservation and endangered species topics. He has also appeared on national television and radio, including NPR’s All Things Considered, C-Span’s Washington Journal, Stossel, Fox News, and Hill.TV.
Jonathan has a law degree from the New York University School of Law, a masters degree in economic policy from the London School of Economics, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Texas. He is on the executive committee for the Federalist Society’s Environmental Law and Property Rights Practice Group and a steering committee member for the Environmental Law Institute’s Emerging Leaders Initiative.
Author and Founding Member, Iran Human Rights Documentation Center
Roya Hakakian is a writer. Her opinion columns, essays and book reviews appear in English language publications like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and NPR’s All Things Considered among many others. She has collaborated on over a dozen hours of programming for leading journalism units in network television, including CBS 60 Minutes. She currently serves as an editorial board member of World Affairs. An active thinker of foreign relations, Roya is a founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. She has been featured in the Washington Post and the US News and World Report, among other publications. In the book, Political Awakenings by University of California at Berkeley’s Professor Harry Kreisler, she has been highlighted “among the most important activists, academics, and journalists of her generation.”
In 2008, she received a Guggenheim prize in nonfiction. It enabled her to complete the work on her most recent book, Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove/Atlantic), about Iran’s terror campaign against exiled dissidents in Western Europe received the Asian American Literary Award for best non-fiction book in 2013. It was named a New York Times Notable Book in 2011, made Newsweek’s Top Ten Not-to-be-missed books and was among Kirkus Reviews Best Non-Fictions in the same year. Her account of the work of the German prosecutor of the case, a modern day Atticus Finch, moved the US Federal Bar Association to establish “the Rule of Law Award,” the first of which was bestowed upon that prosecutor in 2014 at the Daniel Moynihan Federal Courthouse in New York City.
Her memoir of growing up a Jewish teenager in post-revolutionary Iran, Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Crown) has been a celebrated Freshman Experience book at a number of colleges in the US. It was a Barnes and Noble’s Pick of the Week, Ms. Magazine Must Read of the Summer, Publishers Weekly’s Best Book of the Year, Elle Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of 2004, and was named Best Memoir by the Connecticut Center for the Book in 2005 and has been translated into several languages including German, Dutch, and Spanish.
She is currently at work on a new book at the The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she has been awarded a fellowship in 2014. Talking to her readers is one of her great joys and she has addressed them at venues ranging from high schools on Native American reservations to the US Capitol and the CIA.
Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Professor Koplow specializes in the areas of public international law and national security law. He joined the Georgetown Law faculty in 1981. His principal courses have been International Law I (the introductory survey of public international law topics), a seminar in the area of arms control, non-proliferation and terrorism, and the pro-seminar for LLM students in national security law. In addition, he has directed a clinic, the Center for Applied Legal Studies, in which students provide pro bono representation to refugees who seek asylum in the United States because of persecution in their homelands. His government service has included stints as Special Counsel for Arms Control to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense (2009-2011); as Deputy General Counsel for International Affairs at the Department of Defense (1997-1999); and as Attorney-Advisor and Special Assistant to the Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1978-1981). He is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School and a Rhodes Scholar. Most of his scholarly writing concentrates on the intersection between international law and U.S. constitutional law, especially in the areas of arms control and national security and treaty negotiation and implementation.
Legal Counsel, Global Religious Freedom, ADF International
Sean Nelson serves as Legal Counsel for Global Religious Freedom with ADF International, where he advocates on behalf of Christians and other religious minorities being persecuted for their faith around the world.
East Asia Team Leader, Christian Solidarity Worldwide
Benedict Rogers is a journalist and human rights advocate based in London. His work focuses mainly on Burma, North Korea and Indonesia. He is a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Huffington Post and has appeared on BBC, CNN, Sky, Al Jazeera and other television and radio stations. He is the co-founder and deputy chairman of the Conservative Party's human rights commission and the co-founder of the International Coalition to Stop Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea. He is also the East Asia Team Leader at Christian Solidarity Worldwide and the founder of Hong Kong Watch. He has written three books which focus on Burma, including A Land Without Evil: Stopping the Genocide of Burma's Karen People (Monarch, 2004) and Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads (2012), and co-authored two others on Christian human rights obligations.
Litigation Update: Associational Privacy at the Supreme Court
Robert Alt, Allen J. Dickerson, Paul S. Ryan, Derek L. Shaffer
In NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, the Supreme Court recognized a First Amendment right to privacy of...
Courthouse Steps Decision Teleforum: County of Maui, Hawaii v. Hawaii Wildlife Fund
Glenn Roper
The Supreme Court released the decision in County of Maui v. Hawaii Wildlife Fund on April...
Diversity and Elimination of Bias CLE Teleforum: An update to the Harvard Case and the Meaning of Diversity in a Multi-Racial Era
Dennis J. Saffran
Professional Responsibilities Practice Group Diversity CLE Teleforum
Electronic Sign In: Click Here (Sign-in now!) Written Materials: Click Here Certificate of Attendance: Click Here (Fill in the form...
Trump v Pennsylvania - Post-Argument SCOTUScast
Erin M. Hawley
featuring Erin Hawley
On May 6, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court heard argument in the consolidated cases of...
Deep Dive Episode 116 – Surviving COVID-19: The Small Business Perspective
Karen Harned
Regulatory Transparency Project's Fourth Branch Podcast
As small businesses across the country grapple with the current and potential impacts associated with...
The Supreme Court Declines to Consider a Constitutional Challenge to Wisconsin’s Unified Bar
On June 1, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Jarchow v. State...
Topics
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A central feature of the Clean Water Act (CWA) is cooperative federalism. In fact, right...
COVID-19 & Property Rights: Do Government Actions in Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic Create Compensable Takings?
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Courthouse Steps Decision: Atlantic Richfield Co. v. Christian
Jonathan Wood
On April 20, 2020, the Supreme Court, by a vote of 7-2, held that owners...
Nuclear Arms Agreements and Human Rights
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