Hugh and Hazel Darling Foundation Professor of Law; Director, Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism, University of San Diego School of Law
Head of AI Policy, Abundance Institute
Neil Chilson is the Head of AI Policy at the Abundance Institute. Prior to this position, he served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity. Chilson is a lawyer, computer scientist, and author of the book “Getting Out of Control: Emergent Leadership in a Complex World.”
Chilson was previously the senior research fellow for Technology and Innovation at Stand Together, where he guided efforts to understand and promote the legal and cultural paradigms that best enable people to discover, innovate, and improve all our lives.
Before Stand Together, Chilson was the Chief Technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, where he focused on the economics of privacy and blockchain-related issues. Previously, he was an attorney advisor to Acting FTC Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen. In both roles he advised Chairman Ohlhausen and worked with staff on nearly every major technology-related case, report, workshop, or other FTC proceeding since January 2014. Neil joined the FTC from telecom firm Wilkinson Barker Knauer. Neil is frequently quoted by the press and his work has appeared in numerous news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USAToday, and Newsweek. Neil has a J.D. from The George Washington Law School, a M.S. in computer science from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a B.S. in computer science from Harding University.
Policy Counsel for Competition, Public Knowledge
Charlotte is Policy Counsel for competition policy at Public Knowledge. Prior to joining Public Knowledge, Charlotte worked in the Anticompetitive Practices Division of the Federal Trade Commission, investigating and litigating antitrust conduct violations, including the 2017 case against 1-800 Contacts for manipulating Google search ad auctions. She previously worked as a Legislative Aide to Senator Al Franken, focusing on Judiciary Committee issues including competition, media, and consumer privacy.
Charlotte received her J.D. from New York University School of Law and B.A. in Government from the University of Virginia.
Professor Emeritus, Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University
In memoriam
Dr. John Baker is Professor Emeritus of Law, and previously the Dale E. Bennett Professor of Law, at Louisiana State University Law School. He is currently Visiting Professor at Peking University School of Transnational Law (via Zoom) and has been Visiting Professor at The Center for the Constitution, Georgetown Law School (2013-2020). He has also been a Visiting Fellow at Oriel College, the University of Oxford (2012-2014) and taught at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford in 2014. Dr. Baker has also been an adjunct Fellow at the Heritage Foundation (Spring, 2008) and a Distinguished Scholar at the Catholic University of America Law School (2011-12). He has taught at Tulane Law School, George Mason Law School, Pepperdine Law School, New York Law School, Hong Kong University, and the University of Dallas, School of Management and also taught and/or lectured in 17 foreign countries. Notable among his foreign visits are the
following: Visiting Professor at the University of Lyon III (France) (1999-2011); Visiting Professor at the Universidad de los Andes, Chile (2012), as a Fulbright Specialist (2006); and a Fulbright Scholar at various universities in the Philippines. Dr. Baker received his J.D., with honors, from the University of Michigan Law School and his B.A., magna cum laude, from the University of Dallas. He also earned a Ph.D. in Political Thought from the University of London. Baker has taught over a dozen different subjects, mostly courses in public law. His main areas of interest are Constitutional Law (particularly federalism and separation of powers), Criminal Law, Anti-Terrorism Law, International Law, Health Care Law, Mediation, and Comparative Law.
In addition to law review articles and book chapters, Dr. Baker’s academic publications include Hall's Criminal Law: Cases and Materials (with Benson, Force and George; 5th ed. Michie, 1993); An Introduction to the Law of the United States (ed. with Levasseur; University Press of America, 1992). He has also published on Forbes.com, FoxNews.com, in The Washington Times, and a number of times in The Wall Street Journal. He argues in federal court, including two oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court. For many years, he co-taught courses for the Federalist Society on separation of powers with the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In September 2016, he co-taught a Supreme Court seminar in China with Justice Samuel Alito. Following law school, he served as a law clerk in federal district court and as an assistant district attorney in New Orleans before joining LSU in 1975. While a professor, he has been as a consultant to USAID, USIA (since rolled into the State Department), the Justice Department, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Separation of Powers, and the Office of Planning in the White House. He served on an ABA Task Force which issued the report, The Federalization of Crime (1998) and later as a consultant to the “Bi-Partisan Task Force on the Over- federalization of Crime” (2012-2014) created by the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime. Dr. Baker was a co-founder of the first iteration (1995) of Stratfor Inc., a global intelligence agency. He co-authored its first book: The Intelligence Edge (with Friedman, Friedman and Chapman; Crown Books/Random House 1997). In 2022, he began a short, weekly video podcast available on YouTube and Rumble, The Baker Brief.
Senior Counsel, Schaerr Jaffe LLP
Ken Klukowski is senior counsel at the law firm Schaerr Jaffe, focusing on constitutional, administrative, and election law, and the federal courts. He has served in politically appointed positions in the U.S. government, including senior counsel in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and prior to that in the White House as special counsel in the Office of Management and Budget. He was also the constitutional rights advisor on the Presidential Transition Team of President Donald J. Trump. In the private sector, he has worked as a senior fellow of the American Constitutional Rights Union, senior counsel at First Liberty Institute, and a legal journalist. He litigates constitutional cases in the U.S. Supreme Court and lower federal courts, and contributes to media coverage of the nation’s highest court and legal issues. Earlier in his career, Klukowski served as special deputy attorney general of Indiana, and worked on faculty at Liberty University School of Law. His academic works have been published by journals such as the Federalist Society’s Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and his columns have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and other national publications. His amicus briefs and nine law review articles have been cited by various federal courts and top legal journals. He has participated in numerous Supreme Court cases, and lectured and debated at 100 law school events nationwide. Klukowski received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame, studied history at Arizona State University, earned his law degree from Scalia Law School at George Mason University, and served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Alice Batchelder on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Reporter, SCOTUSblog
Amy Howe is the co-founder of SCOTUSblog, a news site devoted to coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court, and its primary reporter. She was part of the blog team that won a Peabody Award in 2013, as well as a National Press Club Journalism Award for Breaking News. Since the spring of 2025, she has also served as the Supreme Court analyst for the PBS NewsHour. In the fall of 2025, she is a fellow in Georgetown University's Institute of Politics.
Before turning to full-time journalism, Amy was a practicing lawyer and served as a lawyer in over two dozen cases at the Supreme Court, on issues ranging from international child custody to the death penalty, and argued two cases there. She has taught or co-taught courses on Supreme Court litigation at Vanderbilt Law School, Stanford Law School, and Harvard Law School. Amy is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds a master's in Arab Studies and a law degree from Georgetown University.
Lecturer in Law; Executive Director, Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, Columbia Law School
June Besek is the executive director and lecturer in law of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts at Columbia Law School.
She teaches a seminar on authors, artists, and performers. Prof. Besek also co-teaches, a seminar on current issues in copyright.
Before joining Columbia in 1999, Prof. Besek was director of intellectual property at Reuters America Inc. She was formerly a partner at Schwab Goldberg Price & Dannay, where she focused on copyright, trademark, and other legal issues.
Prof. Besek is the chair of the copyright division of the American Bar Association’s intellectual property section, and also chairs the section’s copyright reform task force. Prof. Besek serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. and the board of advisors of the Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts.
She clerked for Judge Charles H. Tenney in the Southern District of New York.
Prof. Besek earned her J.D. from New York University in 1981 and received her B.A. from Yale.
Partner, Latham & Watkins LLP
Sy Damle is one of the nation’s foremost practitioners in copyright law, with a particular focus on copyright rate-setting and software copyrights. Mr. Damle is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Latham & Watkins and a member of the Intellectual Property Litigation Practice. He also serves as an advisor to the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Copyright, and regularly writes and speaks about cutting-edge copyright issues. Mr. Damle focuses his practice on high-stakes copyright litigation and regulatory matters.
Mr. Damle joined Latham after serving as General Counsel and Associate Register of Copyrights at the US Copyright Office. In this role, Mr. Damle was responsible for the agency’s litigation, regulatory, and other legal work. While at the Copyright Office, Mr. Damle played a central role in every significant copyright case to reach the Supreme Court, addressing areas as diverse as software copyrights, fee awards in copyright actions, and the scope of the safe harbors in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In addition, Mr. Damle led the Office’s first comprehensive regulatory revision effort in decades, concluding over 20 rulemakings, and helped lead two rulemakings under the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. He was also responsible for overseeing the work of the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), which establishes royalty rates and terms for major segments of the copyright industry. In that role, he wrote and issued binding opinions addressing novel questions of copyright law that govern CRB proceedings. Mr. Damle also regularly advised Congress on novel copyright issues, including by drafting and reviewing legislation.
Previously, Mr. Damle served as an appellate attorney for the Civil Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ). In his role at the DOJ, he appeared as lead counsel in more than 40 appeals, focusing on intellectual property, administrative law, and constitutional matters. He was responsible for the defense of rate-setting determinations of the CRB in the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He also wrote briefs in a number of high-profile Supreme Court cases, including Cable News Network v. CSC Holdings, addressing alleged copyright infringement by remote DVR services, and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, addressing pleading standards. Mr. Damle also served as senior counsel in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Mr. Damle’s work has been recognized by leading publications, including the National Law Journal, which has named him one of the top 40 Under 40 minority lawyers in the United States, and as one of DC’s Rising Stars.
Mr. Damle is a member of the Copyright Society of the USA, and serves on the board of the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court.
Mr. Damle earned his JD from the University of Virginia, where he graduated first in his class. He holds systems engineering and business degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, and was a software developer and information technology consultant prior to attending law school. He also served as a clerk for Judge Sandra L. Lynch of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
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.
Partner, Wiley Rein LLP
Paul Khoury counsels and represents government contractors in solicitation review, multiple award schedule contracting, state and local procurements, subcontracting, teaming agreements, corporate transactions, bid protests, terminations, contract disputes litigation, compliance reviews, mandatory disclosures, inspector general investigations, and False Claims Act actions. Paul is regularly rated as one of the country’s “Leading Lawyers” in his field by Chambers USA, which commends him as “a fantastic bid protest attorney”. Paul was also chair of the firm’s Pro Bono Committee from 1998 to 2014.
Assistant Professor of Law, Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University
Prof. Dakota Rudesill is a scholar, practitioner, and teacher of legislation and national security law and policy. At Moritz, he teaches National Security Law & Process, Legislation and Regulation, and the Legislation Clinic.
His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal, Stanford Journal of International Law, Yale Journal of International Law, Harvard National Security Journal, Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, and the Washington University Law Review, among others. Professor Rudesill is a member of the editorial board of the peer-review Journal of National Security Law and Policy. He is Chair of the National Security Section of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS).
Particular areas of emphasis in Professor Rudesill’s work are intelligence and secrecy (including secret law), arms control and nuclear weapons, legislation, and the experiential “learning-by-doing” training of professionals. Professor Rudesill leads a coalition pushing for a congressional clerkship program analogous to the judiciary’s law clerk program, and is the creator and director of The Ohio State National Security Simulation. This immersive annual exercise places over 130 OSU students from law, policy, intelligence, military, communications, and business management backgrounds in their respective roles as they grapple with current national security challenges and advise top practitioners in real time over two days.
Professor Rudesill has advised senior leaders in all three branches of the federal government. He served the U.S. Congress for nine years, doing national security legislative work for the Senate Budget Committee and Sen. Kent Conrad. In the Executive Branch, as a member of the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition Team, Professor Rudesill advised the President-Elect’s nominees for Director of National Intelligence and CIA Director. He served in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and on the President’s Detention Policy Task Force at the U.S. Department of Justice. In the Judicial Branch, Professor Rudesill was a law clerk to James B. Loken, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
Prior to coming to Ohio State, from 2010 to 2013, Professor Rudesill was Visiting Associate Professor at Georgetown Law Center, and directed the Federal Legislation & Administrative Clinic. Earlier in his career he was a law firm associate, a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, and was selected for the Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship.
Professor Rudesill received his B.A. from St. Olaf College and J.D. from Yale Law School.
Senior Fellow, National Security Institute, Antonin Scalia School of Law, George Mason University; Retired Professor, Distinguished Fellow and Co-Founder, Center for National Security Law, University of Virginia School of Law (1987-2020)
Robert F. Turner holds both professional and academic doctorates from the University of Virginia School of Law. He co-founded the Center for National Security Law with Professor John Norton Moore in April 1981 and served as its associate director for 39 years, except for two periods of government service in the 1980s and during 1994-95, when he occupied the Charles H. Stockton Chair of International Law at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He retired from UVA in January 2020 and currently serves as a non-resident senior fellow at the GMU National Security Institute. He also served briefly in 2020 as President of the Crime Prevention Research Center—one of the most respected pro-Second Amendment groups in the country—while its founder, Dr. John Lott, was on leave of absence.
A former Army captain and veteran of two tours in Vietnam, Turner served as a research associate and public affairs fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace before spending five years in the mid-1970s as national security adviser to U.S. Senator Robert P. Griffin, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (where Turner anticipated by seven years the Supreme Court’s landmark INS v. Chadha decision, striking down legislative vetoes). He also served in the executive branch during the Reagan administration as a member of the Senior Executive Service, first in the Pentagon as special assistant to the undersecretary of defense for policy, then in the White House as counsel to the President's Intelligence Oversight Board, and at the State Department as principal deputy and then acting assistant secretary for legislative affairs. In 1986, he became the first president of the congressionally established United States Institute of Peace.
A former three-term chairman of the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security (and for many years editor of the ABA National Security Law Report), Turner also chaired the Executive-Congressional Relations Subcommittee of the ABA Section on International Law and Practice and chaired or co-chaired the National Security Law Subcommittee of the Federalist Society’s International and National Security Law Practice Group for several years.
Turner taught undergraduate courses at Virginia on international law, U.S. foreign policy, the Vietnam War and foreign policy and the law in what is now the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics. In addition, he co-taught National Security Law and advanced national security law seminars on the Indochina War and on war and peace with Moore at the Law School.
The author or editor of 17 books and monographs (including co-editor of the Center's 1,600-page National Security Law & Policy casebook, National Security Law Documents, and Legal Issues in the Struggle Against Terror) and numerous articles in law reviews and other professional journals, Turner has also contributed articles to most of the major U.S. newspapers, including The New York Times and USA Today. In an op-ed published in The International Herald Tribune in September 1990, he and Moore were the first to call for a war-crimes trial for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and for international controls over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and the following month he wrote the lead story in The Washington Post Sunday Outlook Section, “Killing Saddam: Would It Be a Crime?,” arguing that Hussein would be a lawful target during Operation Desert Storm. (His reasoning contributed to the modern legal justification for drone strikes targeting specific terrorist leaders.) Three years before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Turner published an op-ed in USA Today entitled: “In Self-defense, U.S. Has Right to Kill bin Laden.”
In July 2007, he co-authored an article in The Washington Post with former U.S. Marine Corps Commandant General P.X. Kelley, “War Crimes and the White House,” criticizing the use of unlawful “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the Central Intelligence Agency. On the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon he authored an article in The Wall Street Journal, “Saigon’s Fall Still Echoes Today,” noting that after the war ended, Hanoi admitted it had made a decision in 1959 to open the Ho Chi Minh Trail and start sending troops, weapons and supplies into South Vietnam to overthrow its government — just as the United States had charged. In 2010 Turner received the first “person of the year” award from SACEI, a major Vietnamese-American human rights organization.
A frequent lecturer and debater, Turner has spoken at more than 100 law schools around the nation and in other fora — taking on as many as four opponents at a time. His debate opponents have included former or future deans of Yale, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Berkeley law schools. Following a 1987 debate against Dean Harlan Cleveland (Rhodes Scholar, U.S. Ambassador to NATO, and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient) in which Turner defended the legality of U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras during the Reagan Administration, the host student debating societies awarded Turner the victory by an 85-to-15 percent margin.
Turner has also written and lectured widely on University of Virginia founder and America’s third president Thomas Jefferson. In 2000-2001 he chaired the Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission. In his 2012 book Master of the Mountain, Jefferson critic Henry Wiencek described Turner as “Jefferson’s chief scholarly defender."
A former distinguished lecturer at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Turner is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Academy of Political Science, the Committee on the Present Danger, The Heterodox Academy, and other professional organizations. He maintained a 4.0 gpa as a graduate student at Stanford in History and Political Science and in the UVA Department of Government and Foreign Affairs and was the first person admitted directly to the UVA academic law doctorate (SJD) program without first being required to earn an LL.M. master’s degree. He was selected for inclusion in Who’s Who in American Law less than two years after graduating from law school and Who’s Who in the World before he reached the age of 40. Turner has testified before more than a dozen different congressional committees on issues of international or constitutional law and other topics.
Was Friedrich Hayek an Originalist? [POLICYbrief]
Michael B. Rappaport
Short video featuring Michael Rappaport
Did Friedrich Hayek view the Constitution through the lens of originalism? Professor Michael Rappaport, Director...
Topics
Moving the (Over-Regulated) Music Industry into Modern Times
Music - whether it is pop, rock, country, rap, hip-hop, or any other genre –...
Big Tech, Competition, and Antitrust Enforcement
Neil Chilson, Charlotte Slaiman
Regulatory Transparency Project Teleforum
Senator Elizabeth Warren recently claimed that big tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have...
Courthouse Steps Oral Argument: Department of Commerce v. New York: Citizenship and the Census
John S. Baker, Kenneth A. Klukowski
Sponsored by the Federalism & Separation of Powers Practice Group
On April 23, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Department of Commerce v....
Topics
Defining the "Waters of the United States"
For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps)...
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Questioning Citizenship vs. Questioning the Question
It will be interesting to see how much of the upcoming Supreme Court argument in Department...
Department of Commerce v. New York [SCOTUSbrief]
Amy Howe
Short video featuring Amy Howe
While the Constitution grants Congress the authority to conduct the census, they have delegated that...
The ALI Copyright Project: Restatement or Revisionist?
June Besek, Sy Damle, Steven M. Tepp
Intellectual Property Practice Group
The American Law Institute (ALI) is a familiar and trusted institution for jurists across the...
Topics
Remarks on the GDPR & California Consumer Privacy Act
Last month, the Pepperdine Law Review cohosted a symposium with the Regulatory Transparency Project on "Regulating...
William J. Colwell, Jr. Memorial Teleforum: Security Clearances - Executive Discretion or Executive Overreach?
Paul Khoury, Dakota Rudesill, Robert F. Turner
We are honoring William “Bill” Colwell with a teleforum on a topic we know he...