General Counsel, House Committee on Homeland Security
Steven Giaier is General Counsel for the Committee on Homeland Security in the U.S. House of Representative. In this role, he serves as the lead staff member on the Committee for all legal issues and legislation action. Over the past several years, he has written several of the most substantial pieces of legislation to move through the Committee and be enacted into law, including the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Authorization Act. Mr. Giaier formerly served as parliamentary advisor to Congressman Peter King during King’s tenure as chairman of the Homeland Security Committee from 2011-2013. He recently coauthored “Turf Wars: How a Jurisdictional Quagmire in Congress Compromises Homeland Security,” published by the New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy in the summer of 2015.
Director of Equality and Opportunity Litigation, Pacific Legal Foundation
Joshua directs the litigation for PLF’s Equality and Opportunity Program, where he fights to dismantle unconstitutional barriers to opportunity, freeing individuals to rise based on their choices, character, and ability.
Joshua joined PLF as an attorney in 2007. His litigation practice has covered all PLF subject areas with a particular focus on equality and opportunity. Joshua argued PLF’s 13th case before the United States Supreme Court, Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, where the court ruled that a California regulation that allowed union organizers onto private property violated the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause. Other litigation highlights of his include ending a decades-long racial quota in Hartford, Connecticut, lifting a ban on boys’ dancing in Minnesota, and vindicating an entrepreneur’s right to start a moving business in Kentucky.
Joshua’s writings have been published by the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. And his research has been published in journals such as Texas Review of Law & Politics, Alabama Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Law Review, Journal of Civil Rights & Economic Development, and Northern Illinois University Law Review. He has appeared on national television and radio, including PBS Newshour, NPR’s All things Considered, Stossel, and Univision.
Joshua earned his BA with distinction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a triple major in political science, international relations, and German. He earned his JD cum laude from Michigan State College of Law where he was on the law review and trial practice institute. Joshua lives in Sacramento, California with his wife and three children. He loves playing chess and rooting for Wisconsin sports teams.
Joshua is a member of the bar only in the state of California.
Board Member, Center for Equal Opportunity
Roger Clegg is a Board Member at and former President and General Counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity. He focuses on legal issues arising from civil rights laws--including the regulatory impact on business and the problems in higher education created by affirmative action. A former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Reagan and Bush administrations, Clegg held the second highest positions in both the Civil Rights Division (1987-91) and in the Environment and Natural Resources Division (1991-93). He has held several other positions at the U.S. Justice Department, including Assistant to the Solicitor General (1985-87), Associate Deputy Attorney General (1984-85), and Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy (1984). Clegg is a graduate of Yale University Law School (1981).
Editor, Breitbart News
John Carney covers Wall Street and finance for CNBC.com, where he runs NetNet. John Carney was recently hired by Breitbart News, where he leads a new finance and economics section. Carney joined CNBC in 2010 after serving as managing editor of Business Insider's Wall Street and economics section. Prior to that he was Editor in Chief of DealBreaker.com.
He is a frequent guest on CNBC's "Power Lunch" and public radio's "Marketplace." His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New York Sun, Page Six Magazine, the New York Post, Fortune, Gawker and New York magazine.
Mr. Carney received a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and practiced corporate law at firms such as Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Latham & Watkins where he primarily represented banks, hedge funds and private equity firms.
Partner, Foley & Lardner LLP
A trial and courtroom lawyer for over 30 years, Jason A. Levine is an antitrust and commercial litigation partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Foley & Lardner LLP.
Mr. Levine has served as lead counsel for clients in high-stakes and often multi-faceted business disputes. His diverse practice focuses on antitrust, complex contractual, and business tort suits. Mr. Levine tried 14 cases to judges and juries across the country, briefed and argued dozens of dispositive motions and several precedent-setting appeals, and has had an active amicus practice before the U.S. Supreme Court for nationwide trade associations. He was also lead counsel to defendants in several of the nation’s largest antitrust class actions and MDLs. Mr. Levine has perennially been recognized as a prominent litigator by Best Lawyers, SuperLawyers, Benchmark Litigation, and Global Competition Review. He also spent nearly four years as an Investment Manager at Omni Bridgeway, a global commercial litigation finance company, where he launched and led the Washington, D.C. office and led the U.S. antitrust strategy.
Mr. Levine received his B.A. summa cum laude (Phi Beta Kappa) from Brandeis University in 1991 and his J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1994, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. Before entering private practice, Mr. Levine was a law clerk for Judge Randall Rader on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, where he focused on the court’s Takings and administrative cases.
Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies, Manhattan Institute
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Previously he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute.
Shapiro is the author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (2025) and Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020), coauthor of Religious Liberties for Corporations? (2014), and editor of 11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review (2008-18). He has contributed to a variety of academic, popular, and professional publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, and Newsweek. He also regularly provides commentary for various media outlets, writes the Shapiro’s Gavel newsletter on Substack, and once appeared on the Colbert Report.
Shapiro has testified many times before Congress and state legislatures and has filed more than 500 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court. He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, is a member of the board of fellows of the Jewish Policy Center, was an inaugural Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute, and has been an adjunct law professor at the George Washington University and University of Mississippi. He is also the chairman of the board of advisers of the Mississippi Justice Institute, a barrister in the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court, and a former member of the Virginia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Earlier in his career, Shapiro was a special assistant/adviser to the Multi-National Force in Iraq on rule-of-law issues and practiced at Patton Boggs and Cleary Gottlieb. Before entering private practice, he clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He holds an AB from Princeton University, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School.
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