Chief Policy Counsel, Council on Criminal Justice and Senior Advisor, Right on Crime
Marc A. Levin is the Chief Policy Counsel for the Council on Criminal Justice (counciloncj.org) and Senior Advisor for Right on Crime.
An attorney and accomplished author on legal and public policy issues, Marc began the Foundation’s criminal justice program in 2005. This work contributed to nationally praised policy changes that have been followed by dramatic declines in crime and incarceration in Texas. Building on this success, in 2010, Levin developed the concept for the Right on Crime initiative, a TPPF project in partnership with Prison Fellowship and the American Conservative Union Foundation. Right on Crime has become the national clearinghouse for conservative criminal justice reforms and has contributed to the adoption of policies in dozens of states that fight crime, support victims, and protect taxpayers.
In 2014, Levin was named one of the “Politico 50” in the magazine’s annual “list of thinkers, doers, and dreamers who really matter in this age of gridlock and dysfunction.”
Marc has testified on criminal justice policy on four occasions before Congress and has testified before legislatures in states including Texas, Nevada, Kansas, Wisconsin, and California. He also has met personally with leaders such as U.S. Presidents, Speakers of the House, and the Justice Commtitee of the United Kingdom Parliament to share his ideas on criminal justice reform. In 2007, he was honored in a resolution unanimously passed by the Texas House of Representatives that stated, “Mr. Levin’s intellect is unparalleled and his research is impeccable.”
Since 2005, Marc has published dozens of policy papers on topics such as sentencing, probation, parole, reentry, and overcriminalization which are available on the TPPF website. Levin’s articles on law and public policy have been featured in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Texas Review of Law & Politics, National Law Journal, New York Daily News, Jerusalem Post, Toronto Star, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Times, Los Angeles Daily Journal, Charlotte Observer, Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, San Antonio Express-News and Reason Magazine.
In 1999, Marc graduated with honors from the University of Texas with a B.A. in Plan II Honors and Government. In 2002, Marc received his J.D. with honors from the University of Texas School of Law. Marc was a Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow in 1996. He served as a law clerk to Judge Will Garwood on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Staff Attorney at the Texas Supreme Court.
President, R Street Institute
Eli Lehrer is president and co-founder of the R Street Institute, a free-market think tank. He oversees R Street’s central headquarters in Washington, D.C., as well as its field offices in Sacramento, Calif.; Tallahassee, Fla.; Columbus, Ohio; and Austin, Texas.
Prior to co-founding R Street, Mr. Lehrer was vice president of the Heartland Institute. He also played a major role in founding SmarterSafer.org, a coalition of taxpayer, environmental, insurance and free-market groups dedicated to risk-based insurance rates, mitigation and environmental protection.
He is the author of several academic book chapters on emergency management and insurance topics; and was editor of Heartland’s “Seven Big Ideas for Congress.” His research has been cited in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and USA Today.
Mr. Lehrer worked as speechwriter to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. He previously worked as a manager in Unisys Corp.’s Homeland Security Practice, was senior editor of The American Enterprise magazine, and a fellow of the Heritage Foundation.
Mr. Lehrer earned a bachelor of arts, cum laude, from Cornell University and a master’s with honors from Johns Hopkins University, where his master’s thesis focused on the Federal Emergency Management Agency. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Washington Times, Weekly Standard, National Review, Public Interest, Salon and dozens of other publications. He is an associate editor of National Affairs and is a member of the board of the Log Cabin Republicans, an organization representing gay and lesbian conservatives and their allies.
Mr. Lehrer lives in Virginia with his wife, Kari, and son, Andrew.
Stoneleigh Fellow and Director, Center on Youth Registration Ref, Impact Justice
Nicole Pittman has worked exclusively on questioning the wisdom of placing children on sex offender registries since 2005, becoming a leading national expert on policy, litigation, legislation, and research in this area. In 2011, Ms. Pittman published, "A Snapshot of Juvenile Sex Offender Registration and Notification Laws: A Survey of the United States", a comprehensive reference guide on sex offender registration and notification laws applied to children adjudicated delinquent in the U.S. juvenile justice system.
As a 2011 Soros Senior Justice Advocacy Fellow at Human Rights Watch, Ms. Pittman interviewed hundreds of individuals raised on registries across the country to document the abuses that stem from subjecting children to sex offender registration laws. In 2013, Human Rights Watch published the results of her work in Raised on the Registry: The Irreparable Harm of Placing Children on Sex Offender Registries in the US. The report became the first comprehensive examination of the harm of placing children on sex offender registries and features first-person narratives illustrating the harrowing treatment of children, as young as 8, 10, and 12 years old, subjected to lifetime sex offender registration and public notification.
Ms. Pittman has been invited to testify on this issue before 37 state legislatures and the U.S. Congress. She has cultivated and maintained long-term partnerships with several key stakeholders, including juvenile defender organizations; criminal defense policy groups; members of Congress; state officials and legislators; the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children; the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency and Prevention (OJJDP) and various state chapters of organizations for individuals on registries.
Through her Stoneleigh Fellowship, Ms. Pittman is serving as the Director of the Center on Youth Registration Reform at Impact Justice. This national Center supports federal and state lawmakers and leaders working to make communities safer and eliminate the placement of youth on registries through technical, legal, and programmatic assistance. To advance this work, Ms. Pittman is actively collaborating with numerous stakeholders and thought leaders in the fields of sexual violence prevention, reentry, alternative sentencing, and restorative justice.
For seven years, Ms. Pittman worked as a specialist attorney with the Defender Association of Philadelphia. She is the recipient of the 2013 Distinguished Service Award, Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) and the 2010 National Juvenile Defender Center Robert Shepherd Jr. Leadership Award of Excellence in Juvenile Defense. In 2015, she was named a “Rising Star” by Ozy.com for her work to remove youth from sex offender registries. Ms. Pittman received her JD from Tulane Law School and her undergraduate degree from Duke University.
President, Stop Child Predators
Stacie D. Rumenap is President of Stop Child Predators (SCP). Ms. Rumenap previously served as SCP's Executive Director and brings with her extensive insight and experience into legislative affairs, non-profit management and a dedication to ending the sexual exploitation of children. As president, Ms. Rumenap manages the day-to-day operations of SCP and is responsible for developing partnerships and coalitions with similarly motivated organizations; provides guidance and assistance to state and federal lawmakers to bring about legislative change; and leads Internet safety training programs.
Prior to joining SCP, Ms. Rumenap served as the Deputy Director for the American Conservative Union (ACU), the nation's oldest and largest conservative grassroots issue-advocacy organization, where she directed the ACU's annual Conservative Political Action Conference and served as one of the group's principle lobbyists. Ms. Rumenap has also served as the Executive Director for both U.S. Term Limits and the National Center for Growth, worked on Capitol Hill, and worked on three successful congressional campaigns. Ms. Rumenap currently serves on the Boards of Directors of the America's Future Foundation and the Safe Internet Alliance. She is a former board member of the Initiative and Referendum Institute and the Georgia State Society. Ms. Rumenap received her M.A. in Legislative Affairs from George Washington University and her B.A. in Journalism from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania.
Clinical Professor, University of Texas at Austin School of Law
Steven T. Collis researches and teaches on religion and law and other First Amendment topics. He is the founding faculty director of the Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center and of Texas's Law & Religion Clinic. On the topic of religious freedom law, he is a sought-after speaker to academic and lay audiences across the United States, including foreign diplomats from countries in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and South America on behalf of the United States State Department. He has been interviewed by and quoted in various news and media outlets, including The Deseret News, Bloomberg, The Washington Times, Law360, The Salt Lake Tribune, PBS, The Denver Business Journal, Law Week Colorado, CBN News, and numerous podcasts and television shows. His scholarly work has appeared in The Michigan Law Review, The Nebraska Law Review, The University of Denver Law Review Online, and in his book Deep Conviction, which brings to life the history of free exercise law in the United States for lay audiences.
Prior to joining Texas, Steven was the Olin-Darling Research Fellow in the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School.
Earlier in his career, he was an equity partner at Holland & Hart LLP, where he chaired the firm’s nationwide religious institutions and First Amendment practice group and was a member of the firm's complex civil litigation and employment practice groups. He also taught religious liberty law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and clerked for Chief Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Steven graduated magna cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif and served as an editor on The Michigan Law Review and The Michigan Journal of Race and Law. He also holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he served as the associate editor of the literary journal Blackbird. He completed his undergraduate studies, with university honors, at Brigham Young University.
Partner, Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP
Jeffrey T. Dinwoodie is a member of the Financial Institutions Group at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP. Mr. Dinwoodie previously served as Chief Counsel to the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and as Head of the Office of Financial Institutions at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Mr. Dinwoodie has broad experience advising financial institutions, companies and investors, as well as government officials, across multiple disciplines. His practice focuses on advising clients on financial regulation and compliance, enforcement and examinations, and M&A and other corporate transactions. Mr. Dinwoodie’s practice also covers policy and regulatory strategy matters. Mr. Dinwoodie’s clients include established institutions, emerging companies and entrepreneurs—and his work spans both traditional finance and innovation‑related and crypto asset issues.
Partner, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP
Annette L. Nazareth is a Davis Polk partner practicing in the firm’s Financial Institutions Group in the Washington DC office. She advises clients across a broad range of complex regulatory matters and transactions. She also works closely with Davis Polk’s SEC enforcement practice, counseling nonfinancial sector corporations that are subject to government regulatory and enforcement actions.
Ms. Nazareth was a key financial services policymaker for more than a decade. She joined the SEC Staff in 1998 as a Senior Counsel to Chairman Arthur Levitt and then served as Interim Director of the Division of Investment Management. She served as Director of the Division of Market Regulation (now the Division of Trading and Markets) from 1999 to 2005. As Director, she oversaw the regulation of broker-dealers, exchanges, clearing agencies, transfer agents and securities information processors. In 2005, she was appointed an SEC Commissioner. During her tenure at the Commission, she worked on numerous groundbreaking initiatives, including execution quality disclosure rules, implementation of equities decimal pricing, short sale reforms and modernization of the national market system rules. Ms. Nazareth also served as the Commission’s representative on the Financial Stability Forum from 1999 to 2008.
Since leaving the SEC in January 2008, she has served as Rapporteur for the Group of Thirty’s report, The Structure of Financial Supervision: Approaches and Challenges in a Global Marketplace and as Project Director for their report, Enhancing Financial Stability and Resilience: Macroprudential Policy, Tools and Systems for the Future. Earlier in her career, she held a number of senior legal positions at several investment banks.
Chair, Issues & Appeals, Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP
The former Solicitor General of West Virginia, Mr. Lin has been on the front lines of many precedent-setting cases in appellate courts across the country, including in a US Supreme Court victory that George Will called “the court’s most severe rebuke of a president” since the Truman administration. Having argued more than 60 appeals, he brings to clients a well-honed ability to identify the most persuasive issues for appeal and a practiced understanding of how best to frame complex legal questions in appellate courts.
With experience in the private sector and multiple branches of government, Mr. Lin’s practice has spanned a wide range of issues, including major questions of constitutional and administrative law at the federal and state levels. On behalf of more than two dozen states, he won a stay from the US Supreme Court of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. Described by the New York Times as an “unprecedented” order, the stay was the first time the Supreme Court had ever put a regulation on hold before review by a federal appeals court. In that same case, Elbert argued before the en banc DC Circuit in an historic proceeding that one commenter quoted in E&E News compared to “the NBA All-Star Game.” At the state level, Elbert led the effort that persuaded the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals to overturn an injunction of the state’s right-to-work law.
In 2013, Mr. Lin was appointed the Solicitor General of West Virginia. During his four-and-a-half year tenure, he served as a member of the Attorney General’s senior management team, oversaw all civil and criminal appeals, and argued nearly two dozen cases in federal and state appellate courts. He authored more than twenty-five briefs in the US Supreme Court and more than forty-five formal Opinions of the Attorney General.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Lin served as a trial attorney in the Federal Programs Branch of the US Department of Justice’s Civil Division, where he received a Special Service Award. He has also been a law clerk at all three levels of the federal judiciary: for Justice Clarence Thomas on the US Supreme Court; for Judge William H. Pryor Jr. on the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit; and for Senior Judge Robert E. Keeton on the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
Mr. Lin speaks regularly on a wide variety of topics, including constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, state and federal relations, the US Supreme Court, and appellate practice. He has testified before Congress, and has spoken at the national conventions of the American Bar Association, the Association of Corporate Counsel, the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, the Federalist Society, Americans for Prosperity, and the American Legislative Exchange Council. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and a fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers.
Mr. Lin is admitted to practice in the following federal courts: the Supreme Court of the United States; the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Eleventh, D.C., and Federal Circuits; the District of Massachusetts; the Northern and Southern Districts of West Virginia; and the Eastern and Western Districts of Virginia.
Scarlet Letters and Federal Mandates: Reconsidering Juvenile Sex Offender Registration and the Adam Walsh Act - Podcast
Marc Levin, Eli Lehrer, Nicole Pittman, Stacie Rumenap
Criminal Law & Procedure Practice Group Podcast
Given the understandable public fear of sexual predators, policies concerning sex offenders have often become...
Topics
More sex offender registry background
Stormans v. Wiesman: Paths to Strict Scrutiny in Religious Free Exercise Cases
Steven T. Collis
Federalist Society Review, Volume 17, Issue 2
Note from the Editor: This article is about Stormans v. Wiesman, a case from the 9th...
The Department of Labor’s Fiduciary Rulemaking: Impacts, Implications and Related Policy Issues - Podcast
Jeffrey T. Dinwoodie, Annette L. Nazareth
Financial Services & E-Commerce Practice Group Podcast
On April 6, 2016, the Department of Labor released its much-anticipated “fiduciary” rulemaking, which will...
Topics
Adam Walsh Act Teleforum Preview, Continued
The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 established a national sex offender...
Bruce v. Samuels - Post-Decision SCOTUScast
Elbert Lin
SCOTUScast 5-10-16 featuring Elbert Lin
On January 12, 2016, the Supreme Court decided Bruce v. Samuels. The Prison Litigation Reform...
Topics
Teleforum Preview
Forty American states currently require sex offender registration for at least some children adjudicated juvenile...
The FDA treats innovators like outlaws - and it's taking a toll
In March, I posted about the pharmaceutical company Amarin’s legal battle with the federal Food...
State Court Docket Watch News Clips: 5/9/2016
The Las Vegas Review-Journal posted a summary of the ongoing litigation over Nevada's school choice law....
Topics
Heffernan v. City of Paterson Decided
Officer Heffernan had his day in court, and won. Last week, six justices ruled that...