Attorney General of Tennessee
Jonathan Skrmetti was sworn in to an eight-year term as Tennessee’s Attorney General and Reporter on September 1, 2022.
Prior to his current role, General Skrmetti served as Chief Counsel to Governor Bill Lee and as Chief Deputy Attorney General to his predecessor, Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery.
Before working for the State of Tennessee, General Skrmetti was a partner at Butler Snow LLP in Memphis. His legal career began with nearly a decade as a federal prosecutor. He worked at the Civil Rights Division at Main Justice and then at the Memphis U.S. Attorney’s Office and prosecuted sex traffickers, corrupt government officials, and violent white supremacists. In addition, General Skrmetti taught cyberlaw as an adjunct professor at the University of Memphis.
General Skrmetti earned honors degrees from George Washington University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. Following law school, Jonathan clerked for Judge Steven Colloton on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. He lives in Franklin, Tennessee, with his wife and four children.
General Counsel, xAI and X
Trial Attorney, Civil Rights Division, United States Department of Justice (incoming)
Adam Griffin is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Law. During law school, he served as a research assistant to Professor Stephen E. Sachs and UNC Law Dean Martin Brinkley. After law school, he spent two years litigating for liberty at the Institute for Justice as an inaugural Law and Liberty Fellow. He served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Richard E. Myers in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, and is now a separation-of-powers attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation.
Partner, Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis LLP
Sean Lev, a former General Counsel of the FCC and acting General Counsel of the Department of Energy, advises and advocates in both courts and agencies for clients with complex regulatory problems in technology, energy, and other fields.
He serves as chair of HWG’s Energy Practice and co-chair of the Issues and Appeals Practice.
Sean has more than 30 years of experience helping clients in the public, private, and non-profit sector solve problems involving critical issues of administrative law. He has argued scores of cases in federal and state appellate and trial courts both supporting and challenging agency decisions and has advised Cabinet Secretaries, three FCC Chairs, sophisticated regulated companies, and numerous non-profits and individuals.
As General Counsel of the Federal Communications Commission, Sean was responsible for all legal advice provided to the FCC Chair and Commissioners and oversaw all FCC litigation. Sean was also heavily involved in the Commission’s review of major transactions and enforcement activity. Prior to being named General Counsel, Sean served as Deputy General Counsel and Senior Advisor to the Chairman.
Before joining the FCC, Sean was designated by President Obama to serve as the Acting General Counsel of the United States Department of Energy (DOE). In that role, he was the chief legal officer for the Department, and provided advice on the full range of issues relevant to its mission, including those involving energy efficiency standards, nuclear energy, oil and gas, environmental remediation, and national security. Sean also served as the Deputy General Counsel for Environment and Nuclear Programs at DOE. In that role, he led the agency’s litigation before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and served as the lead agency lawyer in resolving major environmental and other disputes.
Sean most recently served as Legal Director of Democracy Forward, a public interest nonprofit dedicated to furthering the rule of law and fighting unlawful agency decision making. In this role, he oversaw a team of more than a dozen litigators and supervised numerous successful legal challenges against federal agencies and state and local governments.
Sean has significant experience advising clients in private practice, having spent more than fifteen years as a partner of a major Washington, DC based law firm. During that time, Sean had leading roles in numerous key cases involving technology law and policy and in advocating on regulatory and litigation issues raised by major industry transactions.
He started his legal career as an Honors Program attorney on the Civil Division, Appellate Staff at the United States Department of Justice and as a clerk to the Honorable Patricia M. Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Partner, Boyden Gray PLLC
Trent McCotter is a partner with Boyden Gray PLLC. He previously served as Deputy Associate Attorney General of the United States and as an Assistant U.S. Attorney.
Mr. McCotter maintains an extensive appellate practice. He has considerable experience identifying and briefing cases that draw the Supreme Court’s attention, having persuaded the Court to grant certiorari in numerous cases raising issues of sovereignty, constitutional rights, due process, and criminal law. He has authored and submitted over 60 briefs at the Court.
He has also personally argued more than fifteen federal appeals across the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Ninth, Eleventh, Federal, and D.C. Circuits—including once arguing three separate appeals in just four days. He has also twice argued before the 17-judge en banc Fifth Circuit. He has been counsel in over 50 other appeals raising matters from FOIA and the APA to constitutional rights and statutory construction.
As Deputy Associate Attorney General, Mr. McCotter oversaw DOJ’s Civil Appellate and Federal Programs branches, which are responsible for defending nearly all major litigation against the federal government. During his three years as a federal trial attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia’s “Rocket Docket,” Mr. McCotter won the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service.
During his DOJ tenures, Mr. McCotter also assisted with the confirmations of two Supreme Court justices and over a dozen lower-court judges.
Mr. McCotter served as an inaugural clerk to the Hon. Steven J. Menashi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and also clerked for the Hon. R. Lanier Anderson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
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.
Assistant Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law
Alexander "Sasha" Volokh is an assistant professor of law, joining the Emory Law faculty in Fall 2009.
Professor Volokh earned his B.S. from UCLA and his J.D. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit and for Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Samuel Alito. Before coming to Emory, he was a visiting associate professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a visiting assistant professor at University of Houston Law Center.
His interests include law and economics, administrative law and the regulatory process, environmental law and policy, and legal history. His current research topics include the private management of government services, medieval law, judicial decisionmaking and statutory interpretation.
Professor, University of Minnesota Law School
Ilan Wurman is the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches administrative law and constitutional law. He previously taught at Arizona State University. He writes primarily on the Fourteenth Amendment, administrative law, separation of powers, and constitutionalism. His academic writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Minnesota Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the Texas Law Review among other journals.
Professor Wurman is the author of a casebook, Administrative Law Theory and Fundamentals: An Integrated Approach (Foundation Press 2d ed. 2024). He is also the author of A Debt Against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism (Cambridge 2017), and The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment (Cambridge 2020). His next book, The Constitution of 1789: A New Introduction, is also forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Professor Wurman practices law with the firm Tully Bailey. He has litigated a variety of administrative law and constitutional law cases, including cases involving COVID-19 restrictions, transmission lines, and Appointments Clause challenges. He also devised winning public nuisance theories to force city governments to address the increasingly challenging public camping crises throughout the country.
Trial Attorney, Civil Rights Division, United States Department of Justice (incoming)
Adam Griffin is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Law. During law school, he served as a research assistant to Professor Stephen E. Sachs and UNC Law Dean Martin Brinkley. After law school, he spent two years litigating for liberty at the Institute for Justice as an inaugural Law and Liberty Fellow. He served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Richard E. Myers in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, and is now a separation-of-powers attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation.
Partner, Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis LLP
Sean Lev, a former General Counsel of the FCC and acting General Counsel of the Department of Energy, advises and advocates in both courts and agencies for clients with complex regulatory problems in technology, energy, and other fields.
He serves as chair of HWG’s Energy Practice and co-chair of the Issues and Appeals Practice.
Sean has more than 30 years of experience helping clients in the public, private, and non-profit sector solve problems involving critical issues of administrative law. He has argued scores of cases in federal and state appellate and trial courts both supporting and challenging agency decisions and has advised Cabinet Secretaries, three FCC Chairs, sophisticated regulated companies, and numerous non-profits and individuals.
As General Counsel of the Federal Communications Commission, Sean was responsible for all legal advice provided to the FCC Chair and Commissioners and oversaw all FCC litigation. Sean was also heavily involved in the Commission’s review of major transactions and enforcement activity. Prior to being named General Counsel, Sean served as Deputy General Counsel and Senior Advisor to the Chairman.
Before joining the FCC, Sean was designated by President Obama to serve as the Acting General Counsel of the United States Department of Energy (DOE). In that role, he was the chief legal officer for the Department, and provided advice on the full range of issues relevant to its mission, including those involving energy efficiency standards, nuclear energy, oil and gas, environmental remediation, and national security. Sean also served as the Deputy General Counsel for Environment and Nuclear Programs at DOE. In that role, he led the agency’s litigation before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and served as the lead agency lawyer in resolving major environmental and other disputes.
Sean most recently served as Legal Director of Democracy Forward, a public interest nonprofit dedicated to furthering the rule of law and fighting unlawful agency decision making. In this role, he oversaw a team of more than a dozen litigators and supervised numerous successful legal challenges against federal agencies and state and local governments.
Sean has significant experience advising clients in private practice, having spent more than fifteen years as a partner of a major Washington, DC based law firm. During that time, Sean had leading roles in numerous key cases involving technology law and policy and in advocating on regulatory and litigation issues raised by major industry transactions.
He started his legal career as an Honors Program attorney on the Civil Division, Appellate Staff at the United States Department of Justice and as a clerk to the Honorable Patricia M. Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Partner, Boyden Gray PLLC
Trent McCotter is a partner with Boyden Gray PLLC. He previously served as Deputy Associate Attorney General of the United States and as an Assistant U.S. Attorney.
Mr. McCotter maintains an extensive appellate practice. He has considerable experience identifying and briefing cases that draw the Supreme Court’s attention, having persuaded the Court to grant certiorari in numerous cases raising issues of sovereignty, constitutional rights, due process, and criminal law. He has authored and submitted over 60 briefs at the Court.
He has also personally argued more than fifteen federal appeals across the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Ninth, Eleventh, Federal, and D.C. Circuits—including once arguing three separate appeals in just four days. He has also twice argued before the 17-judge en banc Fifth Circuit. He has been counsel in over 50 other appeals raising matters from FOIA and the APA to constitutional rights and statutory construction.
As Deputy Associate Attorney General, Mr. McCotter oversaw DOJ’s Civil Appellate and Federal Programs branches, which are responsible for defending nearly all major litigation against the federal government. During his three years as a federal trial attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia’s “Rocket Docket,” Mr. McCotter won the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service.
During his DOJ tenures, Mr. McCotter also assisted with the confirmations of two Supreme Court justices and over a dozen lower-court judges.
Mr. McCotter served as an inaugural clerk to the Hon. Steven J. Menashi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and also clerked for the Hon. R. Lanier Anderson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
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.
Assistant Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law
Alexander "Sasha" Volokh is an assistant professor of law, joining the Emory Law faculty in Fall 2009.
Professor Volokh earned his B.S. from UCLA and his J.D. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit and for Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Samuel Alito. Before coming to Emory, he was a visiting associate professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a visiting assistant professor at University of Houston Law Center.
His interests include law and economics, administrative law and the regulatory process, environmental law and policy, and legal history. His current research topics include the private management of government services, medieval law, judicial decisionmaking and statutory interpretation.
Professor, University of Minnesota Law School
Ilan Wurman is the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches administrative law and constitutional law. He previously taught at Arizona State University. He writes primarily on the Fourteenth Amendment, administrative law, separation of powers, and constitutionalism. His academic writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Minnesota Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the Texas Law Review among other journals.
Professor Wurman is the author of a casebook, Administrative Law Theory and Fundamentals: An Integrated Approach (Foundation Press 2d ed. 2024). He is also the author of A Debt Against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism (Cambridge 2017), and The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment (Cambridge 2020). His next book, The Constitution of 1789: A New Introduction, is also forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Professor Wurman practices law with the firm Tully Bailey. He has litigated a variety of administrative law and constitutional law cases, including cases involving COVID-19 restrictions, transmission lines, and Appointments Clause challenges. He also devised winning public nuisance theories to force city governments to address the increasingly challenging public camping crises throughout the country.
Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Randy Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He has argued before the United States Supreme Court, tried murder cases to juries as a prosecutor in Chicago, and appeared as a prosecutor in the feature film Inalienable. He is the author of numerous books, including Restoring the Lost Constitution, The Structure of Liberty, Our Republican Constitution, and The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. He has published two memoirs, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, and Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago. He is currently working on a new book, Freedom and Flourishing: Libertarianism for the Real World.
Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
Joshua Kleinfeld teaches and writes about political, legal, and moral philosophy, criminal law, and criminal procedure. He also practices law in Northwestern's Juvenile Criminal Defense Clinic. He is a full professor with tenure at the Northwestern Pritzker School of the Law and (by courtesy) in Northwestern’s philosophy department. In 2017-18, he was a visiting professor at Harvard and Stanford Law Schools. He is the recipient of the Bator Award, given annually to one American law professor under the age of 40 who has demonstrated "excellence in legal scholarship, a commitment to teaching, a concern for students, and who has made a significant public impact."
In philosophy, Kleinfeld's research focuses on the idea of "embodied ethical life," as developed in the socio-theoretic tradition of Hegel, Weber, and Durkheim. This tradition aims to understand and critique social life by bringing to light the normative ideas implicit in social practices and institutions. In law, this means that the most interesting philosophical concepts are often those reflected or actualized in legal practice – in the law as judges and lawyers think of it and wield it.
In criminal law and procedure, Kleinfeld has developed a theory known as "reconstructivism," which holds that the chief office of criminal law is not to dole out retributive justice, nor to optimize crime and cost control, but to reconstruct a violated normative order in the wake of a crime. This work, which draws on the thought of Hegel, Durkheim, Jean Hampton, and Antony Duff, develops an alternative to retributive and utilitarian theories of criminal law by focusing on the distinctive social function and sense of justice at work in the criminal system.
Kleinfeld is also involved in practical criminal justice reform. In this vein, he defends children accused of homicide in the Northwestern Juvenile Criminal Defense clinic and assists in litigation efforts meant to reform American criminal law through the courts. He has also developed a view of criminal justice reform known as "democratization," which holds that the root of the American criminal justice crisis is a set of bureaucratic attitudes, structures, and incentives divorced from the American public’s concerns and sense of justice, and that the primary solution is to make criminal justice more community-focused and responsive to lay influences. Working with others, he has developed a number of policy proposals meant to reform American criminal justice in a democratic direction.
Kleinfeld holds a JD from Yale Law School, a PhD in philosophy from the Goethe University of Frankfurt (supervised by Axel Honneth, Klaus Günther, and Rainer Forst), and a BA in philosophy from Yale College. He clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit; Judge Janice Rogers Brown on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; and President (chief justice) Aharon Barak of the Supreme Court of Israel. He worked as an Associate at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in Frankfurt, Germany, in the area of corporate criminal law. Before law school, he worked as a Senior Research Analyst at the White House’s Council on Bioethics.
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