Chief Justice Paul Newby was born in Asheboro and grew up in Jamestown, N.C. He received his B.A. degree in Public Policy Studies from Duke University and law degree from UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law.
Chief Justice Newby was first elected to the Supreme Court as an Associate Justice in 2004. He was elevated to the highest judicial office in North Carolina in the 2020 election. As Chief Justice, he is head of the Judicial Branch, a co-equal branch of state government with the Legislative and Executive branches. He is entrusted with leading the Judicial Branch and its 7,600 elected officials and employees.
He is an adjunct professor of law at Campbell University and has published a book on the North Carolina Constitution.
Chief Justice Newby’s legal experience includes private practice and corporate inhouse legal counsel. He also served almost 20 years as an Assistant United States Attorney, during which he played an integral role in conducting the undercover sting operation that recovered North Carolina’s original copy of the Bill of Rights, stolen in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Chief Justice Newby is an Eagle Scout and is the recipient of the Heroism Award (for rescuing nine people from a riptide), the God and Service Award, the Silver Beaver Award, and the Scouter of the Year Award. In 2012, he was designated a Distinguished Eagle Scout, a national honor that recognizes both his service to the Boy Scouts and his dedication to public service.
Chief Justice Newby has been married to Macon Tucker Newby since 1983, and they have four children. He is active in his local church, where he serves as a teacher and mentor to young professionals.
Mithun Mansinghani is an experienced appellate and trial litigator who has argued cases at all levels in state and federal court, including at the U.S. Supreme Court. His practice focuses on commercial litigation, regulatory issues, and appeals. Mr. Mansinghani has been ranked by Chambers & Partners both in Oklahoma and nationwide for his litigation work. He also has been recognized in Lawdragon’s 500X – The Next Generation list for his appellate expertise and Benchmark Litigation’s 40 and Under list for his commercial litigation.
From 2017 to 2022, Mr. Mansinghani served as Oklahoma Solicitor General, the state’s chief advocate on appellate matters, constitutional issues, and challenges to federal regulation. In that role, he also advised the Attorney General, the Governor, the Legislature, and other state leadership on critical and high-stakes legal issues. Mr. Mansinghani has argued more cases before the Justices of the Oklahoma Supreme Court than any other litigator in the last decade.
Mr. Mansinghani has been nationally recognized for amici briefs he authored at the U.S. Supreme Court. These amici briefs have been cited in Supreme Court opinions, referenced by the Justices at argument, and received a National Association of Attorneys General “Best Brief” award. He also provides commentary on U.S. Supreme Court cases for media outlets including NPR, TheNew York Times, SCOTUSblog, and Bloomberg.
In addition to appellate litigation, Mr. Mansinghani has first-chaired several bench trials to successful verdicts. He has conducted all stages of district court litigation, and has prevailed in numerous cases on summary judgment and motions to dismiss.
Mr. Mansinghani’s extensive experience includes federal and state constitutional law, litigating federal and state regulation, and work with state attorneys general. He has particular expertise in matters related to energy and the environment. Mr. Mansinghani also has significant experience negotiating with Native American tribes and has litigated some of the nation’s most important federal Indian law cases.
Prior to serving in the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office, Mr. Mansinghani was a litigator with Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher in Washington, D.C. He served as a law clerk to the Hon. Jerry E. Smith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Mr. Mansinghani graduated with honors from Harvard Law School, where he was as an editor of The Harvard Law Review.
Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies, Manhattan Institute
Biography
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 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.
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.
Ben Aguiñaga is the Solicitor General of Louisiana. He earned his B.A. from Baylor University in 2012 and his J.D. from Louisiana State University summa cum laude in 2015. He served as a law clerk for then-Justice Don Willett of the Texas Supreme Court and Judge Edith Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He spent a year as the chief of staff for the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., during President Trump’s first administration. He subsequently served as a law clerk for Justice Samuel Alito of the United States Supreme Court in the 2018 Term. Most recently, he was an Issues and Appeals associate at Jones Day before transitioning to Louisiana in January 2024. He has since presented five oral arguments at the United States Supreme Court, including argument and reargument in Louisiana v. Callais.
Solicitor General, Iowa Office of the Attorney General
Biography
Eric Wessan serves as Iowa’s Solicitor General in the Iowa Attorney General’s Office. In that role, Wessan leads Iowa’s litigation before State and federal appellate courts, including the Iowa and U.S. Supreme Courts. Before that role, Wessan worked on complex commercial litigation at two large law firms in Chicago. Wessan also served as a law clerk for the Honorable James C. Ho on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for the Honorable John F. Kness on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Wessan is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, with honors, and of the University of Chicago.
Clinical Professor and Director of the First Amendment Clinic, Florida State University College of Law
Biography
Denise Mayo Harle is a clinical professor and director of the First Amendment Clinic at FSU College of Law, where she leads student advocacy and litigation on free speech, religious liberty, and press freedom issues. Her teaching and scholarship focus on constitutional law, appellate practice, and First Amendment rights. Before entering academia, Professor Harle was a partner at Shutts & Bowen LLP in Tallahassee, where she was a member of the firm’s Appellate Practice Group and Constitutional Law Practice Area. Prior to that, she served as Deputy Solicitor General in the Office of the Florida Attorney General. Professor Harle has briefed and argued high-profile cases involving significant constitutional issues and questions of statutory interpretation in both state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.
Professor Harle’s early career includes clerking for Justice Ricky L. Polston on the Florida Supreme Court and practicing appellate law in California. In 2022, she was selected as a finalist for a seat on the Florida Supreme Court. She was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis to Florida’s Faith and Community Advisory Council and currently serves on the Judicial Nominating Commission for Florida’s Second Circuit. She was also selected for the prestigious U.S. Supreme Court Fellowship through the National Association of Attorneys General in 2017. She earned her J.D. cum laude from Duke University Law School and her B.A. and B.S. summa cum laude from Florida State University.
Professor Harle is active in the legal and academic communities. She is a member of the American Enterprise Institute’s Leadership Network and the Federalist Society’s Speakers Bureau. She has served on the board of Tallahassee Women Lawyers, the Florida Bar’s Client Security Fund Committee, and the First District Appellate American Inn of Court.
Before practicing law, Professor Harle completed doctoral coursework in Political Science at Stanford University as a Stanford Graduate Fellow, where she taught undergraduate courses on public policy, law, and American politics, and earned a Master’s degree. She continues to serve as a dissertation faculty advisor for Concordia University–St. Paul mentors doctoral students in research and writing.
A frequent speaker and media commentator on constitutional law, Professor Harle has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, and has appeared on national outlets including C-SPAN and Fox News. She has also testified before the U.S. Senate on matters of constitutional significance.
John D. Couriel is the 58th Chief Justice of the State of Florida and the 90th Justice of the Florida Supreme Court. Justice Couriel was born in Miami, Florida in 1978. He is married to Rebecca L. Toonkel, M.D. They have two children.
Justice Couriel received his A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard College in 2000 and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2003. He clerked for the Honorable John D. Bates of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia before joining Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York. His practice there included securities offerings, mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcy matters, and investigations. In 2009, he became an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. He prosecuted hundreds of federal offenses, including international money laundering, public integrity, healthcare fraud, and human trafficking crimes. In 2013, he joined Kobre & Kim LLP, where he specialized in cross-border disputes and investigations relating to financial products and services, asset recovery, and government enforcement defense, with an emphasis on clients in Latin America.
Justice Couriel is a native speaker of Spanish. His parents emigrated from Cuba in the 1960s, his father as one of approximately 14,000 unaccompanied minors welcomed to the United States as part of Operation Pedro Pan.
He was appointed to the Florida Supreme Court by Governor Ron DeSantis on June 1, 2020.
Adam Hasner is a lifelong public servant and advocate for education, economic development and innovation, with more than 30 years of executive leadership experience. He was appointed Florida Atlantic University’s eighth president by a unanimous vote of the Board of Trustees in February 2025 and took office March 10, 2025. With his forward-thinking approach and visionary leadership, President Hasner is charting a bold new course for the future — ensuring that Florida Atlantic remains the place “where tomorrow begins.” Raised in Palm Beach County, President Hasner has long supported his “hometown university.” He served in the Florida House of Representatives from 2002 to 2010, including two terms as House Majority Leader. During his tenure, he championed a number of projects that helped make Florida Atlantic the research and academic powerhouse it is today. This includes leading a multi-year effort to secure funding to establish the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, the ocean energy initiative, and the Engineering East building on the Boca Raton campus — the first state-funded higher education facility to achieve LEED Platinum certification. President Hasner continues his valuable work by overseeing the university’s six campuses, from Fort Lauderdale to Fort Pierce, which are fueling discovery and creating new avenues for regional and economic growth in areas such as ocean science and engineering, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and human health. Florida Atlantic stands among an elite group of just 13 universities nationwide designated by the Carnegie Foundation as an R1 top-tier research institution, an Opportunity University for student access and post-graduation earnings, and a recipient of the Elective Classification for Community Engagement — creating powerful benefits for our students and driving lasting, positive impact across our region. As a university on the rise, Florida Atlantic welcomed the most academically competitive incoming class in its history in Fall 2025, selected from a record number of more than 57,000 applicants. Additionally, the university welcomed dozens of new faculty members with backgrounds from top institutions across the country, and set records for student retention and graduation rates. President Hasner earned a juris doctor from Florida State University and a bachelor’s degree in government and politics from the University of Maryland. He is married to First Lady Jillian Hasner.