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.
Professor of Law Emeritus; Senior Fellow for Climate Policy, Environmental Law Center, Vermont Law School
Biography
Patrick A. Parenteau is Emeritus Professor of Law and Senior Fellow for Climate Policy in the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law School. He previously served as Director of the Environmental Law Center and was the founding director of the EAC (formerly the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic) in 2004.
Professor Parenteau has an extensive background in environmental and natural resources law. His previous positions include Vice President for Conservation with the National Wildlife Federation in Washington, DC (1976-1984); Regional Counsel to the New England Regional Office of the EPA in Boston (1984-1987); Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation (1987-1989); and Senior Counsel with the Perkins Coie law firm in Portland, Oregon (1989-1993).
Professor Parenteau has been involved in drafting, litigating, implementing, teaching, and writing about environmental law and policy for over three decades. His current focus is on confronting the profound challenges of climate change through his teaching, publishing, public speaking and litigation.
Professor Parenteau is a Fulbright US Scholar and a Fellow in the American College of Environmental Lawyers. In 2005 he received the National Wildlife Federation’s Conservation Achievement Award in recognition of his contributions to wildlife conservation and environmental education. In 2016 he received the Kerry Rydberg Award for excellence in public interest environmental law.
Professor Parenteau holds a B.S. from Regis University, a J.D. from Creighton University, and an LLM in Environmental Law from the George Washington U.
A longtime litigator and project team leader, Tom Sansonetti helps clients permit and develop projects with potential obstacles in mind.
Long before a lawsuit can threaten a project, he counsels clients on how to develop effective plans of action that will meet government environmental permitting requirements and stand up to judicial scrutiny when those clients' projects are challenged in court.
Tom joined Holland & Hart in 1993 and has built a nationally recognized practice in natural resources and environmental law. Considered an expert in natural resources and environmental matters, Tom has served as one of the top leaders in the Department of Justice and also has held the third-ranking position in the Department of the Interior. He has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court and in several Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal, and has served as a federal prosecutor in environmental crimes cases. Tom’s appellate experience highlights his ability to argue cases at all levels of the federal court system.
Jordan Lorence is Senior Counsel in FLI’s Washington, D.C. office, where he represents First Liberty in strategic efforts promoting religious liberty, and works on important First Amendment projects and litigation, including those at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Lorence has a long career of litigating religious liberty cases since 1984. He has worked for many public interest law firms, including Alliance Defending Freedom, Home School Legal Defense Association, the North Star Legal Center and Concerned Women for America.
He has worked on important religious liberty cases. Lorence worked on school choice cases at the Supreme Court, such as Witters v. Washington Department of Services for the Blind (1986), and Trinity Lutheran (2016), which laid the foundation for First Liberty’s crucial win in Carson v. Makin (2022), requiring Maine to include religious schools in its school choice program.
Lorence argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in Regents of the University of Wisconsin v. Southworth (2000). He represented prolife Christian law students from the University of Wisconsin Law School who objected to the University’s requirement that they pay a mandatory student fee that funded the advocacy of student pro-abortion groups. Other Supreme Court cases Lorence has worked on include NIFLA v. Becerra (2018), protecting prolife pregnancy centers from a California statute requiring them to post signs explaining how pregnant women could obtain state-funded abortions; Masterpiece Cakeshop (2017), involving a Christian cake artist sued by the State of Colorado for declining to design a case celebrating the wedding of a same-sex couple and other cases such as Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2012), Rosenberger v. University of Virginia (1995), Hurley v. GLIB (1995) and Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches Center Moriches School District (1993).
Churches and other religious groups in New York City obtained the right to rent vacant public schools on weekends to conduct worship services after Lorence’s tenacious 20 years of litigation in Bronx Household of Faith. Lorence won protection for churches facing eviction from discriminatory zoning ordinances in Minnesota in Cornerstone Bible Church v. City of Hastings, Minnesota (1991). He also argued at the New Mexico Supreme Court one of the first cases in the nation defending a Christian wedding photographer charged by the State of New Mexico with discrimination for declining to create photos celebrating the commitment ceremony of a lesbian couple in Elane Photography v. Willock (2013).
Lorence defended home schooling families from intrusive school officials during his time working at Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) in the 1980s and 1990s. HSLDA also tasked Lorence with establishing a sister organization in Canada to protect home schooling families there. He traveled extensively in Canada from British Columbia to Prince Edward Island speaking to families how they could protect their right to home school under relevant Canadian law.
Lorence earned his undergraduate degree in journalism from Stanford University and his law degree from the University of Minnesota, his home state. Lorence was born and raised in Minnesota, where he worked one summer building Mighty Dump trucks at Tonka Toys in Mound, Minnesota. For two years immediately after he graduated from law school, Lorence served as the head administrator for a Minnesota Senate committee.
He speaks extensively on First Amendment and other legal issues. Lorence has spoken at least 75 law schools and many legal conferences. Prominent publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and others have printed his opinion pieces on key legal issues involving religious liberty and freedom of speech. He has appeared on such media outlets as Fox News, CNN, National Public Radio, NBC’s Today Show, BBC radio and many others.
Lorence and his wife Marilyn have been married 40 years. They live in the Washington, D.C. area where they raised their seven children.
University Professor of Law and Political Science, Vanderbilt Law School
Biography
Edward Rubin is University Professor of Law and Political Science at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in administrative law, constitutional law and legal theory. He is the author of Soul, Self and Society: The New Morality and the Modern State (Oxford, 2015); Beyond Camelot: Rethinking Politics and Law for the Modern State (Princeton, 2005) and two books with Malcolm Feeley, Federalism: Political Identity and Tragic Compromise (Michigan, 2011) and Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America's Prisons (Cambridge, 1998). In addition, he is the author of two casebooks, The Regulatory State (with Lisa Bressman and Kevin Stack) (3rd ed., 2019); The Payments System (with Robert Cooter) (West, 1990), three edited volumes (one forthcoming) and The Heatstroke Line (Sunbury, 2015) a science fiction novel about the fate of the United States if climate change is not brought under control. Professor Rubin joined Vanderbilt Law School as Dean and the first John Wade–Kent Syverud Professor of Law in July 2005, serving a four-year term that ended in June 2009. Previously, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania Law School from 1998 to 2005, and at the Berkeley School of Law from 1982 to 1998, where he served as an associate dean. Professor Rubin has been chair of the Association of American Law Schools' sections on Administrative Law and Socioeconomics and of its Committee on the Curriculum. He has served as a consultant to the People's Republic of China on administrative law and to the Russian Federation on payments law. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his law degree from Yale.
Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Biography
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.
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.
Sohan Dasgupta, JD, PhD, is a lawyer, executive, and public servant with leadership experience in law, trade, and national security. His work has included trial and appellate litigation, regulatory matters, and international trade and arbitration. He has argued cases before the federal courts of appeals and has briefed matters before the United States Supreme Court.
Dr. Dasgupta served as Assistant Secretary for Trade and Economic Security, responsible for a comprehensive national security portfolio. His duties included oversight of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), Team Telecom, the Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force (FLETF), Information and Communications Technology and Services (ICTS), Arctic security initiatives, the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort (ICE) Pact, and related trade matters. Sohan Dasgupta also served as political head of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), supporting U.S. foreign policy and national security objectives. Previously, he had served as Deputy General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Dr. Dasgupta holds a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif; a PhD in international trade and arbitration from the University of Cambridge; MSc from the University of Oxford; and BA in Economics–Operations Research and History from Columbia University. He commenced his legal career with clerkships on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia.
Dr. Dasgupta has addressed the Hungarian, Romanian, and Guatemalan parliaments, and has spoken at the invitation of Members of the U.S. Congress, the British Parliament, the European Union Parliament, the Congress of the Philippines, and the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador.
Oppenheim Professor Emeritus of Antitrust and Trade Regulation Law, George Washington University Law School
Biography
Thomas D. Morgan is Oppenheim Professor of Antitrust and Trade Regulation Law Emeritus at George Washington University. He was Dean of the Emory University School of Law and on the faculties of the University of Illinois and Brigham Young University. He is co-author of Problems and Materials on Professional Responsibility (14th Ed. 2022), with Professors Mitt Regan and John Dzienkowski. Professor Morgan served as an Associate Reporter for both the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law (Third): The Law Governing Lawyers andthe American Bar Association’s Ethics 2000 Commission. He is an Executive Committee member of the Federalist Society’s Professional Responsibility and Legal Education Practice Group and a member of the ABA Business Law Section’s Professional Responsibility committee. His book, “The Vanishing American Lawyer” (2010), was publishedby Oxford University Press.
Director of the Center for Energy and Environment and Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Biography
Daren Bakst is Director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment and a Senior Fellow. In this role, he manages, develops, and leads the coalition, advocacy, and research activities of the Center, which is one of the most effective advocates for Free Market Environmentalism.
Before joining CEI as Deputy Director in March, 2023, Daren was a Senior Research Fellow in Environmental Policy and Regulation at the Heritage Foundation, where he played a leading role in the launch of the organization’s new energy and environment center, and created and hosted the Heritage Foundation’s energy and environment podcast the “PowerCast.” During his decade at Heritage, Daren wrote about energy and environmental policy, food and agricultural policy (including editing and co-authoring the book Farms and Free Enterprise), regulation, and trade among other topics.
Daren also worked on environmental policy and regulation at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he was a policy counsel and served as the executive to the association’s Government Oversight, Operations & Consumer Affairs committee, which was responsible for issues such as regulatory process reform. Daren has significant state level experience, working for seven years at the Raleigh, N.C.-based John Locke Foundation, one of the largest state-based, free-market think tanks. As director of legal and regulatory studies, his broad portfolio included energy and environmental policy, regulatory reform, and property rights.
Daren has testified numerous times before Congress, regularly submits comments to federal agencies and has appeared in or been quoted by a wide range of media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Times, CNN, Fox Business News, Al-Jazeera America, and U.S. News and World Report. He is a member of the Federalist Society’s Environmental Law and Property Rights Executive Committee and serves on the College Level Advisory Board for Constituting America, an organization that informs and educates about the importance of the U.S. Constitution.
Daren, who hails from Florida, received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from George Washington University. A licensed attorney, he holds a law degree from the University of Miami and a master of laws degree from American University.
Brad Schimel grew up in the Town of Vernon and graduated Mukwonago High School. He attended UW Waukesha for 2 years and then finished his Bachelor Degree at UW Milwaukee. He began his career in the Waukesha County Courthouse as an intern in the DA's Office in 1989, and after graduating UW Law School in 1990, was hired as an Assistant DA. He served as an Assistant DA until he was elected Waukesha County District Attorney in 2006 and was twice reelected as DA. He left the courthouse in 2015 after being elected Wisconsin Attorney General. Brad and his family stayed here in Waukesha County, and he returned to the courthouse as a Circuit Court Judge presiding over Br. 6 in January, 2019.
Misha leads Troutman Peppers' national appellate and Supreme Court practice. Most recently, he successfully obtained orders from the Supreme Court blocking an unconstitutional restriction on places of worship, as well as overturning a lower court order that had blocked several state election laws. He has also argued and prevailed before the Supreme Court in Gill v. Whitford, one of the most significant redistricting cases in decades, as well as Murr v. Wisconsin, a high-stakes regulatory taking case.
Before joining Troutman, Misha served as Solicitor General of the State of Wisconsin. Misha previously served as a law clerk for the Honorable Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court, Janice Rogers Brown of the D.C. Circuit, and Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit. He graduated from Georgetown University Law Center, where he was President of the Federalist Society Chapter.
