Senior Research Fellow, Mercatus Center, George Mason University
Biography
Emily Hamilton is a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Urbanity Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her research focuses on urban economics and land-use policy. Hamilton has authored numerous academic articles and policy papers. Her writing has appeared in USA Today, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. She contributes to the blog Market Urbanism. Hamilton received her PhD in economics from George Mason University.
Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley, a Milwaukee native, was elected to the Supreme Court in 2016 after being appointed by Gov. Scott Walker in 2015. She is the first Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice to have served as an intermediate appellate court judge as well as a circuit court judge. Before joining the Supreme Court, Justice Bradley served as a District I Court of Appeals judge (appointed 2015), a Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge (appointed 2012, elected 2013) and worked as an attorney in private practice (1996-2012), including serving as vice president of legal operations for a global software company.
Justice Bradley graduated from Marquette University in 1993 with an honors B.S. in Business Administration and Business Economics and received her juris doctor from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1996.
Justice Bradley is a member of the Supreme Court Finance Committee and chairs the Supreme Court Legislative Committee as the Chief Justice's designee. She is a member of the Board of Advisors and past president of the Milwaukee Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society; serves on the Wisconsin State Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; and is a member of the Bench and Bar Committee of the Wisconsin State Bar. She previously served on the Board of Governors of the St. Thomas More Lawyers Society; the Wisconsin Juvenile Jury Instructions Committee; the Wisconsin Juvenile Benchbook Committee; and as a member of the Milwaukee Trial Judges Association and the Wisconsin Trial Judges Association. While in private practice, Justice Bradley served as an American Arbitration Association Arbitrator and Chairman of the State Bar Business Law Section.
Justice Bradley's current term expires July 31, 2026.
El Honorable Rafael L. Martínez Torres nació el 14 de febrero de 1959 en Humacao, Puerto Rico. Es el menor de los dos hijos procreados el señor Luis Martínez y la señora Áurea Torres. Está casado con la Dra. Sandra S. Rodríguez Cruz, pediatra. El juez tiene dos hijos, Christopher y Ricardo.
Producto de nuestras escuelas públicas (en 1976 se graduó, con altos honores, de la Escuela Superior Ana Roqué, de Humacao), el juez Martínez Torres obtuvo en 1980 su Bachillerato en Artes (con calificación de Magna Cum Laude) con concentración en Ciencias Políticas de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras. En 1983 obtuvo el grado de Juris Doctor con calificación de Cum Laude de la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras, donde, además, fue Director Auxiliar de la Revista Jurídica. El juez Martínez Torres comenzó su vida profesional precisamente en el Tribunal Supremo de Puerto Rico, en el cual laboró durante tres años, hasta 1986, como asesor legal en el Secretariado de la Conferencia Judicial y, más adelante, en el Panel Central.
Posteriormente, el juez Martínez Torres se dedicó durante nueve años a la práctica privada de su profesión, particularmente en el campo de la litigación civil y apelativa; así, laboró en la firma Rivera Cestero & Marchand Quintero, en la División de Litigios del bufete Fiddler, González & Rodríguez y, finalmente, por su cuenta. Además, entre 1988 y 1993, enseñó el curso de Paralegal que ofrecía la División de Educación Continua del Recinto de Río Piedras de la Universidad de Puerto Rico.
En 1993, el juez Martínez Torres regresó al servicio público, esta vez como Director Ejecutivo de la Comisión de Gobierno de la Cámara de Representantes. En tal cargo colaboró y participó en el proceso de evaluación jurídica y en otros trámites relacionados con las leyes de reforma gubernamental que aprobó la Asamblea Legislativa, incluso la Reforma Judicial de 1994. Además, participó en la etapa inicial de la evaluación legislativa de las enmiendas propuestas a las Reglas de Procedimiento Civil y Criminal aún vigentes.
En febrero de 1995 fue nombrado juez del recién creado Tribunal de Circuito de Apelaciones. Con 36 años de edad recién cumplidos, el juez Martínez Torres se convirtió en el más joven de la plantilla de jueces de dicho foro apelativo intermedio. Durante los catorce años que laboró en el Tribunal de Apelaciones, se destacó por su laboriosidad y por la claridad de sus decisiones. Además, colaboró con el Tribunal Supremo en la preparación del Reglamento del Tribunal de Apelaciones que estuvo vigente entre 1996 y 2004. El 4 de febrero de 2009, el Gobernador de Puerto Rico, Hon. Luis Fortuño Burset, lo nombró Juez Asociado del Tribunal Supremo. Tomó posesión el 10 de marzo de 2009.
Además de su labor como Juez Asociado, el juez Martínez Torres ha ofrecido cursos en las escuelas de derecho de la Universidad de Puerto Rico y la Universidad Interamericana.
Research Fellow, Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, Cato Institute
Biography
Trevor Burrus is a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and Center for the Study of Science, as well as managing editor of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy. His academic work has appeared in journals such as the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the New York University Journal of Law and Liberty, the New York University Annual Survey of American Law, the Syracuse Law Review, and many others. His popular writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, USA Today, Forbes, the Huffington Post, the New York Daily News, and others.
Burrus lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Foundation for Economics Education, and other organizations, and he frequently appears on major media outlets. He is also the co-host of Free Thoughts, a weekly podcast that covers topics in libertarian theory, history, and philosophy.
He is the editor of A Conspiracy against Obamacare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Deep Commitments: The Past, Present, and Future of Religious Liberty (Cato, 2017), and holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.
Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law
Biography
James Lindgren is a law professor at Northwestern University, with a BA from Yale and a JD and a PhD in (quantitative) sociology from the University of Chicago. He is a cofounder of the Section on Scholarship of the Association of American Law Schools and a former chair of its Section on Social Science and the Law. He has published in the Yale Law Journal and the Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, California, Northwestern, Georgetown, and UCLA Law Reviews, among others. His work includes "Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal " (Yale Law Journal, 2002) and "Term Limits for the Supreme Court: Life Tenure Reconsidered " (Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 2006). In Evans v. US (1992), the US Supreme Court adopted Lindgren's view of the overlap of bribery and federal extortion. He blogs at the Washington Post.
Vice President and Director, Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, Cato Institute
Biography
Norbert Michel is vice president and director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, where he specializes on issues pertaining to financial markets and monetary policy. Michel was most recently the Director for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation where he edited, and contributed chapters, to two books: The Case Against Dodd–Frank: How the “Consumer Protection” Law Endangers Americans, and Prosperity Unleashed: Smarter Financial Regulation
Michel was previously a tenured professor at Nicholls State University’s College of Business, teaching finance, economics and statistics. Before that, he worked at Heritage as a tax policy analyst in the think tank’s Center for Data Analysis from 2002 to 2005. He previously was with the global energy company Entergy, where he worked on models to help predict bankruptcies of commercial clients.
Michel holds a doctoral degree in financial economics from the University of New Orleans. He received his bachelor of business administration degree in finance and economics from Loyola University. He currently resides in Virginia.
Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute, providing thought and policy leadership on financial issues and the study of financial systems. His work includes cycles of booms and busts, financial crises with their political responses, housing finance, government-sponsored enterprises, risk and uncertainty, central banking, banking and financial regulation, corporate governance, retirement finance, student loans, and the politics of finance.
He previously served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department 2019-2021. He was a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the R Street Institute 2015-2019 and 2021, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 2004-2015. Among the many aspects of his AEI work, he developed the One Page Mortgage Form to give borrowers in clear form the key information they need in order to know what they are committing themselves to. He was President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004. There he invented the Mortgage Partnership Finance program, which successfully created front-end mortgage credit risk sharing beginning in 1997. His decades of banking experience include being a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 1991.
Pollock was a director of the CME Group 2004-2019 and of Ascendium Education Group 1989-2019. He is a director and past-chairman of the Great Books Foundation and a past president of the International Union for Housing Finance.
Constitutional, Appellate, and Political Speech Lawyer
Biography
Randy Elf, a Jamestown, New York, native, attended Jamestown Public Schools and Southwestern Central School.
After graduating as valedictorian from Southwestern, he graduated with honors from Duke University and was Duke’s first guest teacher at Landheim Schondorf, a German-language boarding school in Schondorf am Ammersee, Germany.
Thereafter, he held a one-year position as a German teacher at Southwestern, was an assistant to authors and lecturers Dr. Russell Kirk and Annette Kirk, and covered education and federal and state affairs for The Post-Journal in Jamestown, where his reporting was instrumental in completing Interstate 86 in Chautauqua County.
He graduated as president of his law-school class at Syracuse University—where he co-founded a chapter of the Federalist Society, in which he remains active—and clerked for two federal judges: Brevard Hand of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama in Mobile, and Alice Batchelder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Medina, Ohio.
Having been involved in political campaigns beginning with the first campaign of U.S. Rep. Amo Houghton, he twice ran for the New York State Assembly against a long-term incumbent in Chautauqua County.
Dr. Elf has practiced law, both at the Federal Election Commission and privately. Since 2010, no one in the country has had more experience briefing and conducting hearings on the constitutionality of political-speech law. Much of his experience is reflected in his 2016 Regent University Law Review article.
In 2018, he explored seeking the Republican and Conservative parties’ nominations for New York attorney general.
He has been active in his family’s church and several community organizations in the Jamestown area; is an occasional columnist for The Post-Journal and the Dunkirk Observer; and enjoys participating in several sports, particularly water sports, traveling, and rooting for the Duke Blue Devils and the Buffalo Bills.
