Lieutenant General (Ret.) Ronald L. Burgess, Jr., was commissioned in Military Intelligence through the Auburn University ROTC Program in 1974. He earned a Master of Science degree in Education from the University of Southern California in 1980, and a Master of Military Arts and Science from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in 1986. He recently received an honorary doctorate from National Intelligence University. His military education includes the Armor Officer Basic Course, the Military Intelligence Officers Advanced Course, the Command and General Staff College, the Advanced Military Studies Program, and the Air War College.
Lieutenant General Burgess held a variety of key staff and command positions throughout his 38 year military career. General officer assignments include Director of Intelligence, J2, U.S. Southern Command; Director of Intelligence, J2, Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Customer Outcomes transitioning to Director of the Intelligence Staff in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He was dual-hatted twice as the Acting Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence. His final military assignment was as the 17th Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He joined Auburn University on December 1, 2012, as Senior Counsel for National Security Programs, Cyber Programs and Military Affairs, and now serves as the school’s Chief Operating Officer. His personal awards and decorations include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal (Two Oak Leaf Clusters), Defense Superior Service Medal (Two Oak Leaf Clusters), Legion of Merit, Meritorious Service Medal (Four Oak Leaf Clusters,) Joint Service Commendation Medal, Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, NATO Medal—former Republic of Yugoslavia, Parachutist Badge, Joint Chiefs of Staff Identification Badge and Army Staff Identification Badge.
Antonio Garza served as the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico from 2002 through 2009 and is now Counsel to White & Case in Mexico City. Garza is currently a Director to both Kansas City Southern (NYSE:KSU), where he is member of the Executive Committee and Chairman of the company's subsidiary, Kansas City Southern de Mexico, and MoneyGram (NYSE:MGI) where he serves as Chairman of the company's Committee on Compliance and Ethics. Additionally, Garza is a Trustee at Southern Methodist University (J.D.,1983) and acts as Chairman of the university's Committee on Legal and Governmental Affairs and is a past-Chairman and President of the TexasExes, the alumni association of the University of Texas at Austin (B.B.A.,1980). Mr. Garza served as Chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission from 1998-2002, and prior to that as Texas 99th Secretary of State and Cameron County Judge , 1988-1994.
Andy Keiser served 14 years on Capitol Hill for former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers - as Senior Advisor to the Committee, Chief of Staff, and Legislative Director handling all national security policy issues.
As Deputy National Security Senior Advisor to the pre-election phase of the Trump for America transition team, Mr. Keiser prepared and advised the transition's policy, personnel and agency action teams on all aspects of the national security portfolio. This included work in the Departments of Defense, State, Justice, Homeland Security, the Intelligence Community, and the National Security Council.
He was also the head writer for a nationally-syndicated radio program and assisted in the production of the CNN series “Declassified.”
Mr. Keiser has written extensively on intelligence, space and cyber policy, missile defense, Afghanistan, China, Iran, ISIS, North Korea, and Russia. He also helped shepherd six Intelligence Authorization Acts into law and managed Chairman Rogers’ cyber threat sharing legislation, which passed the House twice and the core of which was later signed into law by President Obama.
He has a Bachelor of Arts from Michigan State University and a Master of Arts from the United States Naval War College. He is active on various national security-focused policy projects at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, where he serves as a Senior Advisor, and at the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, where he serves as a Fellow. He also is a member of the OSS Society and serves on the Meridian International Center’s Global Leadership Council.
Mr. Keiser is currently a Principal at Navigators Global, where he focuses on cybersecurity and other national security priorities. Dubbed a “national security expert” by the Washington Post, Andy is a regular media commentator on national security issues.
Timothy Meyer is an expert in public international law, with specialties in international trade and investment law and international energy governance. His current research examines how international economic agreements relate and respond to concerns about economic opportunity and inequality, as well as the role of the constitutional separation of powers in U.S. international economic policymaking. His past research has examined the interaction of international and local rules on energy subsidies, the role of local governments in free trade agreements, and the creation of non-binding "soft law" obligations. Professor Meyer's work has appeared in the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the California Law Review, the Vanderbilt Law Review, the Journal of Legal Analysis, and the European Journal of International Law, among others. He is also the author of a book on international soft law (with Andrew Guzman), forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Professor Meyer has testified before the U.S. Senate Committees on Foreign Relations and the Judiciary and has served both as counsel and as an expert in cases raising international law issues in U.S. courts.
Before joining Vanderbilt’s law faculty in 2015, Professor Meyer taught for five years at the University of Georgia School of Law. He entered the legal academy after practicing law for several years at the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Legal Adviser where he represented the United States in commercial arbitrations and real property transactions all over the world and in negotiations with foreign governments on diplomatic law issues. Before joining the State Department, Professor Meyer was a law clerk for Justice Neil M. Gorsuch when he sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Professor Meyer earned his B.A. and M.A. in history from Stanford University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and his J.D. and Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he held a Public Policy and Nuclear Threats Fellowship from the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.
Professor Emeritus of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Biography
Jeremy A. Rabkin is a Professor Emeritus of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. Before joining the faculty in June 2007, he was for over two decades a professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Professor Rabkin serves on the board of directors of the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest law firm based in Washington, D.C. Previously he was a board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the board of academic advisors of the American Enterprise Institute.
Professor Rabkin’s books include Law Without Nations? (Princeton University Press, 2005). He authored “If You Need a Friend, Don’t Call a Cosmopolitan,” a chapter in Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship (Sigal R. Ben-Porath & Rogers M. Smith eds., University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). His articles have appeared in major law reviews and political science journals and his journalistic contributions in a range of magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
General Counsel and Vice-President of Litigation, Washington Legal Foundation
Biography
Cory Andrews is General Counsel and Vice-President of Litigation for the Washington Legal Foundation (WLF). As counsel of record for WLF and other clients, he has authored more than 100 briefs, at petition and merits stages, in the U.S. Supreme Court. He also frequently litigates in state and federal appellate courts. Before joining WLF, Cory practiced trial and appellate law for White & Case LLP, where he litigated in state and federal courts on behalf of clients in the telecommunications, hospitality, and banking industries. He received his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Florida, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Florida Law Review and elected to the Order of the Coif. Upon graduation, Cory served as a law clerk to the Honorable Steven D. Merryday of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida.
Director, GW Regulatory Studies Center & Distinguished Professor of Practice, Trachtenberg School of Public Policy & Public Administration, The George Washington University
Biography
Susan Dudley is the Founder and Director of the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center, established in 2009 to raise awareness of regulations’ effects and improve regulatory policy through research, education, and outreach. She is also a distinguished professor of practice in the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration. She is past-president of the Society for Benefit Cost Analysis, a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and on the Regulatory Transparency Project Regulatory Practice Working Group. Her book, Regulation: A Primer, with Jerry Brito, is available on Amazon.com.
From April 2007 through January 2009, Professor Dudley served as the Presidentially-appointed Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and was responsible for the review of draft executive branch regulations under Executive Order 12866, the collection of federal-government-wide information under the Paperwork Reduction Act, the development and implementation of government-wide policies in the areas of information policy, privacy, and statistical policy, and international regulatory cooperation efforts.
Prior to OIRA, she directed the Regulatory Studies Program at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and taught courses on regulation at the George Mason University School of Law. Earlier in her career, Professor Dudley served as an economist at OIRA, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. She was also a consultant to government and private clients at Economists Incorporated. She holds a Master of Science degree from the Sloan School of Management at MIT and a Bachelor of Science degree (summa cum laude) in Resource Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Sheldon Gilbert is the President and CEO of The Federalist Society. Gilbert has been involved in the conservative and libertarian legal movement since law school, and has served in prominent roles at both nonprofit organizations as well as corporate America.
A longtime constitutional litigator, Gilbert has represented clients through amicus and party briefs in nearly a hundred cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, at both the certiorari and merits stages. Most recently, Gilbert served as Senior Lead Counsel for Strategic Initiatives at Walmart, the world’s largest company, where he led teams providing legal advice related to government enforcement, internal investigations, government relations, public relations, and special projects at the center of law and policy.
Before joining Walmart, Gilbert served as Vice President for Content and Development and Senior Fellow for Constitutional Studies at the National Constitution Center, a congressionally chartered non-partisan center for constitutional education and debate, where he led both fundraising and programming efforts. While at the NCC, Gilbert helped ensure that the Center’s programming and exhibits incorporated constitutional perspectives from experts on both the right and the left, including the launch of the Center’s landmark permanent exhibit on the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments.
Prior to the National Constitution Center, Gilbert served as the director of the Institute for Justice’s Center for Judicial Engagement (CJE), where he educated the public about the role of the courts and the Constitution, where he frequently hosted discussions and debates on constitutional issues, and often spoke at Federalist Society lawyer and student chapters across the country.
He was also a litigator with the U.S. Chamber Litigation Center, the litigation arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he represented the U.S. Chamber in over 400 cases in federal and state courts addressing a wide range of legal issues, from free speech to property rights.
Gilbert is a graduate of the George Washington University Law School where he helped found a first-of-its-kind National Religious Freedom Moot Court, which hosted law students from across the country to debate important, emerging religious liberty issues. After graduating from GWU, he also taught as a professorial lecturer at the school.
A graduate of the University of Utah, Gilbert is a child of the Mountain West, where he was born in a coal mining town in Utah and raised in Idaho near the Grand Tetons. Before going to law school, Gilbert’s diverse interests led him to work in a wide range of roles, from software development project management for a nonprofit, to working in his University’s radiobiology research lab, to volunteer service in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for his church.
Joel focuses his litigation practice on the defense of patent infringement claims and challenges to patent validity as well as disputes over trademarks, copyrights and other intellectual property. A registered patent attorney, he has deep experience in post-grant practice before the Patent Office, particularly contested review conducted in parallel with patent infringement litigation. Joel works closely with trial teams preparing patent portfolios for assertive litigation through rigorous “pre-examination” claim validity review and owner-directed re-examination and correction. He has also represented clients in copyright matters and related questions involving the rights surrounding various methods of copying, storing, reproducing and streaming digital media.
Joel litigates and advises candidates, election officials and members of the public on election law, including ballot access and integrity provisions of federal law. He has extensive experience in voter roll integrity and language minority ballot access provisions of federal election statutes. Joel has investigated and enforced statewide violations of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act, and implemented election day polling place observers in primary and general elections in numerous jurisdictions.
Vice President for Litigation & General Counsel, Goldwater Institute
Biography
Jon Riches is the Vice President for Litigation for the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation and General Counsel for the Institute. He litigates in federal and state trial and appellate courts in the areas of economic liberty, regulatory reform, free speech, taxpayer protections, public labor issues, government transparency, and school choice, among others.
Jon has developed and authored several pieces of legislation, including the landmark Right to Earn a Living Act, which provides some of the greatest protections in the country to job-seekers and entrepreneurs facing arbitrary licensing regulations. He also developed legislation eliminating deference to administrative agencies in Arizona—a first-of-its-kind regulatory reform that can serve as a model for the rest of the country.
His work at the Institute has been covered by national media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CBS This Morning, Bloomberg News, and Politico. Jon is also a member of the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project: State and Local Working Group.
Prior to joining the Goldwater Institute, Jon served on active duty in the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps. While on active duty, Jon represented hundreds of clients, litigated dozens of court-martial cases, and advised commanders on a vast array of legal issues.
He previously clerked for Sen. Jon Kyl on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, worked for the Rules Committee in the Arizona State Senate, and clerked in the Office of Counsel to the President at the White House. Jon received his B.A. from Boston College, where he graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He earned his J.D. from the University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law.
Jon served as a presidentially appointed Panel Member on the Federal Service Impasses Panel. He is an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve and an Adjunct Professor at Arizona State University School of Law. Jon is a native of Phoenix.