Associate Professor & Director, Constitutional Government Initiative, Wheatley Institute, Brigham Young University
Biography
James C. Phillips is the Constitutional Government Initiative Director and an associate professor at BYU’s Wheatley Institute. He is also a fellow with the UC-Berkeley School of Law’s Public Law and Policy Program and an academic affiliate with the D.C.-based law firm Schaerr|Jaffe. His scholarship has been cited by judges around the country, including at the U.S. Supreme Court, and has been covered in various media outlets, including the New York Times Magazine, USA Today, Reuters, CNN, and Fox News. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society's Religious Liberty Practice Group and the J. Reuben Clark Law Society Religious Liberty Committee.
Prior to joining Wheatley, Phillips was associate professor of law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law, where he taught Constitutional Law, Religion and the Constitution, Civil Procedure, Family Law, and Professional Responsibility and was named 1L Professor of the Year. Dr. Phillips has taught Administrative Law at BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, where he also helped conceive and design the Corpus of Founding-Era American English. He was also a Non-resident Fellow with Stanford Law School’s Constitutional Law Center.
Dr. Phillips has published dozens of academic articles, primarily in law journals, but also communications, business, and history journals. His longer pieces have been published in, for example, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and his shorter articles have been published in journals such as the Yale Law Journal Forum and the Duke Law Journal Online. Dr. Phillips has also written op-eds on constitutional issues for Newsweek, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register, Deseret News, and National Review.
Prior to his university posts, Dr. Phillips practiced law as a Constitutional Law Fellow for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and an associate for Kirton | McConkie. He has worked on dozens of cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as cases in federal and state courts throughout the country. He is a member of the bar in Utah and D.C. He clerked for Judge Thomas B. Griffith on the U.S. Court of Appeal for the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Thomas R. Lee on the Utah Supreme Court. Dr. Phillips earned his JD, Order of the Coif, from UC-Berkeley’s School of Law, where he was a member of the California Law Review. He also has a PhD in Jurisprudence & Social Policy from UC-Berkeley, an M.A. in Mass Communication from BYU, and a B.A. in History from Arizona State University.
Director, Center to Protect Free Speech, American Legislative Exchange Council
Biography
Shelby Emmett graduated from James Madison College at Michigan State University (GO GREEN!!) in 2006 with a dual-major in Political Theory & Constitutional Democracy and Social Relations & Policy. Shelby attended the David A. Clarke School of Law in Washington, D.C., where she participated in the school’s Legislative Clinic.
After law school, Shelby served as the Policy Coordinator for a national non-profit in Baltimore. In 2012, Shelby was the Legislative Fellow with the Republican Study Committee, the largest caucus in the House of Representatives. During the 113th session of Congress, Shelby served as Legislative Counsel for Michigan’s 11th district, responsible for a broad legislative portfolio including education and civil rights. Most recently, Shelby was the Legal & Legislative Policy Advocate and Strategic Outreach Officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit organization devoted to protecting free speech rights on college campuses.
Shelby, a native of Detroit, Michigan is an attorney licensed in the state of Maryland and lives in Washington, D.C. In her down time, Shelby enjoys traveling and kickboxing–and is looking forward to competing in her first competition in 2017.
Senior Counsel, National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls
Speaker Information
Randy Elf
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.
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.
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.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy and civil liberties. He worked as special assistant to President Reagan and editor of the political magazine Inquiry. He writes regularly for leading publications such as Fortune magazine, National Interest, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Times. Bandow speaks frequently at academic conferences, on college campuses, and to business groups. Bandow has been a regular commentator on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. He holds a J.D. from Stanford University.
Dr. John Eastman is the former Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service and former Dean at Chapman University's Dale E. Fowler School of Law, where he had been a member of the faculty since 1999, specializing in Constitutional Law, Legal History, and Property. He is a founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute that he founded in 1999. He has a Ph.D. in Government from the Claremont Graduate School and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, and a B.A. in Politics and Economics from the University of Dallas. He serves as the Chairman of the Board of the National Organization for Marriage.
Prior to joining the Chapman law faculty, Dr. Eastman served as a law clerk to the Honorable Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States, and to the Honorable J. Michael Luttig, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and practiced law with the national law firm of Kirkland & Ellis. Dr. Eastman has also represented numerous clients in important constitutional law matters and has argued before the Supreme Court. On behalf of the Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, he has participated as amicus curiae before the Supreme Court of the United States, U.S. Courts of Appeals, and State Supreme Courts in more than one hundred cases of constitutional significance, including Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (the school vouchers case), Kelo v. New London, Ct. (eminent domain), and Van Orden v. Perry (the 10 Commandments case). He has also appeared as an expert legal commentator on numerous television and radio programs, including C-SPAN, Fox News, PBS, NewsHour, and The O'Reilly Factor.
Michael Barone is a Senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner, where he writes a twice-weekly column and contributes to their Beltway Confidential blog. He is also a frequent contributor during Fox News Channel's election coverage.