Here are the latest events.
Chief Legal Officer, Paradigm
Manager of Tech and Innovation, Charles Koch Institute
Jesse Blumenthal manages the Technology & Innovation work of the Charles Koch Institute, focusing on emerging technology issues, digital free speech, and industries ripe for innovation.
The Charles Koch Institute and Charles Koch Foundation work to foster a national conversation on critical issues that have a strong impact on the advancement of societal well-being.
Senior Director, Government Affairs, Consumer Technology Association
Jamie Boone is the senior director of government affairs for the Consumer Technology Association, serving as an advocate for the consumer technology industry on Capitol Hill. Her core areas of policy expertise include self-driving vehicles and vehicle technology, privacy, and drones. She is a passionate thought leader on public policy for automated and connected vehicles, and has spoken at CES, SXSW, and on various policy panels across the DC area. Jamie is an experienced legislative and policy professional, having previously served as a longtime aide for Congressman Bill Shuster, last acting as his deputy chief of staff. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Women’s High Tech Coalition. Jamie earned a Bachelor of Arts from Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania before moving to Washington, D.C., where she currently lives with her husband.
Program Officer, Madison Initiative, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Jean Parvin Bordewich is a Program Officer for the Madison Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She manages a portfolio of grants related to strengthening U.S. democracy, with a particular emphasis on the institution of Congress.
Previously, Jean spent over 20 years as a congressional staff member. Before joining Hewlett in 2014, she served for more than five years as staff director of the U.S. Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, the committee most involved in the administration of the Senate and oversight of legislative branch agencies. In that capacity, she worked on campaign finance disclosure legislation, a new law to broaden access to voting for military and overseas voters, Senate rules and regulations including filibuster reform, improving election administration, streamlining the process for confirmation of Presidential nominations, Senate operations and administration, and oversight for the Federal Election Commission and the Election Assistance Commission. She also served as staff director of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, which was responsible for all 2013 Presidential Inaugural events at the U.S. Capitol.
Earlier in her career, Jean was elected to three terms as a councilwoman in New York’s Hudson Valley, ran for Congress in 1998, was a delegate to two national Presidential nominating conventions, and served as chief of staff and campaign director for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. She also has worked as a writer and editor for magazines and newspapers, and as a business executive. Since 2014, Jean has written and produced two plays in the Washington, D.C. Capital Fringe Festival, including a political drama about McCarthyism in the U.S. Senate.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in classics from Brown University and a master’s degree in business administration from The George Washington University.
Head of AI Policy, Abundance Institute
Neil Chilson is the Head of AI Policy at the Abundance Institute. Prior to this position, he served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity. Chilson is a lawyer, computer scientist, and author of the book “Getting Out of Control: Emergent Leadership in a Complex World.”
Chilson was previously the senior research fellow for Technology and Innovation at Stand Together, where he guided efforts to understand and promote the legal and cultural paradigms that best enable people to discover, innovate, and improve all our lives.
Before Stand Together, Chilson was the Chief Technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, where he focused on the economics of privacy and blockchain-related issues. Previously, he was an attorney advisor to Acting FTC Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen. In both roles he advised Chairman Ohlhausen and worked with staff on nearly every major technology-related case, report, workshop, or other FTC proceeding since January 2014. Neil joined the FTC from telecom firm Wilkinson Barker Knauer. Neil is frequently quoted by the press and his work has appeared in numerous news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USAToday, and Newsweek. Neil has a J.D. from The George Washington Law School, a M.S. in computer science from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a B.S. in computer science from Harding University.
Advisor on Policy, Data for Democracy
Renée has a decade of experience in technological, marketing, and business capacities in a variety of industries including supply chain logistics, venture capital, and derivatives trading. She has served as an advisor to the State Department, Congress, and other state and federal government institutions concerned with the spread of disinformation and propaganda.
Non-resident Distinguished Senior Fellow, Technology & Innovation, R Street Institute
Mike Godwin focuses his research and writing on the areas of patent and copyright reform, surveillance reform, technology policy, freedom of expression and global internet policy.
He previously served as a senior policy advisor at Internews, advising the organization’s public-policy partners in developing and transitional democracies as part of the Global Internet Policy Project.
Mike also served as general counsel for the California-based Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia and other collaborative projects. There, he created and directed anti-censorship, privacy, trademark and copyright strategies and policies including Wikimedia’s responses to the SOPA and PIPA initiatives.
Prior to that, Godwin was the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which he advised on a range of legal issues centered on freedom of expression and privacy rights during the accelerating growth of Internet access in the United States. His continuing career as an Internet-law thought leader has included a policy fellowship at the Center for Democracy and Technology and a research fellowship at Yale Law School.
Early in his career, he served as a reporter and later editor-in-chief of The Daily Texan. He is also a contributing editor at Reason magazine and is the originator of the widely cited “Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies,” which, in 2012, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Godwin received his bachelor’s and juris doctor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Professor of Law and Co-Director, High Tech Law Institute, Santa Clara University School of Law
Eric Goldman is a Professor of Law, and Co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute, at Santa Clara University School of Law. Before he became a full-time academic in 2002, he practiced Internet law for 8 years in the Silicon Valley. His research and teaching focuses on Internet, IP and advertising law topics, and he blogs on these topics at the Technology & Marketing Law Blog [http://blog.ericgoldman.org]. Managing IP magazine has twice named him to a shortlist of North American “IP Thought Leaders,” and he has been named an “IP Vanguard” by the California State Bar’s IP Section.
Head of Policy, Lincoln Network
Zach Graves is head of policy at the Lincoln Network, a nonprofit that helps bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and DC. Previously, Zach was technology policy program director at the R Street Institute, where he remains an associate fellow. Prior to R Street, Zach worked at the Cato Institute and the America’s Future Foundation. He is also a fellow at the Internet Law and Policy Foundry.
He holds a master’s from the California Institute of the Arts and a bachelor’s from the University of California at Davis.
Zach is married and lives in Washington.
Program Manager, Academic & Student Programs, Mercatus Center, George Mason University
Anne Hobson is a Program Manager for Academic & Student Programs at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She is currently an associate fellow of technology policy at the R Street Institute and a 2017-2019 Internet Law & Policy Foundry fellow. Prior to that, Anne was a Public Policy Associate at Facebook. She is currently pursuing a PhD in economics from George Mason University and is an alum of the Mercatus Center MA Fellowship at George Mason University. She continues to focus on policy issues associated with emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and cybersecurity. She received her B.A. in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University.
Co-Founder & Executive Director, Lincoln Network
Garrett is the Co-founder & Executive Director of Lincoln, a network where liberty and technology meet.
Garrett is the former CEO/co-founder of SendHub, a venture-backed startup based in Silicon Valley. He previously served as professional staff on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where his oversight portfolio included Afghanistan, Pakistan and Haiti.
Johnson was graduated magna cum laude in three years with a double major in Political Science and English. Johnson was named an academic All-American in 2005 and 2006 and earned the Florida State Golden Torch Award given to the FSU student-athlete with the highest GPA.
Johnson completed graduate studies at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and was accepted to Harvard law school. Originally from Florida, he took his undergraduate degrees from Florida State University where he was also a two time NCAA track champion.
Former President, National Religious Broadcasters
Dr. Jerry A. Johnson is the former President of the National Religious Broadcasters. He became president of NRB on November 1, 2013, succeeding Dr. Frank Wright. Before accepting that post, he was President of Criswell College, and former Dean of Academics at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also held several positions during 14 years at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. From 2013-2014 he served as Chairman of the Nominating Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Fellow, Beeck Center, Georgetown University
Lorelei Kelly is an expert on building inclusive and informed democratic systems. She leads the Resilient Democracy Coalition (RDC) and is based at the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University. The coalition assesses how data, technology and new engagement methods can help build a more resilient democracy, specifically focused on Congress.
Lorelei used to lead the Smart Congress initiative with the Open Technology Institute at New America. She was also at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. A civil-military expert, she has spent a decade leading “Security for a New Century” a bipartisan study group in the House and Senate. Lorelei has worked with hundreds of women candidates across the USA—creating and communicating national security platforms that reflect the needs of a rapidly changing world. She attended Grinnell College, Stanford University and the Air Command and Staff College of the US Air Force. She has co-authored two books and numerous articles. Please see the list of her publications.
Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Office of Science and Technology Policy
Michael Kratsios advises President Donald J. Trump on a broad range of technology policy issues and drives United States technology priorities and strategic initiatives.
Michael has had an integral role in the development and execution of the Trump Administration’s national technology policy agenda since inauguration. Under his leadership, the White House launched initiatives in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, 5G and broadband communications, autonomous vehicles, commercial drones, STEM education, and advanced manufacturing.
Michael encourages the development of emerging technologies in the United States, empowers American companies to commercialize and adopt new technologies, and improves and expands access to the tools necessary for Americans to succeed in the 21st century economy. He is also responsible for aligning the development of new technologies with the Administration’s priorities, including standing up for the American worker, defending American innovations abroad, and protecting the safety and security of the American people.
Michael has represented the United States as the Head of Delegation at multiple international fora, including G7 Technology Ministerials in Italy, Canada, and France; G20 Digital Economy Ministerials in Argentina and Japan; and the OECD Ministerial Council Meeting in Paris. Prior to joining the White House, Michael was a Principal at Thiel Capital. Michael graduated from Princeton University and served as a Visiting Scholar at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.
On August 1, 2019, the U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed Michael as the fourth Chief Technology Officer of the United States.
President and Founder, International Center for Law & Economics
Geoffrey A. Manne is the president and founder of the International Center for Law and Economics (ICLE), a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center based in Portland, Oregon. He is also a distinguished fellow at Northwestern Law School’s Searle Center on Law, Regulation, & Economic Growth. In April 2017 he was appointed by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to the FCC’s Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, and he recently served for two years on the FCC’s Consumer Advisory Committee.
Mr. Manne earned his JD and AB degrees from the University of Chicago and is an expert in the economic analysis of law, specializing in competition, telecommunications, consumer protection, intellectual property, and technology policy.
Prior to founding ICLE, Manne was a law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School. From 2006-2009, he took a leave from teaching to develop Microsoft’s law and economics academic outreach program. Manne has also served as a lecturer in law at the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Virginia School of Law. He practiced antitrust law and appellate litigation at Latham & Watkins, clerked for Hon. Morris S. Arnold on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, and worked as a research assistant for Judge Richard Posner. He was also once (very briefly) employed by the FTC.
Mr. Manne’s publications have appeared in numerous journals including the Journal of Competition Law and Economics, the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, the Supreme Court Economic Review, and the Arizona Law Review, among others. With former FTC Commissioner, Joshua Wright, Manne is the editor of a volume from Cambridge University Press entitled, Competition Policy and Intellectual Property Law Under Uncertainty: Regulating Innovation. Manne has also testified on several occasions before Congress and at the FCC and FTC, and he regularly files written comments and amicus briefs on key antitrust, IP, and telecommunications issues. His analysis is frequently published in popular print and broadcasting outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Foreign Affairs, NPR, and Bloomberg, among others.
Manne is a member of the American Law and Economics Association, the Canadian Law and Economics Association, and the Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics. He blogs at Truth on the Market (www.truthonthemarket.com) (of which he is also the co-founder), is a contributor at WIRED, and tweets at @geoffmanne. His scholarly publications are available at http://ssrn.com/author=175541.
Founding Partner, Floodgate Capital
Mike Maples, Jr is a Partner at Floodgate. He has been on the Forbes Midas List since 2010 and was also named one of “8 Rising Stars” by FORTUNE Magazine. Before becoming a full-time investor, Mike was involved as a founder and operating executive at back-to-back startup IPOs, including Tivoli Systems (IPO TIVS, acquired by IBM) and Motive (IPO MOTV, acquired by Alcatel-Lucent.)
Some of Mike’s investments include Twitter, Twitch.tv, ngmoco, Weebly, Chegg, Bazaarvoice, Spiceworks, Okta, and Demandforce.
Mike is known for coining the term “Thunder Lizards,” which is a metaphor derived from Godzilla that describes the tiny number of truly exceptional companies that are wildly disruptive capitalist mutations. Mike likes to think of himself as a hunter of the “atomic eggs” that beget these companies.
General Partner, Bullpen Capital
Paul is the founder of four companies including Ahpah Software (a computer security firm acquired by InterTrust); Tribe (one of the world’s first social networks), and Aggregate Knowledge (a big data advertising attribution company acquired in 2014 by Neustar). Paul’s early online gaming innovations in multi-player user experience from almost 20 years ago are the inspiration for several of the modern social gaming offerings. He is the holder of over a dozen core patents covering social networking and big data.
Prior to forming Bullpen, he was an active angel investor and personally invested in the first rounds of Zynga, TubeMogul, and uDemy. Paul founded Bullpen in 2010 and has led several of its key investments including FanDuel, Namely, Ipsy, SpotHero, Classy, and Airmap. Paul holds a BS in Mathematics from Lehigh University and a Masters in Computer Science from Princeton University.
Federal Affairs Manager & Executive Director for Digital Liberty, Americans for Tax Reform
Katie McAuliffe is Federal Affairs Manager at Americans for Tax Reform and Executive Director of Digital Liberty. She focuses her research and advocacy efforts on telecom/technology issues, such as spectrum allocation, internet taxation, electronic communications privacy reform, and tech/telecomm reform. In the telecom field she has experience from not only the legislative side, but the industry perspective as well. Before staffing Congressman Cliff Stearns' (R-Fla.) DC office in various capacities (Staff Assistant/Legislative Correspondent and Budget Legislative Assistant) she spent time as a radio station professional in the US and abroad. Her commentary has been published in The Hill, U.S News & World Report, Townhall.com and The Daily Caller. She received her Master of Mass Communications with a Telecommunications Policy focus from the University of Florida and her B.A. from Virginia Tech.
Legal Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Corynne McSherry is the Legal Director at EFF, specializing in intellectual property, open access, and free speech issues. Her favorite cases involve defending online fair use, political expression, and the public domain against the assault of copyright maximalists. As a litigator, she has represented Professor Lawrence Lessig, Public.Resource.Org, the Yes Men, and a dancing baby, among others, and one of her first cases at EFF was In re Sony BMG CD Technologies Litigation (aka the "rootkit" case). In 2015 she was named one of California's Top Entertainment Lawyers. She was also named AmLaw's "Litigator of the Week" for her work on Lenz v. Universal. Her policy work includes leading EFF’s effort to fix copyright (including the successful effort to shut down the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA), promote net neutrality, and promote best practices for online expression. In 2014, she testified before Congress about problems with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Corynne comments regularly on digital rights issues and has been quoted in a variety of outlets, including NPR, CBS News, Fox News, the New York Times, Billboard, the Wall Street Journal, and Rolling Stone.
Prior to joining EFF, Corynne was a civil litigator at the law firm of Bingham McCutchen, LLP. Corynne has a B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz, a Ph.D from the University of California at San Diego, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. While in law school, Corynne published Who Owns Academic Work?: Battling for Control of Intellectual Property (Harvard University Press, 2001).
Senior Vice President, Political and Industry Affairs, Consumer Technology Association
Tiffany M. Moore serves as senior vice president of political and industry affairs for the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)™. Promoted to the newly created position in 2018, Moore’s expanded role includes overseeing CTA’s U.S. jobs, and diversity and inclusion initiatives. In addition, she leads the association’s advocacy efforts on Capitol Hill on issues including communications and technology policy, patent litigation reform, strategic immigration reform and international trade, and overseeing CTA’s political action committee CTAPAC. Moore joined CTA as vice president of government and political affairs in 2015.
Before joining CTA, she served as principal of Moore Consulting and strategic consultant with TwinLogic Strategies. In these roles, Moore advised corporations, trade associations, and coalitions on how to influence technology and innovation policy before Congress and the administration.
Moore’s career in Washington, DC spans 20 years where she has served in a variety of roles including stints as a senior advisor to Congress, a corporate government relations executive, a political appointee at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and a strategic consultant to tech and telecom companies and trade associations.
A proud native of Detroit, MI, Moore earned her master’s degree in international affairs from George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, and her bachelor’s degree from Western Michigan University.
Founder and Director, TechCongress
Travis Moore was the Legislative Director for Rep. Henry A. Waxman, the former Chairman and Ranking Member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, who had jurisdiction over wide-ranging matters of technology policymaking. Travis has launched a number of programs to build human capital and improve technological capacity inside and outside of Congress including:
Travis is the Co-Founder of Congress Too, a group of 1500 former Congressional staffers that brought the #MeToo movement to Capitol Hill and spearheaded a reform overhaul signed into law in late 2018.
Travis' work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Re/code, Politico, The Hill, Roll Call and other outlets. He can be reached at Travis [at] TechCongress.io or @travismoore.
Founder and Executive Director, Code for America
Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America. She served as the U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 2013–2014, where she architected and helped found the United States Digital Service. She currently serves on the Defense Innovation Board in her personal capacity. She is known for her TED talk, Coding a Better Government, and is the recipient of several awards, including the National Democratic Institute’s Democracy Award and being named by Wired as one of the 25 people who has most shaped the past 25 years. She previously ran the Game Developers Conference, Game Developer magazine, Gamasutra.com, and the Independent Games Festival, followed by the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 events. She is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Oakland, California with her daughter, husband, and seven chickens.
Assistant Professor of Economics, SUNY-Purchase College
Liya Palagashvili’s research is broadly in law and economics, political economy, development economics, regulation, and entrepreneurship. She has written on topics relating to labor regulations, entrepreneurship, foreign aid agency rankings and aid effectiveness, self-governing communities, culture and transitional economies in Eastern Europe, federalism, and community policing. Currently, she is conducting interviews with tech entrepreneurs and creating a unique survey to examine early tech start-ups and the regulatory framework in their industries, as well as co-authoring a book that analyzes the policies in response to the 2008 financial crisis.
Liya is also the Law and Economics Fellow with the Classical Liberal Institute at New York University School of Law and a Senior Fellow with the Fraser Institute. She earned her PhD in economics from George Mason University in 2015, and while in graduate school, she was also a Visiting PhD Fellow with the Department of Economics at New York University.
She has published in academic journals such as the History of Political Economy, Journal of Institutional Economics, Supreme Court Economic Review, and the Journal of Law, Economics, and Policy, among others. Liya has also published in media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer, MSN, Yahoo Finance, U.S. News and World Report, and Orange County Register, among others.
In 2016, Liya was named one of the Forbes “30 under 30” in Law & Policy.
Director, Public Policy, Mozilla
Chris Riley is the Director of Public Policy at Mozilla, working to advance the open internet through public policy analysis and advocacy, strategic planning, coalition building, and community engagement. Chris manages the global Mozilla public policy team and its active engagements in Washington, Brussels, New Delhi, and around the world. Chris works on all things internet policy, motivated by the belief that an open, disruptive internet delivers tremendous socioeconomic benefits, and that if we as a global society don't work to protect and preserve the internet's core features, those benefits will go away. The internet ecosystem isn't perfect - but we have to be smart in how we address its problems while continuing to invest in its strengths. Getting internet policy right is crucial for that future.
Prior to joining Mozilla, Chris worked as a program manager at the U.S. Department of State on Internet freedom, a policy counsel with the non-profit public interest organization Free Press, and an attorney-advisor at the Federal Communications Commission. Chris holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University, where he worked as a research and teaching assistant and an instructor, and a J.D. from Yale Law School, taking internships at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the law firm Ropes & Gray. He has published scholarship on topics including innovation policy, cognitive framing, graph drawing, and distributed load balancing.
Executive Director, Mercatus Center, George Mason University
Dan Rothschild is the Executive Director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He leads strategy and oversees all programs and operations for the organization.
Prior to serving in this role at Mercatus, Mr. Rothschild was director of state projects and a senior fellow with the R Street Institute. He joined R Street in October 2013 after two years as the first-ever director of external affairs and coalitions at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously, he spent six years in a variety of policy, communications, and project management positions at the Mercatus Center. He has worked extensively with think tanks throughout the country.
His popular writing and articles and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Reason, Weekly Standard, Roll Call, The Hill, Chicago Policy Review, Economic Affairs, and many other popular and policy publications. He was a 2012-13 National Review Institute Washington fellow. Dan has testified before the U.S. Congress and several state legislatures on tax and fiscal policy, government reform, and disaster recovery policy.
Rothschild has a bachelor’s degree from Grinnell College, a master’s degree from the University of Manchester, and a master’s degree in public policy from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
Vice President, Glen Echo Group
As Vice President at Glen Echo Group, Ellen Satterwhite helps clients formulate policy positions and tell their stories with good one-liners backed by solid data. As a co-author of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, Consumer Policy Advisor to the Commission and freelance consultant, her work has been written about in Huffington Post, AllThingsD, CNet, Geekwire, GigaOm and CivSource. Previously, Ellen served as Program Director for Gig.U, supporting communities seeking gigabit speeds.
Satterwhite earned a Master’s in Public Affairs from UT Austin and a BA from Grinnell College. She believes brevity is the soul of wit and someone should tell that to YouTube commenters.
Policy Director, Demand Progress
Daniel leads Demand Progress and Demand Progress Education Fund’s efforts on issues that concern governmental transparency/accountability/reform, civil liberties/national security, and promoting an open internet.
He co-founded the Congressional Data Coalition, which brings together organizations from across the political spectrum to advocate for a tech-savvy Congress. Daniel directs the Advisory Committee on Transparency, which supports the work of the Congressional Transparency Caucus, and is a fellow at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. His new website, EveryCRSReport, recently won a ‘le hackie’ award from D.C. Legal Hackers.
In 2016 Daniel was named to the FastCase 50 and in 2013 Daniel was named among the 'top 25 most influential people under 40 in gov and tech' by FedScoop. He is a nationally recognized expert on federal transparency, accountability, and capacity and has testified before Congress and appeared on NPR, C-SPAN, and other news outlets.
He previously worked as policy director at CREW; policy counsel at the Sunlight Foundation; and as a legislative attorney with the Congressional Research Service. Daniel graduated cum laude from Emory University School of Law.
Managing Director, Econ One
Hal Singer is an expert in antitrust, consumer protection, and regulation. He has researched, published, and testified on competition-related issues in a wide variety of industries, including media, pharmaceuticals, sports, and finance. He has extensive experience providing expert economic and policy advice to regulatory agencies in the United States and Canada, as well as before congressional committees.
Dr. Singer is also a Senior Fellow at the George Washington Institute of Public Policy and an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University, McDonough School of Business, where he teaches advanced pricing to MBA candidates. In 2018, the American Antitrust Institute honored Dr. Singer with an antitrust enforcement award for his work in the Lidoderm antitrust litigation.
Chairman, Anduril Industries and Partner, Founders Fund
Trae Stephens is Co-Founder and Chairman of Anduril Industries, and additionally a Partner at Founders Fund.
Trae was a senior in high school on 9/11 and was inspired to attend Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service focusing on Arabic and Security Studies, later serving as a computational linguist building enterprise solutions to Arabic/Persian name matching and data enrichment within the United States Intelligence Community.
After his time in the Intelligence Community, Trae joined as an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he led teams focused on growth in the intelligence/defense space as well as international expansion, helping large organizations solve their hardest data analysis problems. He was also an integral part of the product team, leading the design and strategy for new product offerings. He simultaneously served as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University.
Trae has also served in the office of then Congressman Rob Portman and in the Political Affairs Office at the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, D.C. immediately following the installation of Hamid Karzai’s transitional government.
Director of Research, American Economic Liberties Project
Matt Stoller is a public intellectual who writes about the American anti-monopoly
tradition. He is the author of the Simon and Schuster book Goliath: The Hundred Year
War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. Stoller is the Director of Research at
the American Economic Liberties Project. He publishes an email newsletter called BIG.
Stoller is a former policy advisor to the Senate Budget Committee, and worked in the House of Representatives on the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform Act.
He has lectured on competition policy and media at Columbia University, Harvard Law, Duke Law, Bertelsmann Foundation, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, West Point and the National Communications Commission of Taiwan. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Fast Company, Foreign Policy, the Guardian, Vice, The American Conservative, and the Baffler.
He has also produced for MSNBC and starred in a short-lived television show on FX called Brand X with Russell Brand.
President, TechFreedom
Berin Szoka serves as President of TechFreedom. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow and the Director of the Center for Internet Freedom at The Progress & Freedom Foundation. Before joining PFF, he was an Associate in the Communications Practice Group at Latham & Watkins LLP, where he advised clients on regulations affecting the Internet and telecommunications industries. Before joining Latham's Communications Practice Group, Szoka practiced at Lawler Metzger Milkman & Keeney, LLC, a boutique telecommunications law firm in Washington, and clerked for the Hon. H. Dale Cook, Senior U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Oklahoma. Szoka received his Bachelor's degree in economics from Duke University and his juris doctor from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he served as Submissions Editor of the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology. He is admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia and California (inactive).
Senior Fellow, R Street Institute
Prior to R Street, Adam spent 12 years as a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Before the Mercatus Center, he served as the president of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. Adam has also worked for the Adam Smith Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.
Adam has published 10 books on a wide range of topics, including online child safety, internet governance, intellectual property, telecommunications policy, media regulation and federalism.
In 2008, Adam received the Family Online Safety Institute’s “Award for Outstanding Achievement.”
Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Institute for Progress
Caleb Watney is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress.
Caleb manages the metascience and immigration policy teams at IFP. His research focuses on policy levers the U.S. could use to rebuild state capacity and increase long-term rates of innovation.
Previously, Caleb worked as the director of innovation policy at the Progressive Policy Insitute, a technology policy fellow at the R Street Institute, and a graduate research fellow at the Mercatus Center. His commentary has been published in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Politico, Lawfare, and the National Review. He has also been cited in the New York Times, The Economist, Vox, Ars Technica, and the National Journal. He received his master’s in economics from George Mason University and a bachelor of business administration from Sterling College.
Professor of Law and Assistant Director, Criminal Justice Center, University of Florida Levin College of Law
Professor Stinneford teaches and writes about legal ethics, criminal law, criminal procedure, and constitutional law. His work has been cited by the United States Supreme Court, several state supreme courts and federal courts of appeal, and numerous scholars. It has published in numerous scholarly journals including the Georgetown Law Journal, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the William & Mary Law Review. The Stanford-Yale Junior faculty forum selected one of his articles as the best paper in the category of Constitutional History, and the AALS Criminal Justice Section named another article as the best paper in its Junior Scholars Paper Competition. In the fall of 2015, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Georgetown Law Center, Center for the Constitution.
Before joining the Florida faculty in 2009, Stinneford clerked for the Hon. James Moran of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, served as an Assistant United States Attorney, and practiced law with Winston & Strawn in Chicago. Stinneford teaches first-year courses in Criminal Law and Constitutional Law, and upper-level courses in Professional Responsibility, Criminal Procedure, Federal Criminal Law, Law & Literature, and White Collar Crime.
Associate Dean & Principle Lecturer, Regent University School of Law
Professor Jacob has been a law professor at Regent University since January 2001. Prior to coming to Regent, his career began in a big-firm law practice and included years as a religious liberty lawyer, in Christian ministry leadership, and in Christian higher education.
Most of his teaching and scholarship is in the area of constitutional law. His published articles include"Griswold and the Defense of Traditional Marriage” in the North Dakota Law Review; “Will the Real Constitutional Originalist Please Stand Up?” in the Creighton Law Review; “Back to Basics: Constitutional Meaning and ‘Tradition,’” in the Texas Tech Law Review; and “Free Exercise in the ‘Lobbying Nineties,’” in the Nebraska Law Review.
Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
JEFFREY S. SUTTON is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He has served as Chair of the Federal Judicial Conference Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, Chair of the Advisory Committee on Appellate Rules, and Chair of the Supreme Court Fellows Commission. He currently serves as Chair of the Executive Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States. Since 1993, Chief Judge Sutton has been an adjunct professor at The Ohio State University College of Law, where he teaches seminars on State Constitutional Law, the United States Supreme Court, and Appellate Advocacy. He also teaches a class on State Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. Among other publications, he is the author of Who Decides? States as Laboratories of Constitutional Experimentation and 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law. He is the co-author of a casebook, State Constitutional Law: The Modern Experience, as well as The Law of Judicial Precedent. He is also the co-editor of The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law. In 2006, Chief Judge Sutton was elected to the American Law Institute, and in 2017 he was elected to its Council.
Adjunct Professor of Law, Scalia Law; Google, Corporate Counsel
Kathryn Ciano Mauler currently serves as a Corporate Counsel at Google. Prior to Google, Kathryn was Senior Regulatory Counsel at Uber Technologies, and also spent three years at i360, LLC as General Counsel. Before this, she also worked at a boutique law firm in Washington, D.C. and at the Institute for Justice.
She received her B.A. from the University of Florida. She also received her business degree from the University of Florida - Warrington College of Business, studying at the Ecole supérieure de Commerce de Toulouse in France. Kathryn's J.D. is from the George Mason University School of Law.
Professor of Law, University of Baltimore School of Law
Professor Garrett Epps joined the University of Baltimore School of Law in 2008. He teaches courses in Constitutional Law, First Amendment, and Fiction and Non-Fiction Writing for Law Students. He is a contributing writer to The Atlantic Online and serves as the magazine's Supreme Court correspondent. He is also a contributing editor of The American Prospect. Epps' most recent book, American Justice 2014: Nine Clashing Visions on the Supreme Court, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Professor Epps' previous book, American Epic: Reading the U.S. Constitution, was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. In March 2014, American Epic was named a finalist for the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Book award. Two of his previous books, Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America (2006) and To an Unknown God: Religious Freedom on Trial (2001), were both also Silver Gavel finalists. A former staff writer for The Washington Post, Epps has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic and The American Prospect.
He received his LL.M. in Comparative and International Law and his J.D. from Duke University, where he served as articles editor of Law and Contemporary Problems and graduated with the Willis Smith Award for the highest three-year academic average. Before attending law school, Epps earned his M.A. in English Writing in 1975 from Hollins College and his B.A. in 1972 from Harvard College, where he was editor of The Harvard Crimson.
Deputy General Counsel, U. S. House of Representatives, Office of General Counsel
Todd Tatelman has served in the Office of General Counsel since November 2011. Mr. Tatelman previously served as a Legislative Attorney for the American Law Division of the Congressional Research Service. He received his bachelor of arts degrees in Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics from Boston University and his law degree, with honors, from The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law, where he was a member of The Catholic University Law Review.
George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
TODD J. ZYWICKI is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University and Research Fellow of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. During the Fall 2023 semester he served as the Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy for the Bruce Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado-Boulder. From 2020-2021 he was Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Taskforce on Federal Consumer Financial Law. In 2021 he was inducted to the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers. He is also a Senior Fellow of the F.A. Hayek Program for the Advanced Study of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at George Mason University and a former Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute. From 2015-2017 he was Executive Director of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. He served as Co-Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review from 2006-2017. From 2003-2004, Professor Zywicki served as the Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. He has also taught at Vanderbilt University Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Boston College Law School, Mississippi College School of Law, and China University of Political Science and Law.
Professor Zywicki clerked for Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and worked as an associate at Alston & Bird in Atlanta, Georgia, where he practiced bankruptcy and commercial law. He received his J.D. from the University of Virginia, where he was executive editor of the Virginia Tax Review and John M. Olin Scholar in Law and Economics. Professor Zywicki also received an M.A. in Economics from Clemson University and an A.B. cum Laude with high honors in his major from Dartmouth College.
Professor Zywicki is also a Lone Mountain Fellow of the Property and Environment Research Center, a Fellow of the International Centre for Economic Research in Turin, Italy, and a former Senior Fellow of the Goldwater Institute. During the Fall 2008 Semester Professor Zywicki was the Searle Fellow of the George Mason University School of Law and was a 2008-09 W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Arch W. Shaw National Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He has lectured and consulted with government officials around the world, including Iceland, Italy, Japan, and Guatemala. In 2006 Professor Zywicki served as a Member of the United States Department of Justice Study Group on “Identifying Fraud, Abuse and Errors in the United States Bankruptcy System.”
Professor Zywicki is the author of more than 130 articles in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed economics journals. He is one of the Top 10 most-cited law professors in the field of Commercial Law and one of the Top 25 law professors on Twitter as measured by engagement levels. He is one of the Top 50 Most Downloaded Law Authors at the Social Science Research Network. He has testified multiple times before Congress on issues of consumer bankruptcy law and consumer credit and is a frequent commentator on legal issues in the print and broadcast media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Nightline, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Neil Cavuto Show, Fox & Friends, Smerconish, Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream, Fox Business, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg News, BBC, The Diane Rehm Show, Lou Dobbs Show, Jerry Doyle Show, and The Laura Ingraham Show.
Professor Zywicki is former Chairman and a current member of the Board of Directors of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Humane Studies, Bill of Rights Institute, the Executive Committee for the Federalist Society's Financial Institutions and E-Commerce Practice Group, the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment. He formerly served on the Governing Board and the Advisory Council for the Financial Services Research Program at George Washington University School of Business. He is currently the Chair of the Academic Advisory Council for the following organizations: The Bill of Rights Institute, the film “We the People in IMAX,” and the McCormick-Tribune Foundation “Freedom Museum” in Chicago, Illinois. He is a member of the Board of Visitors of Ralston College and was a member of the Board of Trustees of Yorktown University. From 2005-2009 he served as an elected Alumni Trustee of the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees.
Nonresident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Ajit Pai, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), is a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on issues pertaining to technology and innovation, telecommunications regulatory policy, and market-based incentives for investment in broadband deployment. Concurrently, he is a partner at Searchlight Capital Partners, a global investment firm.
Mr. Pai’s distinguished career at the FCC includes two leadership roles following presidential appointments. He was appointed commissioner by President Barack Obama in 2012, designated chairman by President Donald Trump in 2017, and twice confirmed by the US Senate. While at the helm of the FCC, Mr. Pai had a transformative impact on the future of US technology and communications policy, implementing major initiatives to help close the digital divide; advance US leadership in 5G and other wireless technologies; promote innovation; protect consumers, public safety, and national security; and make the agency itself more open, transparent, and data-driven.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Pai served in various public-sector positions in the FCC’s Office of General Counsel, the US Department of Justice, the US Senate Judiciary Committee, and the US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. He also worked as a partner at Jenner & Block and associate general counsel at Verizon Communications.
Mr. Pai graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he received a bachelor’s degree, and from the University of Chicago Law School, where he received a law degree and was an editor on the University of Chicago Law Review.
Senior Counsel, First Liberty Institute
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.
Professor and D’Alemberte Chair in Constitutional Law, Florida State University College of Law
Alexander Tsesis is the D’Alemberte chair in constitutional law at the Florida State University College of Law. He is also the general editor of the Cambridge Studies on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Oxford Theoretical Foundations in Law. Tsesis’ scholarship and teaching focus on a breadth of subjects, including constitutional law, civil rights, constitutional reconstruction, interpretive methodology, free speech theory, and legal history.
Tsesis’ most recent book is Free Speech in the Balance (Cambridge University Press 2020). His previous books include Constitutional Ethos: Liberal Equality for the Common Good (Oxford University Press 2017) and For Liberty and Equality: The Life and Times of the Declaration of Independence (Oxford University Press 2012), We Shall Overcome: A History of Civil Rights and the Law (Yale University Press 2008), The Thirteenth Amendment and American Freedom (New York University Press 2004), and Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paved the Way for Harmful Social Movements (New York University Press 2002). He also edited a collection of essays in Promises of Liberty (Columbia University Press 2010). The subjects of his articles range from cyber speech, constitutional interpretation, civil rights law, and human rights. They have appeared or will appear in a variety of law reviews across the country, including the Boston University Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Southern California Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and Vanderbilt Law Review.
Partner, Lehotsky Keller LLP
The New York Times recognized Scott A. Keller as a “legal heavyweight,” who “is praised by opponents as a formidable advocate.”
Mr. Keller has argued 12 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and 12 cases before the Texas Supreme Court. He is the only practicing lawyer to have argued at least 10 cases in both courts. Mr. Keller frequently represents parties in high stakes appeals, and he has argued many cases in federal courts of appeals throughout the nation. He has earned individual accolades from Lawdragon 500 Leading Litigators in America, Chambers, Legal 500, The American Lawyer, The National Law Journal, Law360, Super Lawyers, The Best Lawyers in America, and other publications.
Before founding Lehotsky Keller Cohn LLP, Mr. Keller headed Baker Botts LLP’s Supreme Court Practice. He also has significant experience at the highest levels in all three branches of government. Mr. Keller served as the Solicitor General of Texas, the State’s chief appellate litigator. He was U.S. Senator Ted Cruz’s chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Keller was a law clerk for Justice Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States and Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was also a Bristow Fellow in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Solicitor General.
Mr. Keller represents clients in cases where public communications strategy is crucial, and he has made numerous media appearances in major outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC, Fox News, NPR, and Politico. As a sought after speaker and writer, Mr. Keller’s articles have appeared in the Stanford Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Texas Law Review. He has also served as an adjunct professor of constitutional litigation, Supreme Court practice, and federal courts at the University of Texas School of Law.
