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.
Wayne A. Abernathy is a former U.S. Treasury Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions under President George W. Bush, receiving the Alexander Hamilton Award in recognition of his service. In that office he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Prior to his work at the Treasury, Mr. Abernathy served as Staff Director of the Senate Banking Committee, under Chairman Phil Gramm.
Following his service at the Treasury, Mr. Abernathy worked for 15 years on the staff of the American Bankers Association, as Executive Vice President for Financial Institutions Policy and Regulatory Affairs.
Previous experience with the Senate Banking Committee includes serving as Staff Director of the Subcommittee on Securities during 1995-1998. From 1989 until 1994, Mr. Abernathy was a Republican economist for the committee. He previously worked as a senior legislative assistant for Senator Gramm during 1987-1989 and as an economist for the Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on International Finance and Monetary Policy during 1981-1986, under Chairman Jake Garn.
Mr. Abernathy earned his bachelor’s degree in International Studies from The Johns Hopkins University in 1978. In 1980, he received a master’s degree in International Studies from the School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University.
Associate Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Biography
Associate Professor of Law J.W. Verret joined the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University faculty in 2008. In 2013, he took leave for two years to serve as the Chief Economist and Senior Counsel for the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services. He received his JD and MA in Public Policy from Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, respectively, in 2006. While in law school, Professor Verret served an Olin Fellowship in Law and Economics at the Harvard Program on Corporate Governance under the guidance of Prof. Lucian Bebchuk.
Professor Verret then served as a law clerk for Vice-Chancellor John W. Noble of the Delaware Court of Chancery. Prior to joining the faculty at Scalia Law, Professor Verret was an associate in the SEC Enforcement Defense Practice Group at Skadden, Arps in Washington, D.C. He has written extensively on corporate law topics, including Delaware's Guidance, co-written with Chief Justice Myron T. Steele of the Delaware Supreme Court. His academic work has been featured in the Yale Journal on Regulation, The Business Lawyer, the Delaware Journal of Corporate Law, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law, and the Virginia Law and Business Review. Professor Verret was selected by the Northwestern Law School Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth for a 2009-2010 Searle-Kaufmann Research Fellowship.
Professor Verret is also a Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center Working Group on Financial Markets, where he regularly briefs Congressional staff, members of Congress, SEC Commissioners and other financial regulatory agencies on financial regulation topics. He also directs the Corporate Federalism Initiative, where he obtains research grants for a network of students and faculty scholars who study the division between states and the federal government as sources of corporate law. Professor Verret has been invited to testify before various House and Senate Committees four times during the financial crisis of 2009 regarding all of the central provisions of the Obama Administration's 2009 financial regulatory reform proposals. For a full list of Professor Verret's C-Span appearances, including testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, see http://www.c-spanvideo.org/jwverret.
Professor Verret has been an invited panelist for various television appearances, including an interview on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Professor Verret has been quoted in various media on financial regulation and corporate law topics, including the New York Times, CNN Money, the CNN Political Ticker, CNBC, ABC News, Investor's Business Daily, ESPN.com, The American Banker, The American Lawyer, The Huffington Post, CBS.com, and AP News. Professor Verret's op-eds have been featured in Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The Orange County Register, and The Wall Street Journal. Professor Verret is also a regular guest contributor to three of the most noted corporate law and financial regulation law blogs: the Harvard Law School Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation Forum, Deallawyers.com, and The Conglomerate.
David Dorsen is Of Counsel with Sedgwick, LLP. He served as an Assistant US Attorney in New York under Robert M. Morgenthau, and later as Assistant Chief Counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee under Senator Sam Ervin. He has taught at Duke University, North Carolina, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington DC, and George Washington University Law School, Washington DC. His book, Henry Friendly, Greatest Judge of his Era (with Richard A. Posner, 2012), won the Green Bag Award for Exemplary Legal Writing.
Adjunct Professor, George Washington University Law School
Biography
Alan B. Morrison was for more than 16 years the Lerner Family Associate Dean for Public Interest & Public Service Law at George Washington University Law School where he headed up the Law School’s efforts to increase pro bono opportunities for its students. He is currently an adjunct professor at GW where he teaches civil procedure and the basic constitutional law course, He previously taught at Harvard, NYU, Stanford, Hawaii, & American University law schools. For most of his career Professor Morrison worked for the Public Citizen Litigation Group, which he co-founded with Ralph Nader in 1972 and directed for over 25 years. He has argued 20 cases in the Supreme Court, including victories in Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar; Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council; and INS v. Chadha. He is currently litgating a range of cases challenges actions of the Trump administration, with a particular focus on the Trump tariffs.
Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, University of San Diego School of Law
Biography
Michael D. Ramsey is Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law, where he teaches and writes in the areas of Constitutional Law, Foreign Relations Law and International Law. He is the author of The Constitution’s Text in Foreign Affairs (Harvard University Press), co-editor of International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: Continuity and Change (Cambridge University Press), and co-author of two casebooks, Transnational Law and Practice (2d ed., Aspen) and International Business Transactions: A Problem-Oriented Coursebook (14th ed., West). His scholarly articles have appeared in publications such as the Yale Law Journal, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal and the American Journal of International Law. He received his B.A. magna cum laude from Dartmouth College and his J.D. summa cum laude from Stanford Law School. Prior to teaching, he served as a judicial clerk for Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court, and practiced law with the law firm of Latham & Watkins, where he specialized in international finance and investment. He has taught as a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego, in the Department of Political Science and at the University of Paris – Sorbonne, in the Department of Comparative Law.
George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
Biography
John O. McGinnis is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He also has an MA degree from Balliol College, Oxford, in philosophy and theology. Professor McGinnis clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. From 1987 to 1991, he was deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. He is the author of Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Government Through Technology (Princeton 2013) and Originalism and the Good Constitution (Harvard 2013) (with M. Rappaport). He is a past winner of the Paul Bator award given by the Federalist Society to an outstanding academic under 40. He has been listed by the United States on the roster of panelists who may be called upon to decide World Trade Organization Disputes.
Steve Simpson joined PLF in 2019 to head up its Separation of Powers practice group.
Steve’s career in public interest law started at the Institute for Justice in 2001, where he litigated free speech, campaign finance, and economic liberty cases. Among other high-profile cases in which Steve was involved, he was co-counsel in Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett, IJ’s successful Supreme Court challenge to Arizona’s public financing law for political campaigns. He was the lead litigator in SpeechNow.org v. FEC, a joint effort between IJ and the Institute for Free Speech that led to the creation of super PACs. And he was co-counsel in Swedenburg v. Kelly, IJ’s successful Supreme Court challenge to New York’s ban on the interstate shipping of wine.
In 2013, Steve moved into the policy arena as the Ayn Rand Institute’s director of Legal Studies, where he spent five years writing and speaking on a wide variety of legal and cultural issues. From there, he moved back into law as senior litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance in Washington, D.C.
Steve has spoken and written on a wide variety of legal and policy issues. He has testified in Congress and briefed congressional staffers. He has been interviewed on scores of television and radio programs, including PBS News Hour, Stossel, and The Rubin Report. His writings have appeared in many publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. In 2014, Steve was a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute. He is the editor of Defending Free Speech (ARI Press, 2016).
Steve earned his law degree magna cum laude from New York Law School in 1994. Following law school, he clerked for a federal district judge in the Southern District of Florida and spent several years as a litigator at Shearman & Sterling.
When he’s not at work or spending time with his wife and three daughters, Steve can usually be found mucking around in the woods at his cabin on Shenandoah Mountain.
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.
Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown University Law Center; Faculty Director, Georgetown Center for the Constitution
Biography
Randy E. Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and is the Faculty Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, he tried many felony cases as a prosecutor in the Cook County States’ Attorney’s Office in Chicago. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies and the Bradley Prize, Professor Barnett has been a visiting professor at Penn, Northwestern and Harvard Law School.
Professor Barnett’s publications includes thirteen books, more than one hundred articles and reviews, as well as numerous op-eds. His most recent book is Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago (2026). His other books on the Constitution include: A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist (2024); The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit (2021) (with Evan Bernick); An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know (2019) (with Josh Blackman); Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (2nd ed. 2013); Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People (2016); and Constitutional Law: Cases in Context (5th ed. forthcoming 2027) (with Josh Blackman). His books on contracts are The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Contracts (2010) and Contracts: Cases and Doctrine (7th ed. 2021) (with Nate Oman). And he is the author of The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (2nd ed. 2014).
In 2004, he argued the medical marijuana case of Gonzalez v. Raich before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2012, he was one of the lawyers representing the National Federation of Independent Business in its constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act in NFIB v. Sebelius. He’s appeared in numerous documentaries and portrayed a prosecutor in the 2010 science-fiction feature film, InAlienable: The Movie. On X he is @RandyEBarnett
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 Drs. 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—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.
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, at https://ssrn.com/abstract=5283417, and his 2020 Advocates for Balance at Chautauqua presentation, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3ebymA7xOo .
He explored seeking the Republican and Conservative parties’ nominations for New York attorney general in 2018, has written a regular newspaper column since 2020, and was his Mom’s caregiver for eight years.
He has been active in several organizations and enjoys swimming, snowmobiling, traveling, golf, tennis, and rooting for the Buffalo Bills and Sabres.
A 13th great-grandson of King Gustav Eriksson Vasa of Sweden, he and the former Hilary Anne Kurtz, who he later learned is his ninth cousin twice removed, were married (#KurtzElfWedding) on December 28, 2019. Mrs. Elf and their two children, Ryan and Margaret, are in Heaven.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Biography
Anthony Johnstone serves as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Judge Johnstone previously served as the Helen and David Mason Professor of Law and an affiliated Professor of Public Administration at the University of Montana, Alexander Blewett III School of Law in Missoula since 2011. As a professor he taught federal and state constitutional law and legislation, as well as a federal judicial clinic. Johnstone also has served as trial and appellate counsel in federal and state courts, including the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court of the United States, most recently with Johnstone PLLC. He served the Montana Department of Justice as state solicitor from 2008 to 2011 and assistant attorney general from 2004 to 2008. Johnstone entered practice as an associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York from 2000 to 2003. Born to Montanans in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Johnstone received his Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 1995 and his Juris Doctor, with honors, from the University of Chicago Law School in 1999. Following law school, he clerked for Ninth Circuit Judge Sidney R. Thomas in Billings, Montana from 1999 to 2000.