Josh Windham is an attorney at the Institute for Justice.
Originally from Charlotte, Josh joined the Institute’s headquarters office in 2016. He received his law degree in 2016 from the University of North Carolina School of Law, where he served as president of the Federalist Society and as judicial extern to the Honorable Robert Numbers in the Eastern District of North Carolina. Josh graduated summa cum laude from North Carolina State University in 2013 with a Bachelor of Arts in History. He is an avid sports fan and dessert lover.
James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and Albert Clark Tate, Jr., Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Biography
Professor Saikrishna Prakash’s scholarship focuses on separation of powers, particularly executive powers. He teaches Constitutional Law, Foreign Relations Law and Presidential Powers at the Law School.
Prakash has authored over 75 law review articles. Among them are “Of Synchronicity and Supreme Law” in the Harvard Law Review, “The Indefensible Duty to Defend” in the Columbia Law Review, and “50 States, 50 Attorneys General and 50 Approaches to the Duty to Defend” and “The Executive Power Over Foreign Affairs” in the Yale Law Journal.
Prakash has published op-eds in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. At the request of Democrats and Republicans, he has testified before Congress on matters of presidential removal, the Mueller Report and how Congress might better check the presidency. He is currently a Miller Center Senior Fellow. In 2015, he received the Roger Traynor award for faculty scholarship. In the same year, he received an honorable mention from the American Society of Legal Writers for his book “Imperial from the Beginning.” He has given named lectures at William & Mary Law School, Princeton University and Toledo Law School, and keynote addresses at several conferences.
Prakash majored in economics and political science at Stanford University. At Yale Law School, he served as senior editor of the Yale Law Journal and received the John M. Olin Fellowship in Law, Economics and Public Policy. He subsequently clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. After practicing in New York for two years, he served as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and as an associate professor at Boston University School of Law. He then spent several years at the University of San Diego School of Law as the Herzog Research Professor of Law. Prakash has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. He also has served as a James Madison Fellow at Princeton University and Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution of War & Peace at Stanford University.
Hugh and Hazel Darling Foundation Professor of Law; Director, Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism, University of San Diego School of Law
Biography
Michael Rappaport is the Hugh & Hazel Darling Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law, where he is also the Director of the Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism. Rappaport teaches Constitutional Law and Administrative Law. His research interests include originalism, administrative law, the separation of powers, federalism, the constitutional amendment process, and supermajority rules. He is the author (with John McGinnis) of Originalism and the Good Constitution (Harvard 2013) as well as of numerous law review articles. He also blogs at The Originalism Blog. He has taught at the Sorbonne and at Paris 2 Law School in Paris, France, at Bocconi University, Milan, Italy, and at Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. Before joining the academy, Rappaport worked in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice and practiced appellate law with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, D.C. He received a JD and a DCL (political theory) from the Yale Law School, and served as a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal.
Logan Beirne is an American entrepreneur, attorney, businessman, and writer. He currently serves as Chief Legal Officer of Strive Asset Management and teaches at Yale Law School. His debut book, Blood of Tyrants: George Washington and the Forging of the Presidency, was a national bestseller and won the Colby Award for best military history.
Beirne founded the multinational legal technology company Matterhorn Transactions, Inc. in 2011, providing data analytics to thousands of law firms across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. He successfully led the company to its acquisition by DealPulse, Inc. in 2023. In addition to Matterhorn, Beirne has co-founded and invested in several other businesses, including the museum systems company Collection Harbor and the music software firm Artusi Music, Inc.
A Fulbright Scholar at Queen's University in Belfast, Beirne studied economics before earning his J.D. from Yale Law School. At Yale, he received the Edgar M. Cullen Prize for constitutional scholarship and an Olin Fellowship for his work on presidential power.
Before founding Matterhorn, Beirne worked at GE Capital's private equity arm, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, and J.P. Morgan & Co.
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.
John Paul Stevens Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law
Biography
Andrew Koppelman is John Paul Stevens Professor of Law, Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science, and Philosophy Department Affiliated Faculty at Northwestern University. He received the Walder Award for Research Excellence from Northwestern, the Hart-Dworkin award in legal philosophy from the Association of American Law Schools, and the Edward S. Corwin Prize from the American Political Science Association. His scholarship focuses on issues at the intersection of law and political philosophy. He has written more than 100 scholarly articles and eight books, most recently Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed, (St. Martin’s Press). His column appears regularly at The Hill. You can find his recent work at andrewkoppelman.com.
Distinguished University Chair and Professor of Law, University of St. Thomas School of Law
Biography
Michael Stokes Paulsen is Distinguished University Chair & Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas, where he has taught since 2007. Professor Paulsen was previously the McKnight Presidential Professor of Law & Public Policy and Associate Dean at the University of Minnesota Law School, where he taught from 1991-2007. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, Yale Law School, and Yale Divinity School. He has served as a federal prosecutor, as Attorney-Advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, and as counsel for the Center for Law & Religious Freedom.
Paulsen has taught as a visiting professor at Princeton University, Pepperdine University, Georgetown University, Bethel University, Uppsala University (Sweden), Daystar University (Kenya), and University of the Andes (Chile). He has been a guest lecturer at universities around the nation, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Penn, NYU, Georgetown, Virginia, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan, University of Chicago, and Northwestern.
Professor Paulsen is the author of more than ninety scholarly articles and book chapters on a wide variety of constitutional law topics, published in law journals including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, and the Northwestern University Law Review. He is the author or co-author of three books, including The Constitution: An Introduction (Basic Books, 2015) (co-authored with Luke Paulsen) and the casebook The Constitution of the United States, now in its fifth edition with Foundation Press, co-authored with Michael McConnell, Samuel Bray, and Will Baude.
Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA School of Law
Biography
Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), as well as the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA School of Law. He recently retired from teaching at UCLA, after 30 years there, and is now focusing on research.
Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (8th ed. 2023), and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed. 2016), as well as over 100 academic law journal articles, mostly on First Amendment law. He is a member of The American Law Institute; the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Free Speech Law; and the creator and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a leading legal blog founded in 2002 (hosted at the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017 and now at Reason Magazine).
Senior Legal Fellow and Manager, National Security Law Program, The Heritage Foundation
Biography
Charles “Cully” Stimson is a widely recognized expert in national security, homeland security, crime control, drug policy and immigration. A senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation since 2007, Stimson became Manager of the National Security Law Program in Heritage’s Institute for Constitutional Government in April 2013 after serving as Heritage’s chief of staff for a year.
Stimson writes and lectures on policy issues such as the law of armed conflict, terrorist detainee policy and interrogations, the Geneva Conventions, military commissions, the Patriot Act and FISA, criminal law and the death penalty, immigration and the war on drugs. As chief of staff to then-Heritage President Edwin J. Feulner, he was a key adviser on public policy matters as well as manager of Feulner’s office staff and Heritage’s day-to-day operations.
Stimson’s many research papers, op-eds and articles include special reports such as “Adult Time for Adult Crime,” a comprehensive study on the constitutionality of life sentences for teen-age murderers, and Sexual Assault in the Military: Understanding the Problem and How to Fix It, a ground-breaking paper detailing the inner workings of the military justice system compared to its civilian counterpart. His work on criminal and immigration law has been cited in briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court.
He testifies before the U.S. Senate and House on national security issues, and recently testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the Law of Armed Conflict, Law of War, and the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force.
Before joining the think tank in 2007, Stimson served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs. He advised then-Secretaries of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates and coordinated the Pentagon’s global detention policy and operations, including at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was chairman of detainee-related panels such as the Defense Senior Leadership Oversight Committee, and the Special Detainee Follow Up Group. He represented the United States before the U.N. in Geneva, Switzerland in May 2006 where he led the DOD delegation in defense of the United States’ Second Period Report on the Convention Against Torture.
An accomplished trial lawyer, Stimson worked as a prosecutor at the local, state and federal levels, where he concentrated on violent crimes such as homicide, sexual assault and domestic violence. A third generation naval officer, Cully also served as a military prosecutor, defense counsel, and recently served as Deputy Chief Judge of the Navy-Marine Corps Trial Judiciary. He continues to serve, with the rank of Captain, as the Commanding Officer of the Preliminary Hearing Unit.
Stimson’s thousands of media interviews and appearances include Fox News Channel, MSNBC, CNN, BBC, NPR and C-SPAN. He has been quoted by most major newspapers, including The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and London Times.
A businessman and educator by training, Stimson is Vice Chairman of his family’s commercial real estate company in Seattle. Before 9/11, he was a Vice President at a New York-based global financial services and insurance brokerage firm where ran the private equity mergers and acquisitions D.C. operation.
Stimson holds a law degree from the George Mason University School of Law, where he later taught as an Adjunct Professor of Law. He is a graduate of Kenyon College, where he was Captain of the men’s varsity soccer team and an All-Conference player. He also studied at Harvard and Exeter universities. An avid soccer player and triathlete, he serves as Chairman of the Board of the United States Soccer Foundation, the charitable giving arm of U.S. Soccer.
Senior Judge, United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
Biography
Loretta A. Preska is a senior judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. She joined the court in 1992 after being nominated by President George H.W. Bush. Preska became the chief judge of the court in May of 2009 when Kimba Wood assumed senior status. She served as chief judge of the court for a seven-year term from 2009 to 2016, and took senior status in 2017.
Preska graduated from the College of St. Rose with her Bachelor's degree in 1970 and also graduated from Fordham Law with her Juris Doctor Degree in 1973. She graduated from NYU Law with her Master of Laws degree in 1978.
Professor of Law, Northern Kentucky University Chase College of Law
Biography
Mike Mannheimer received his J.D. in 1994 from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar all three years and served as Writing & Research Editor of the Columbia Law Review. After a brief stint as a staff attorney with the Criminal Appeals Bureau of the Legal Aid Society in New York City, he clerked for the Hon. Sidney H. Stein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and then for the Hon. Robert E. Cowen of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
From 1997 to 1999, he worked as a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York City, where he practiced general commercial litigation and arbitration encompassing such diverse areas as antitrust, breach of contract, business torts, employment discrimination, ERISA, false advertising, product liability, and civil RICO.
For five years before joining the Chase faculty in 2004, Professor Mannheimer served as Appellate Counsel and then Senior Appellate Counsel at the Center for Appellate Litigation in New York City, where he represented indigent criminal defendants on appeal from their convictions and in related collateral proceedings. He has briefed and/or argued over forty appeals in the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, the New York Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He has represented clients at every level of the state and federal judiciaries, from handling sentencing proceedings, motions, and hearings in the New York trial courts to filing cert. petitions in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Professor Mannheimer was Co-Chair of the Kentucky Death Penalty Assessment Team for the American Bar Association. He is also a prolific and eclectic scholar. He has published articles on the death penalty, coerced confessions, and the Establishment, Free Speech, Self-Incrimination, Confrontation, and Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clauses. His work on the use of the premeditation-deliberation formula to distinguish first- and second-degree murder was the winner of the 2010 AALS Criminal Justice Section Junior Scholar Paper Award. His current research focuses on the under-appreciated federalism component of the Bill of Rights.