Judicial Philosophy
Fayette County Circuit Courthouse Multi-purpose room 120 N Limestone,Lexington, Kentucky 40507
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Justice, Supreme Court of Kentucky
Laurance B. VanMeter was elected to the Kentucky Supreme Court in November 2016 from the 5th Appellate District, comprising Anderson, Bourbon, Boyle, Clark, Fayette, Franklin, Jessamine, Madison, Mercer, Scott, and Woodford Counties. Upon taking office on January 2, 2017, he became just the third Justice to have served at all four levels of Kentucky unified court system. Prior to being elected to the Supreme Court, Justice VanMeter served thirteen years as a Judge of the Kentucky Court of Appeals, having been elected in November 2003, and being re-elected unopposed in 2006 and 2014.
Justice VanMeter currently serves as the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Kentucky Judicial Form Retirement Systems, having previously served as chairman of that Board for two terms (2012-16), with an intervening term as chairman of the Judicial Retirement Fund Investment Committee (2016-18). Justice VanMeter is the Supreme Court’s liaison to the Kentucky Bar Association’s Continuing Legal Education Commission. He served the Court of Appeals as acting Chief Judge during 2010 and as Chief Judge Pro Tempore from 2007 to 2010, and served as the Court of Appeals’ representative on the Ethics Committee of the Kentucky Judiciary from 2004 to 2012 and as its alternate member on the Kentucky Judicial Conduct Commission from 2012 to 2016. In addition, Justice VanMeter has served on the Probate and Trust Legislative Committee of the Kentucky Bar Association, the Family Court Rules and the Civil Rules Committees of the Kentucky Supreme Court, the Chief Justice’s Fayette County Family Court Task Force, and is a frequent speaker for continuing legal education.
Justice VanMeter was born in 1958 in Lexington, and was raised in Winchester. He received his undergraduate degree with a major in history in 1980 from Vanderbilt University, and his law degree in 1983 from the University of Kentucky College of Law, where he was a member of the Order of the Coif and the Kentucky Law Journal.
Justice VanMeter practiced law with the Lexington firm of Stoll, Keenon & Park from 1983 to 1994, where his practice areas included equine law, business planning and organizations, real estate, taxation, estate planning, trusts and probate. He has been admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States, and is a member of the Kentucky and Fayette County Bar Associations. From 1994 to 1999, he served as a judge of the Fayette District Court, 22nd District, Division 1. Justice VanMeter was appointed and then elected to the Fayette Circuit Court bench in 1999 on which he served until his election to the Court of Appeals.
Justice VanMeter has been actively involved in a number of community organizations, including Little League Baseball, Lexington Youth Soccer, Boys' and Girls' Clubs of America, Parents’ Place, the University of Kentucky Libraries National Advisory Board, and has served on the vestry of Christ Church Cathedral, on the Vanderbilt University Alumni Board of Directors, and on the Sayre School Board of Trustees. He is a Fellow of the University of Kentucky, a Life Fellow of the Kentucky Bar Foundation, and a Founding Fellow of the Fayette County Bar Foundation. He is a member of Christ Church Cathedral. Justice VanMeter and his late wife, Lucy, are the parents of four children.
Emeritus Dean and Professor of Law, Lewis & Clark Law School
Professor Huffman joined the law school faculty in 1973, was appointed Acting Dean in 1993 and Dean in 1994, and returned to full time teaching in 2006. Born in Fort Benton, Montana, Jim graduated from Montana State University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and the University of Chicago Law School. He has been a visiting professor at Auckland University in New Zealand, the University of Oregon, the University of Athens in Greece and Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala. He was also a fellow at the Humane Studies Institute and a Distinguished Bradley Scholar at the Heritage Foundation. Jim serves on the boards of the National Crime Victims Law Institute, the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, the Classroom Law Project, and the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation. He is a member and former Chair of the Executive Committee of the Environment and Property Rights Practice Group of the Federalist Society. He is a member of the Montana Bar Association and is admitted to practice before the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the United States Supreme Court. He is the author of more than 100 articles and chapters on a wide array of legal topics.
Principal Attorney, Woodring Law Firm
Mr. Daniel Woodring has lived in Florida for almost 30 years, but was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In Florida, he has lived and worked in Pensacola, Clearwater, Jacksonville, Gainesville and Tallahassee. His wife Jean, who is also an attorney, was born in Miami, and grew up in Ft. Myers. They have a son and a daughter.
Mr. Woodring is recognized as a Florida Super Lawyer, an honor given to fewer than 5% of Florida Attorneys, and holds an Avvo “Superb” rating. Mr. Woodring also has an AV Preeminent® Peer Reviewrating. AV®, AV Preeminent® are registered certification marks of Reed Elsevier Properties Inc., used in accordance with the Martindale-Hubbell certification procedures, standards and policies, and the ratings are explained at www.martindale.com/ratings.
Mr. Woodring is a member of the Florida and Georgia Bars, and is admitted to practice before the Florida Federal Southern, Middle and Northern District Courts, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court. He has worked at the trial level on cases in many of Florida’s 20 judicial circuits, in addition to cases in state administrative tribunals. He has argued cases at the Florida Supreme Court and Florida District Courts of Appeal, and has briefed cases at the U.S. Supreme Court.
He graduated from the University of Florida, College of Law with a Juris Doctorate, Cum Laude, and received his B.A. degree from Clearwater Christian College, Summa Cum Laude.
After law school, Mr. Woodring was in private practice doing general civil and appellate work. He then left for a two year appellate clerkship at the First District Court of Appeal. During his time at the court, he worked on cases including, but not limited to: criminal; family law; administrative law; workers’ compensation; business and civil law; constitutional law.
Mr. Woodring next worked as a counsel in the Executive Office of the Governor, Office of the General Counsel. During his time in Governor Bush’s Legal Office he had diverse responsibilities, including oversight and strategic litigation management of significant legal matters at numerous Governor’s agencies, including the Department of Education, Department of Management Services, Department of Business and Professional Regulation, Department of Health, Agency for Health Care Administration, Department of Children and Families, Department of Community Affairs, Department of Elder affairs, Agency for Workforce Innovation, Department of Transportation, and the Department of State.
He was also legally responsible for topics as disparate as emergency operations; advising the Governor on the selection of judges; implementation of civil service reform; reform of workers’ compensation; budget and appropriation matters; Indian gaming law; and legally advising the Florida Cabinet sitting in its many capacities, such as the Florida Land and Water Adjudicatory Commission.
Mr. Daniel Woodring was then offered the opportunity to be General Counsel for the Florida Department of Education, which encompassed Pre-K though 12th grade, community colleges(now State colleges) and the Florida University System. He was also the first General Counsel for the Florida Board of Governors, when that Board was constitutionally created to manage the State University System.
During almost five years at the Department of Education, Mr. Woodring advised and litigated on matters including, but not limited to: constitutional challenges to Florida’s education programs, including Opportunity Scholarships and the charter school approval and appeal process; doing away with race as a preference in university admissions and state contracting; teacher and professional discipline cases; union, labor and employment matters; state procurement and bid protest proceedings; administrative rule challenges and rule making proceedings; IDEA and Section 504 proceedings; public records, government in the sunshine and ethical matters; contract negotiations and disputes.
Since 2007, Mr. Woodring has been back in private practice as the principal of the Woodring Law Firm, located in Tallahassee, Florida, but with a statewide practice, including Pensacola, Jacksonville, Gainesville, Tampa Bay, Orlando, West Palm Beach, Ft. Myers, Ft. Lauderdale, and Miami. He concentrates his practice on appeals; constitutional cases in both state and federal court; education law matters, including charter school represention; Business litigation; and state administrative matters, including state procurement, regulation and licensing, rule challenges and proposed rule making, although he also handles cases in many other areas.
Please look at the individual practice areas on the left menu for more information.
Mr. Woodring is a member of the Appellate, Administrative, and Governmental Lawyer sections of the Florida Bar and served as Chair of the Education Law Committee of the Florida Bar.
Author, The Indispensable Electoral College: How the Founders’ Plan Saves Our Country from Mob Rule and Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College
Tara Ross is nationally recognized for her expertise on the Electoral College. She is the author of Why We Need the Electoral College (2019), The Indispensable Electoral College: How the Founders’ Plan Saves Our Country from Mob Rule (2017), We Elect A President: The Story of our Electoral College (2016), and Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College (2d ed. 2012). She is also the author of She Fought Too: Stories of Revolutionary War Heroines (2019), and a co-author of Under God: George Washington and the Question of Church and State (2008) (with Joseph C. Smith, Jr.). Her Prager University video, Do You Understand the Electoral College?, is Prager’s most-viewed video ever, with more than 60 million views.
Tara often appears as a guest on a variety of talk shows nationwide, and she regularly addresses civic, university, and legal audiences. She’s contributed to several law reviews and newspapers, including the National Law Journal, USA Today, the Washington Examiner, The Hill, The Washington Times, and FoxNews.com. She’s appeared before institutions such as the Cooper Union, Brown University, the Dole Institute of Politics, and Mount Vernon. She’s appeared on Fox News, CSPAN, NPR, and a variety of other national and local shows.
Tara is a retired lawyer and a former Editor-in-Chief of the Texas Review of Law & Politics. She obtained her B.A. from Rice University and her J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law. She resides in Dallas with her husband and children.
Adjunct Professor, George Washington University Law School
Vice President for Legal Affairs, Cato Institute
Roger Pilon is the Cato’s Institute’s vice president for legal affairs, the founding director of Cato’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, the inaugural holder of Cato’s B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies, and the founding publisher of the Cato Supreme Court Review.
Prior to joining Cato, Pilon held five senior posts in the Reagan administration, including at State and Justice, and was a national fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. In 1989 the Bicentennial Commission presented him with its Benjamin Franklin Award for excellence in writing on the U.S. Constitution. In 2001 Columbia University’s School of General Studies awarded him its Alumni Medal of Distinction. Pilon lectures and debates at universities and law schools across the country and testifies often before Congress.
His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Legal Times, National Law Journal, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Stanford Law and Policy Review, and elsewhere. He has appeared on ABC’s Nightline, CBS’s 60 Minutes II, Fox News Channel, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, C-SPAN, and other media.
Pilon holds a BA from Columbia University, an MA and a PhD from the University of Chicago, and a JD from the George Washington University School of Law.
Vice President for Legal Affairs, Goldwater Institute
U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit
Judge Williams practiced law in New York City (at the firm of Debevoise Plimpton and as an Assistant U.S. Attorney) and then taught law at the University of Colorado Law School from 1969 to 1986, with visiting years at UCLA, SMU, and the University of Chicago (where he was also a fellow in law and economics). He was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1986. His most recent book is a biography of Vasily Maklakov, The Reformer: How One Liberal Fought to Preempt the Russian Revolution (Encounter Books, 2017).
Senior Counsel and Director of Strategic Engagement, Alliance Defending Freedom
Jordan Lorence serves as senior counsel and director of strategic engagement with Alliance Defending Freedom, where he plays a key role with the Strategic Relations & Training Team. His work has encompassed a broad range of litigation, with a primary focus on religious liberty, free speech, student privacy, conscience rights of creative professionals, and the First Amendment freedoms of public university students and professors.
Lorence argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in the precedent-setting Southworth v. Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System case in 1999, challenging the university’s requirement that forced unwilling students to contribute to campus activist groups. He led the challenge to New York City’s ban on private worship services after hours in vacant public school buildings in the long-running Bronx Household of Faith v. Board of Education of the City of New York case. Lorence also defended the right of conscience in Elane Photography v. Willock at the New Mexico Supreme Court.
Lorence has made media appearances on television and radio shows including Fox News, NBC’s Today Show, and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. His commentary has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Daily News, The New York Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Times, The Hill, and National Review.
Before officially joining the organization in 2001, Lorence was a productive allied attorney for many years, actively involved in significant litigation for ADF. He has also worked for the Home School Legal Defense Association, Concerned Women for America, and the American Center for Law and Justice. Lorence earned a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School and received a B.A. in journalism from Stanford University. He is admitted to the bar in Minnesota, Virginia, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Supreme Court, and multiple federal appellate and district courts.
Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; Co-Director, Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State
Adam J. White is the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State.
Mr. White practiced constitutional and administrative law, particularly in the regulation of energy and financial markets. He started his legal career as a law clerk for Judge David B. Sentelle at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
Mr. White has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Affairs, Commentary, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and Notre Dame Law Review, among other publications. He is a regular contributor to the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice and Comment blog, and for many years, he was one of the Weekly Standard’s lead writers on constitutional law and the Supreme Court.
Mr. White has testified often before Congress, including before the Senate’s Committees on the Judiciary; Commerce, Science, and Transportation; and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and before the House’s Judiciary and Financial Services Committees. In 2018, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary called him to testify in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings to advise senators on Kavanaugh’s approach to administrative law.
In 2021, he served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, where he criticized “Court packing” and other efforts to restructure the Supreme Court. In 2017, he was appointed to serve on the Administrative Conference of the United States. He also serves on the leadership council for the American Bar Association’s Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section, which he will chair in 2023–24. Before joining AEI, he was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Mr. White has a JD from Harvard Law School and a bachelor of business administration from the College of Business at the University of Iowa.
Professor of Law, South Texas College of Law Houston
Josh Blackman is a national thought leader on constitutional law and the United States Supreme Court. Josh’s work was quoted during two presidential impeachment trials. He has testified before Congress and advises federal and state lawmakers. Josh regularly appears on TV, including NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and the BBC. Josh is also a frequent guest on NPR and other syndicated radio programs. He has published commentaries in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and leading national publications.
Since 2012, Josh has served as a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston. He holds the Centennial Chair of Constitutional Law. Josh is an Adjunct Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Josh has written more than seven dozen law review articles that have been cited more than a thousand times. Josh was selected as the Jurist of the Year by the Texas Journal of Law & Public Policy, received the inaugural Meese III Originalism Award, and was awarded the Inaugural Joseph Story Award. Josh was selected by Forbes Magazine for the “30 Under 30” in Law and Policy. Josh is the President of the Harlan Institute, and founded FantasySCOTUS, the Internet’s Premier Supreme Court Fantasy League. He blogs at the Volokh Conspiracyand posts@JoshMBlackman.
Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies, Manhattan Institute
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 is the author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (2025) and Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020), coauthor of Religious Liberties for Corporations? (2014), and editor of 11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review (2008-18). He has contributed to a variety of academic, popular, and professional publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, and Newsweek. He also regularly provides commentary for various media outlets, writes the Shapiro’s Gavel newsletter on Substack, and once appeared on the Colbert Report.
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.