2024 National Lawyers Convention
Group Identity and the Law
The Washington Hilton1919 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington, DC 20009
Here are the latest events.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
John K. Bush is a Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
His chambers are in Louisville, Kentucky. Prior to joining the court, Judge Bush was a partner in the
Louisville office of the firm Bingham Greenebaum Doll (now Dentons Bingham Greenebaum),
where he also was co-chair of the firm’s litigation department. He began his legal practice in the
Washington, D.C. office of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher.
Judge Bush served as a law clerk for Judge J. Smith Henley of the United States Court of
Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. He was graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University,
and cum laude from Harvard Law School. He is an adjunct lecturer at The George Washington
University Law School and the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville.
Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Department of Justice
T. Elliot Gaiser is the Office of Legal Counsel’s 27th Assistant Attorney General. He was nominated by President Donald Trump on April 29, 2025, confirmed by the United States Senate on July 30, 2025, and sworn in as AAG by Attorney General Pam Bondi on August 4, 2025.
Prior to joining the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Gaiser served as the 11th Solicitor General of Ohio. In that role, he represented his home state and its agencies before the Supreme Court of the United States, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, the Supreme Court of Ohio, and other state and federal courts. He also advised Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost on significant legal and constitutional matters important to the people of Ohio.
Mr. Gaiser clerked for Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States, Judge Neomi Rao of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Judge Edith H. Jones of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. In the private sector, Mr. Gaiser worked at the law firms Jones Day, Boyden Gray, and Gibson Dunn. He graduated from the University of Chicago Law School and Hillsdale College. He is also a husband and father.
Professor of Law, Florida International University College of Law
Howard M. Wasserman joined the College of Law in 2003. He graduated magna cum laude from the Northwestern University School of Law, where he was an associate articles editor of the Law Review and was named to the Order of the Coif. Following law school, he clerked for Chief Judge James T. Giles of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and Judge Jane R. Roth of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He also has been a visiting professor at Saint Louis University School of Law and Florida State University College of Law. Professor Wasserman teaches civil procedure, evidence, federal courts, civil rights, and First Amendment; his scholarship focuses on the freedom of speech and on the role of procedure and jurisdiction in public-law and civil-rights litigation. He blogs at PrawfsBlawg and at Sports-Law Blog and is the Section Editor for the Courts Law Section of JOTWELL. Professor Wasserman is a loyal Chicago Cubs fan.
Segal Family Professor of Regulatory Law and Policy, New York University School of Law
Catherine Sharkey is the Segal Family Professor of Regulatory Law and Policy at NYU School of Law. She is a leading authority on torts, products liability, artificial intelligence in federal administrative agencies, public nuisance, punitive damages, and federal preemption of state tort law. She is a Senior Fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), a member of its Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence in Federal Agencies, author of Algorithmic Tools in Retrospective Review (2023) and co-author of Government by Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence in Federal Administrative Agencies (2020). Sharkey is co-author of Cases and Materials on Torts (13th edition, 2024) and Business, Defamation, and Privacy Torts (1st ed., forthcoming 2025), and co-editor of Foundations of Tort Law (2nd edition, 2009). She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and an adviser to the Restatement Third, Torts: Liability for Economic Harm and Restatement Third, Torts: Remedies projects.
Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School
Christopher J. Walker is a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining Michigan law faculty in 2022, he spent a decade teaching at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. He previously clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court, worked on the Civil Appellate Staff at the U.S. Department of Justice, and served on the Senate Judiciary Committee staff for the Gorsuch Supreme Court confirmation. Professor Walker’s research focuses on administrative law, regulation, and law and policy at the agency level. Outside the law school, he chaired the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice in 2020-21 and served as one of forty Public Members of the Administrative Conference of the United States from 2016-2022, and he continues to serve in both organizations in various capacities. He also works of counsel at the U.S. Chamber Litigation Center. In 2022, he received the Federalist Society’s Joseph Story Award.
United States District Judge, Eastern District of Pennsylvania
Judge Wolson was nominated to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in May 2018 and was confirmed in May 2019. Judge Wolson earned his J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School, B.A., magna cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating from law school, he served as a law clerk for Hon. Jan E. DuBois of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. He then maintained a complex commercial litigation practice, first as an associate with Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C., and then as a partner with Dilworth Paxson in Philadelphia.
Judge, United States District Court, District of Columbia
Judge Trevor N. McFadden was appointed to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in 2017. He received his B.A. in 2001 from Wheaton College, IL, magna cum laude. In 2006, he received his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he graduated Order of the Coif and was an editor for the Virginia Law Review.
Following graduation from law school, Judge McFadden clerked for Judge Steven Colloton, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. He then joined the U.S. Department of Justice, where he served as Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General and as Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia. Judge McFadden subsequently became a partner at Baker & McKenzie LLP in Washington, DC, where he focused on white collar investigations. He is also co-author of a treatise, Corporate Settlement Tools: DPAs, NPAs, and Cooperation Agreements.
After four years in private practice, Judge McFadden returned to the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was Deputy Assistant Attorney General and acted as the second-in-command of the Department's Criminal Division. As Deputy Assistant Attorney General, he managed the Division's Fraud and Appellate Sections.
Judge McFadden also has extensive experience in law enforcement. He served as an officer with the Fairfax County, VA, Police Department and as a deputy sheriff in Madison County, VA.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
Judge Readler earned his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Michigan. After graduating, he served as a law clerk to Judge Alan Norris of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Judge Readler then began practicing law in the Columbus office of the international law firm Jones Day, eventually spending ten years as a partner in the firm’s Issues and Appeals Practice Group. While at Jones Day, Judge Readler appeared in state and federal trial and appellate courts around the country, most frequently the Supreme Court of Ohio and the Sixth Circuit. Judge Readler also successfully argued before the United States Supreme Court in McQuiggin v. Perkins on behalf of an inmate claiming actual innocence. His other pro bono representations include representing capital defendants before the Tenth Circuit and the Supreme Court of Ohio, as well as representing defendants sentenced to life in prison before the Sixth Circuit. While at Jones Day, Judge Readler traveled to Nairobi with Lawyers Without Borders to train Kenyan lawyers in prosecuting domestic violence cases, and he was also a recipient of the American Marshall Memorial Fellowship awarded by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Following his career in private practice, Judge Readler served as Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division of the United States Department of Justice from 2017 to 2019. In that role, Judge Readler led and supervised over 1,000 lawyers in the Department’s largest litigating division, briefing and arguing several cases on behalf of the United States in federal courts across the country, including high-profile cases significant to the Administration and the Department. In March 2019, Judge Readler was confirmed to serve as a Circuit Judge on the Sixth Circuit. He resides in Columbus.
Chief Legal Officer, Strive Asset Management
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.
University Professor of Law and Religion and Director of the Eleanor H. McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy, Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law
Michael P. Moreland was appointed University Professor of Law and Religion and Director of the Eleanor H. McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy at Villanova University in 2017. Professor Moreland joined the Villanova faculty in 2006 and served as Vice Dean from 2012 to 2015. His research is primarily in the areas of torts, law and religion, constitutional law, and Catholic social thought, and he regularly teaches Torts, First Amendment, seminars in law and religion, and undergraduate courses in ethics.
Professor Moreland is the co-editor of Christianity and Private Law (Routledge, 2021), and his most recent publications include: “The Authority of Tradition: John Henry Newman and Legal Theory” in Christianity and the Making of Irish Law (Routledge, 2025); “Christianity and Torts” in The Oxford Handbook on Christianity and Law, (Oxford University Press, 2023); “Germaneness and Religious Liberty” in the Notre Dame Law Review (2023); “Contingency and Contestation in Christianity and Liberalism” in the Notre Dame Law Review (2023); “Friendship as the Primary Purpose of Law” in The American Journal of Jurisprudence 279 (2022); and “The Moral of Torts” (with Jeffrey Pojanowski) in Christianity and Private Law (Routledge, 2021).
Professor Moreland was a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame and the Mary Ann Remick Senior Visiting Fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture from 2015 to 2017. He was the Forbes Visiting Fellow at Princeton University in the James Madison Program during academic year 2010-11. He has served as the project leader for grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation. He serves as the Chair of the Federalist Society’s Religious Liberties Practice Group Executive Committee and the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California.
Professor Moreland received his BA in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, his MA and PhD in theological ethics from Boston College, and his JD from the University of Michigan Law School. Following law school, Professor Moreland clerked for the Honorable Paul J. Kelly Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and was an associate at Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington, DC, where he represented clients in First Amendment, professional liability, and products liability matters. Before coming to Villanova, he served as Associate Director for Domestic Policy at the White House under President George W. Bush, where he worked on a range of legal policy issues, including criminal justice, immigration, civil rights, and liability reform.
Michael J. Marks Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School
M. Todd Henderson is the Michael J. Marks Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor Henderson’s research interests include corporations, securities regulation, and law and economics. He has taught classes ranging from Banking Regulation to Torts to American Indian Law.
Professor Henderson received an engineering degree cum laude from Princeton University in 1993. He worked for several years designing and building dams in California before matriculating at the Law School. While at the Law School, Todd was an editor of the Law Review and captained the Law School's all-University champion intramural football team. He graduated magna cum laude in 1998 and was elected to the Order of the Coif. Following law school, Todd served as clerk to the Hon. Dennis Jacobs of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He then practiced appellate litigation at Kirkland & Ellis in Washington, DC, and was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company in Boston, where he specialized in counseling telecommunications and high-tech clients on business and regulatory strategy.
Chairman & Co-Founder, Cynosure Group
Randal Quarles is Chairman and co-founder of The Cynosure Group. Before founding Cynosure, Mr. Quarles was a long-time partner of the Carlyle Group, where he began the firm’s program of investments in the financial services industry during the 2008 financial crisis.
From October 2017 through October 2021, Mr. Quarles was Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, serving as the system’s first Vice Chairman for Supervision, charged specifically with ensuring stability of the financial sector. He also served as the Chairman of the Financial Stability Board (“FSB”) from December 2018 until December 2021; a global body established after the Great Financial Crisis to coordinate international efforts to enhance financial stability. In both positions, he played a key role in crafting the US and international response to the economic and financial dislocations of COVID-19, successfully preventing widespread global disruption of the financial system. As FSB Chairman, he was a regular delegate to the finance ministers’ meetings of the G-7 and G20 Groups of nations and to the Summit meetings of the G20. As Fed Vice Chair, he was a permanent member of the Federal Open Market Committee, the body that sets monetary policy for the United States.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Quarles was Under Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, where he led the Department’s activities in financial sector and capital markets policy, including coordination of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets.
Before serving as Under Secretary, Mr. Quarles was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, where he had a key role in response to several international crises. Mr. Quarles was also the U.S. Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund, a member of the Air Transportation Stabilization Board, and board representative for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. In earlier public service, he was an integral member of the Treasury team in the George H. W. Bush Administration that developed the governmental response to the savings and loan crisis.
Between his tours of duty in public service, Mr. Quarles was a partner with the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell, working at various times in both the New York and London offices, where he was co-head of the firm’s financial institutions practice and advised on transactions that included a number of the largest financial sector mergers ever completed.
Mr. Quarles received an A.B. summa cum laude in philosophy and economics from Columbia in 1981 and a J.D. from the Yale Law School in 1984.
Sterling Professor of Law, Yale Law School
Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law in both Yale College and Yale Law School. After graduating from Yale College, summa cum laude, in 1980 and from Yale Law School in 1984, and clerking for Judge (later Justice) Stephen Breyer, Amar joined the Yale faculty in 1985 at the age of 26. He is Yale’s only living professor to have won the University’s unofficial triple crown — the Sterling Chair for scholarship, the DeVane Medal for teaching, and the Lamar Award for alumni service.
Amar’s work has won awards from both the American Bar Association and the Federalist Society, and he has been cited by Supreme Court justices across the spectrum in more than 50 cases — tops among scholars under age 70. According to both Fred Shapiro’s landmark 2021 study of lifetime scholarly citations and Heinonline’s most recent tabulation of lifetime law-review citations, Amar is America’s second most-cited legal scholar still under age 70. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has written widely for popular publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and The Atlantic. He was an informal consultant to the popular TV show The West Wing and his scholarship has been showcased on many broadcasts, including The Colbert Report, Morning Joe, AC360, Velshi, Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream, Fareed Zakaria GPS, Erin Burnett Outfront, and Constitution USA with Peter Sagal.
He is the author of more than a hundred law review articles and several books, including The Bill of Rights (1998 — winner of the Yale University Press Governors’ Award), America’s Constitution (2005 — winner of the ABA’s Silver Gavel Award), America’s Unwritten Constitution (2012 — named one of the year’s 100 best nonfiction books by The Washington Post), and The Constitution Today (2016 — named one of the year’s top ten nonfiction books by Time magazine). The first volume of his ambitious trilogy on American constitutional history from the Founding to the present, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840, came out in May 2021. The second volume, Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840-1920, will be published in September 2025 and is already available for pre-order. All together, his nonfiction books have won two starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and three starred reviews from Kirkus—tops, it is believed, among legal scholars under age 70. Together with Vikram David Amar (YLS ’88), he has a bi-weekly column on the Supreme Court on the distinguished website SCOTUSblog. Along with Andy Lipka, he co-hosts a popular and free weekly podcast, Amarica’s Constitution, whose listeners are eligible for CLE credit in most American jurisdictions. A wide assortment of his articles and op-eds and video links to many of his public lectures and free online courses may be found at akhilamar.com.
Former Solicitor General of Texas
Jonathan F. Mitchell is Principal at Mitchell Law PLLC. He received his law degree with high honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was an articles editor of The University of Chicago Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif.
After graduating from law school, Mr. Mitchell clerked for Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and for Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States. He then served as an Attorney-Adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice from 2003 through 2006. After leaving the Department of Justice, Mr. Mitchell served as a Visiting Researcher at Georgetown University Law Center, a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Law School from 2006 through 2008, and an Assistant Professor of Law at George Mason University from 2008 through 2010.
In 2010, Mr. Mitchell was appointed Solicitor General of Texas, a position he held until January 2015. After leaving the Texas Solicitor General’s office, Mr. Mitchell served as the Searle Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law before joining the Hoover Institution as a Visiting Fellow from 2015 to 2016. Mr. Mitchell also served as a Visiting Professor of Law at Stanford Law School before opening his own law firm in 2018.
Mr. Mitchell has published numerous works of scholarship in top-10 law journals, and he has written articles on textualism, national-security law, criminal law and procedure, judicial review and judicial federalism, and the legality of stare decisis in constitutional adjudication.
Mr. Mitchell has argued eight times before the Supreme Court of the United States, and more than 20 times in the federal courts of appeals. He has also argued before Supreme Court of Texas and in numerous trial courts. Mr. Mitchell has authored the principal merits brief in 11 Supreme Court cases, and has written and submitted more than 20 amicus curiae briefs in the Supreme Court.
Mr. Mitchell devised the novel enforcement mechanism in the Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as Senate Bill 8, which avoids pre-enforcement judicial review by prohibiting government officials from enforcing the statute and empowering private citizens to bring lawsuits against those who violate it. This produced an end-run around Roe v. Wade and allowed Texas and other states to impose pre-viability abortion bans despite the continued existence of Roe.
Senior Attorney, Institute for Justice
Patrick Jaicomo is a Senior Attorney with the Institute for Justice and one of the leaders of IJ’s Project on Immunity and Accountability. Through the project, Patrick works to dismantle judicially created immunity doctrines and ensure that government officials are held accountable when they violate the Constitution.
In November 2020, Patrick argued the police brutality case Brownback v. King before the U.S. Supreme Court. In March 2024, Patrick returned to the high court for the First Amendment retaliation case Gonzalez v. Trevino and again in October 2024, when the court granted, vacated, and reversed the denial of a similar retaliation claim in Murphy v. Schmitt. Patrick has litigated immunity and accountability issues—including qualified immunity, judicial immunity, and the restriction of constitutional claims against federal workers—across the United States and at every level of the court system.
Before joining IJ, Patrick was a litigator at a private firm in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he cultivated a civil rights practice and handled a variety of cases in state and federal court. He earned his law degree from the University of Chicago and a degree in economics and political science from the University of Notre Dame.
Patrick was born and raised in rural, Steuben County, Indiana, where he met his wife and IJ colleague, Kenzie. The Jaicomos live in Arlington, Virginia, with their lovely daughter, Cora.
Patrick’s work has been featured in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and USA Today. He has also appeared on numerous podcasts and television programs, authored academic articles, and frequently gives presentations on his areas of expertise.
Senior Attorney, Institute of Justice
Kirby Thomas West is a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, where she is also the co-director of IJ’s National Initiative to End Forfeiture Abuse. She joined IJ in 2018 and litigates cases defending property rights, free speech, and educational choice.
In her time at IJ, Kirby has launched challenges to unconstitutional civil forfeiture and impoundment schemes. She has also litigated educational choice cases, including as part of the IJ team that litigated Carson v. Makin, a landmark educational choice case decided in 2022.
In 2024, Kirby was a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School.
Before joining IJ, Kirby Was an attorney at Baker Botts LLP, in Washington D.C. She clerked for Judge Dennis Shedd of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Kirby received her law degree cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2015.