Garwood Visiting Professor and Visiting Fellow, James Madison Pr, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law
Biography
David F. Forte is Professor of Law at Cleveland State University, where he was the inaugural holder of the Charles R. Emrick, Jr.- Calfee Halter & Griswold Endowed Chair. This fall, Professor Forte will be the Garwood Visiting Professor at Princeton University in the Department of Politics, and Visiting Fellow at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He holds degrees from Harvard College, Manchester University, England, the University of Toronto and Columbia University.
During the Reagan administration, Professor Forte served as chief counsel to the United States delegation to the United Nations and alternate delegate to the Security Council. He has authored a number of briefs before the United States Supreme Court, and has frequently testified before the United States Congress and consulted with the Department of State on human rights and international affairs issues. His advice was specifically sought on the approval of the Genocide Convention, on world-wide religious persecution, and Islamic extremism. He has appeared and spoken frequently on radio and television, both nationally and internationally. In 2002, the Department of State sponsored a speaking tour for Professor Forte in Amman, Jordan, and he was also a featured speaker to the Meeting of Peoples in Rimini, Italy, a meeting which gathers over 500,000 people from all over Europe. He has also been called to testify before the state legislatures of Ohio, Kansas, and Idaho as well as the New York City Council. He has assisted in drafting a number of pieces of legislation for the Ohio General Assembly dealing with abortion, international trade, and federalism. He has sat as acting judge on the municipal court of Lakewood Ohio and was chairman of Professional Ethics Committee of the Cleveland Bar Association. He has received a number of awards for his public service, including the Cleveland Bar Association’s President’s Award, the Cleveland State University Award for Distinguished Service, the Cleveland State University Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Alumni Award for Faculty Excellence. He served as Consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Family under Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. In 2003, Dr. Forte was a Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the University of Trento and returned there in 2004 as a Visiting Professor. For the academic year, 2008-2009, Professor Forte was Senior Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion and the Constitution in at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. He was the Robert E. Henderson Constitution Day Lecturer at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, and he has given over 300 invited addresses and papers at more than 100 academic institutions. His work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Professor Forte was a Bradley Scholar at the Heritage Foundation, and Visiting Scholar at the Liberty Fund. He has been President of the Ohio Association of Scholars, was on the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia Society, and is also adjunct Scholar at the Ashbrook Center. He has been appointed to the Ohio State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He has also been a Civil War re-enactor and a Merit Badge Counselor for the Boy Scouts.
He writes and speaks nationally on topics such as constitutional law, religious liberty, Islamic law, the rights of families, and international affairs. He served as book review editor for the American Journal of Jurisprudence and has edited a volume entitled, Natural Law and Contemporary Public Policy, published by Georgetown University Press. His book, Islamic Law Studies: Classical and Contemporary Applications, has been published by Austin & Winfield. He is Senior Editor of The Heritage Guide to the Constitution (2006), 2d edition (2014), published by Regnery & Co, a clause by clause analysis of the Constitution of the United States.
His teaching competencies include Constitutional Law, the First Amendment, Islamic Law, Jurisprudence, Natural Law, International Law, International Human Rights, the Presidency, and Constitutional History.
Dave Roland is the Director of Litigation and co-founder of the Freedom Center of Missouri; he also serves as the Secretary for the Freedom Center’s Board of Directors. Dave earned undergraduate degrees in Political Science and Biblical Studies at Abilene Christian University before studying law and religion at Vanderbilt University, where he received his law degree and a Master’s in Theology in 2004. While at Vanderbilt, Dave wrote a series of essays for the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center about the First Amendment and public education, and he clerked for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in Washington, DC. Following law school, Dave spent more than three years in the nation’s capital as an attorney with the Institute for Justice, where he litigated school choice, economic liberty, and property rights cases in state and federal courts. His work has been discussed in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, USAToday, the Huffington Post, on Fox News and MSNBC, and other major media outlets nationwide. Since moving to Missouri in 2007, Dave has become a familiar presence on television news broadcasts, radio shows, and in newspapers across the state. He travels widely throughout the state, speaking to elected officials, student groups at colleges and law schools, Federalist Society chapters, and community groups about education, property rights, health care reform, constitutional protections for liberty, and the American Founders’ conception of virtue. Dave has also established himself as one of the preeminent election attorneys in Missouri, having won groundbreaking, precedent-setting victories in Wright-Jones v. Nasheed, Vowell v. Kander, and Franks v. Hubbard. Prior to founding the Freedom Center, he spent three years working as an attorney and policy analyst for the Show-Me Institute. Dave also previously served as the Director of the Theodore L. Stiles Center for Liberty at the Freedom Foundation in Olympia, Washington. He has been admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia, Missouri, Tennessee, and Washington, as well as before the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern District of Missouri, the Western District of Missouri, the Western District of Washington, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. He lives in Mexico, Missouri, with his wife, Jenifer, and their three children. Dave can be reached at dave@mofreedom.org.
Vice President for Legal Affairs, Goldwater Institute
Biography
Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation and holds the Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government. He litigates to promote economic liberty, private property rights, free speech, and other crucial values in states across the country.
Timothy is the author of nine books, including most recently You Don’t Own Me: Individualism and the Culture of Liberty (2025), and Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness (2022), as well as more than 50 scholarly articles on a wide variety of legal subjects. A frequent guest on radio and television, he is well known to radio audiences as “Tim the Lawyer” on The Armstrong & Getty Show, and his writings have appeared in Reason, National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and The Objective Standard, where he is a contributing editor. He has taught classes at Pepperdine University, McGeorge School of Law, George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, and Arizona State University, where he held the 2023-24 Barry Goldwater Chair in American Institutions.
He is an Adjunct Scholar with the Cato Institute and is a graduate of Hillsdale College and Chapman University School of Law.
Thomas Barnett is a partner in the Washington, DC office and co-chair of the firm's Antitrust & Consumer Law Practice Group. He specializes in global antitrust and competition law practice and works closely with the firm’s white collar practice on criminal antitrust enforcement and investigative matters.
Mr. Barnett recently served as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. He headed the Antitrust Division from 2005 to 2008, having previously served in the Division as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Enforcement from 2004 to 2005. During his tenure, Mr. Barnett was involved in some of the largest and most complicated criminal matters in the Division’s history, including investigations and prosecutions that involved coordination with multiple competition authorities in other jurisdictions. In the merger area, Mr. Barnett oversaw the review of all mergers investigated by the Division and supervised more than 30 cases filed in federal district court. He also oversaw an active competition advocacy program that included numerousamicusbriefs filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on antitrust issues and comments to a wide range of federal and state agencies. He argued before the U.S. Supreme Court asamicuson behalf of the United States inBell Atlantic Corp. v. Twomblyand testified several times before Congressional committees.
While at the Antitrust Division, Mr. Barnett worked with international antitrust authorities throughout the world and served in leadership positions in key international competition organizations, such as chairing the Working Party on International Cooperation and Enforcement of the OECD Competition Committee and serving on the Steering Committee of the International Competition Network.
Mr. Barnett received the Edmund Randolph Award, the U.S. Department of Justice’s highest honor, for his service in the Division.
Prior to 2004, Mr. Barnett was a leader in the firm’s Antitrust & Consumer Law Practice Group. He counseled Fortune 500 companies on all aspects of antitrust law and was involved in mergers and acquisitions, government antitrust investigations, and antitrust litigation involving a wide range of industries. He served as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, teaching a course on antitrust and intellectual property issues in sports in 2001 and 2003, and as a co-teacher of an advanced antitrust seminar at the University of Virginia Law School multiple times between 1991 and 2004.
Harvard Law School, J.D., 1989 - magna cum laude
London School of Economics, M.Sc., 1986 - Fulbright Scholar
Bob Barr represented the 7th District of Georgia in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003, and now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia, where he serves as chairman of the state’s Judicial Qualifications Commission. Bob also chairs Liberty Guard, Inc. a non-profit and non-partisan organization dedicated to protecting individual liberty. He also heads a consulting firm, Liberty Strategies, Inc., and is a registered Mediator and Arbitrator. Bob has taught constitutional law at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School and government at Kennesaw State University.
Bob is a member of the Board of Directors for the National Rifle Association, and serves on the Board of the Interactive College of Technology. He is a member of Tau Kappa Epsilon Fraternity.
From 2003 to 2008, Bob occupied the 21st Century Liberties Chair for Freedom and Privacy at the American Conservative Union. He served as a member of The Constitution Project’s Initiative on Liberty and Security, and from 2003 to 2005 was a member of a project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government addressing matters of privacy and security. Barr has served as an advisory board member for Privacy International, headquartered in London, and was labeled “Mr. Privacy” by former New York Times columnist William Safire. He was the Libertarian Party nominee for President in 2008.
Bob has appeared on virtually every major cable and network television program dealing with public policy matters. He writes regularly for Townhall.com, The Daily Caller, and The Marietta Daily Journal, and has been a columnist and blogger for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He writes occasional pieces for other publications and hosts a regular podcast, “Bob Barr’s Laws of the Universe.” He is the author of three books: “The Meaning of Is: The Squandered Impeachment and Wasted Legacy of William Jefferson Clinton,” “Patriot Nation: Bob Barr’s Laws of the Universe Volume One,” and “Lessons in Liberty.”
Bob was appointed by President Reagan as the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia (1986-90), served as President of Southeastern Legal Foundation from 1990-91, and was an official with the CIA from 1971-78. Additionally, he has served as a member of U.S. delegations at several United Nations conferences on firearms.
Bob Barr was awarded his law degree from Georgetown University, his master’s degree from The George Washington University, and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California. He and his wife Jeri live in Smyrna, Georgia just outside Atlanta.
Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute, providing thought and policy leadership on financial issues and the study of financial systems. His work includes cycles of booms and busts, financial crises with their political responses, housing finance, government-sponsored enterprises, risk and uncertainty, central banking, banking and financial regulation, corporate governance, retirement finance, student loans, and the politics of finance.
He previously served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department 2019-2021. He was a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the R Street Institute 2015-2019 and 2021, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 2004-2015. Among the many aspects of his AEI work, he developed the One Page Mortgage Form to give borrowers in clear form the key information they need in order to know what they are committing themselves to. He was President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004. There he invented the Mortgage Partnership Finance program, which successfully created front-end mortgage credit risk sharing beginning in 1997. His decades of banking experience include being a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 1991.
Pollock was a director of the CME Group 2004-2019 and of Ascendium Education Group 1989-2019. He is a director and past-chairman of the Great Books Foundation and a past president of the International Union for Housing Finance.
Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise, Vanderbilt University Law School
Biography
Brian Fitzpatrick is the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School, where his research focuses on class action litigation, federal courts, judicial selection, and constitutional law. He is best known for his empirical studies of class action settlements as well as his book The Conservative Case for Class Actions (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Professor Fitzpatrick joined Vanderbilt's law faculty in 2007 after serving as the John M. Olin Fellow at New York University School of Law. He graduated first in his class from Harvard Law School and went on to clerk for Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. After his clerkships, Professor Fitzpatrick practiced commercial and appellate litigation for several years at Sidley Austin in Washington, D.C., and served as Special Counsel for Supreme Court Nominations to U.S. Senator John Cornyn. Before earning his law degree, Fitzpatrick graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's of science in chemical engineering from the University of Notre Dame. He has received the Hall-Hartman Outstanding Professor Award, which recognizes excellence in classroom teaching, for his Civil Procedure and Federal Courts courses.
