Judge, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas
Biography
Hon. Charles Eskridge, Judge, United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and arrived in Houston, Texas, at the age of 11 with his parents in 1974.
Judge Eskridge received a B.S. from Trinity University and a J.D. from Pepperdine University School of Law. He served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Charles Clark of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, as a law clerk to Justice Byron White of the Supreme Court of the United States, and as a special assistant to the Hon. Howard Holtzmann of the Iran/U.S. Claims Tribunal in The Hague.
From 1994 to 2019, Judge Eskridge was in private practice in Houston, Texas, litigating complex commercial disputes. He teaches Origins of the Federal Constitution at the University of Houston Law Center and has served as the Distinguished Visiting Practitioner of Law at the Pepperdine University School of Law.
President Donald J. Trump nominated him to the federal bench on May 3, 2019. Following confirmation by the Senate, Judge Eskridge took his seat on October 22, 2019.
Evan Young is a Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas. Governor Greg Abbott, who appointed Young to fill an unexpired term, swore him into office on November 10, 2021. Justice Young was elected to a full term in November 2022.
Young graduated summa cum laude from Duke University in 1999, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He was a British Marshall Scholar at Oxford University, where he completed his studies in 2001 and earned a First Class Honours degree in Modern History, focusing on British constitutional history. He earned his law degree from Yale Law School in 2004.
Young then worked as a lawyer in the judicial and executive branches of the federal government. He first served as a law clerk to Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and then to Justice Antonin Scalia at the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2006, after his clerkship with Justice Scalia ended, Justice Young became Counsel to the Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, serving in the Office of the Attorney General under Attorneys General Alberto R. Gonzales and Michael B. Mukasey. While on the Attorney General’s staff, he accepted a detail to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, where he was the Deputy Rule of Law Coordinator. In that position he worked to assist the Iraqi government in its efforts to strengthen its legal regime, including, for example, its courts and prison system.
Young returned to Texas and joined the Austin office of Baker Botts L.L.P. in 2009. His practice focused on trial and appellate litigation. He argued cases before both the Supreme Court of the United States and the Supreme Court of Texas, as well as many federal and state appellate courts. He represented clients across the country before every level of the state and federal judiciary.
Before joining the Texas Supreme Court, Young was appointed in 2017 by Governor Abbott and confirmed by the Texas Senate to serve as a member of the Texas Judicial Council, which is the policy-making body for the Texas Judiciary. In 2015, the Texas Supreme Court appointed him to the Supreme Court Advisory Committee, which assists the Court in drafting the rules that govern litigation in Texas courts. He served on both until his elevation to the bench.
Justice Young is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a member of the Texas Philosophical Society. He has been an adjunct law professor for many years at the University of Texas School of Law, where he has frequently taught the Federal Courts and Religious Liberty courses. He also has been an adjunct professor at the University of Mississippi School of Law, where he has taught multiple courses involving U.S. Supreme Court history. He served as Chair of the State Bar of Texas Business Law Section, Chair of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's Texas Regional Office, and Trustee of the Texas Supreme Court Historical Society.
Justice Young and his wife, Tobi, live in Austin with their daughter.
Cory Liu is a state district judge in Austin, Texas. He previously served as assistant general counsel to Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Mr. Liu clerked for Judge Andrew Oldham on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Judge Danny Boggs on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago.
Adam Mortara graduated from the University of Chicago in 1996 with a B.Sc. in chemistry. He then attended Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he received a masters degree in astrophysics on a British Marshall Scholarship.
Mr. Mortara graduated from the University of Chicago Law School with highest honors in 2001. Following graduation, he clerked for Judge Patrick Higginbotham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and then for Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court of the United States. After his clerkships, he was a Temple Bar Scholar of the American Inns of Court.
From 2003 to 2020, Mr. Mortara was with Bartlit Beck LLP where he tried high stakes intellectual property cases and, more notably, Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard. He retired from Bartlit Beck and founded Lawfair LLC, a civil and voting rights firm. He has been a Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School since 2007, where he teaches Federal Habeas Corpus, Federal Jurisdiction, Criminal Procedure, and Writing for the Judiciary.
University of Chicago, 2001, J.D., with Highest Honors
University of Cambridge, Magdalene College, 1998, M.A., Astrophysics
University of Chicago, 1996, Sc.B., Chemistry, General and Special Honors
Jenny McCain is a Shareholder of Maynard Nexsen and Co-Chair of the firm’s Banking Practice. She also is President of Stonegate Real Estate Investments, LLC, a multi-state commercial real estate company. Ms. McCain is also the Founder, Director, and President (2013-2015) of Scholarships for Kids, Inc.
Ms. McCain provides specialized regulatory and general corporate advice to financial institutions of all sizes, including public and private banks, savings associations, credit unions, insurance companies, and other non-depository financial institutions. Ms. McCain’s clients include many of the nation’s largest banking corporations, insurance companies and credit unions based on asset size, as well as numerous community banks.
In 2010, Ms. McCain led the corporate reorganization/restructuring of a privately owned, $100 million commercial real estate company and has served for the past seven years as its President. Ms. McCain is active in both local and regional philanthropic initiatives. In 2013, Ms. McCain founded Scholarships for Kids, Inc. a nonprofit organization that provides scholarships to low income children throughout the state of Alabama. Ms. McCain actively ran the organization from 2013 until 2015, during which time Scholarships for Kids raised over $18 million, partnered with 36 schools throughout the state, and provided more than 3400 scholarships to kindergarten to 12th grade students in Alabama. A twenty-year veteran of the Federalist Society, Ms. McCain has served in leadership positions with the organization since the early 2000s.
Ms. McCain has earned numerous professional and personal accolades, including recognition by both Chambers USA and America’s Best Lawyers as a Leading Practitioner in the area of Banking and Finance. In 2015, Ms. McCain was selected as a member of the inaugural class of the Presidential Leadership Scholars, a national leadership program created by the George W. Bush, William J. Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Libraries.
Ms. McCain is a graduate of the University of Virginia and the University of Texas School of Law. She was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama.
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota
Biography
Dr. Juan Del Toro is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He also holds a Research Associate affiliation with the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Del Toro received his Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology with a concentration in Advanced Quantitative Analyses from New York University.
As a developmental psychologist, Dr. Del Toro examines how specific perpetrators of ethnic-racial discrimination (e.g., peers, school adults, and law enforcement) shape children’s life course trajectories. The goal of specifying perpetrators is to inform setting-specific policies and interventions working to improve the well-being of all youth.
His research includes a series of first authored publications in Child Development, American Psychologist, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and has been featured in the Huffington Post, Forbes, and the New York Times. Dr. Del Toro serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of Research on Adolescence, the journal for Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, and the Journal of Educational Psychology.
Vice President for Public Policy and Engagement, Child Trends
Biography
Kristen Harper brings to Child Trends a wealth of expertise in utilizing research to drive policy decision making and promote better outcomes for youth. She serves as a strategic advisor working to continuously improve the policy relevance of Child Trends’ portfolio and connect researchers with local, state, and federal officials. Kristen is also a nationally recognized expert on education policy, racial and ethnic disparities in education, school discipline policy, and school health and climate, and has been cited and quoted by The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, Politico, Education Week, U.S. News & World Report, and The 74, among other publications. Kristen is a proud member of the 2019-2021 class of the Annie E. Casey Foundations’ Child and Family Fellowship.
Currently, Kristen is the principal investigator of a study to examine how shifts in Medicaid policy have influenced reimbursements for school-based health services and school capacity to promote health equity. She serves as a senior advisor for multiple projects—funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation—dedicated to improving school health, school safety, and adolescent health. Kristen previously led a project to build a framework to assess how states support children and youth with special health care needs.
Kristen came to Child Trends after serving for seven years in the U.S. Department of Education, where she was a chief architect of the agency’s efforts to improve conditions for learning. As a senior policy advisor for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), she authored federal regulations to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in the identification, placement, and discipline of children with disabilities. In this role, Kristen also directed the Department’s efforts to promote alternatives to suspension under the Supportive School Discipline Initiative, a partnership launched in 2011 between the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice to address exclusionary and punitive discipline. Her leadership in addressing school discipline continued under the federal My Brother’s Keeper initiative, a taskforce launched in 2014 to improve outcomes for young men and boys of color. Prior to OSERS, Kristen served in the Department’s elementary and secondary education offices advancing policy initiatives to improve school climate and conditions for learning. With her guidance, the Department established, in 2010, the first federal grant to support the use of survey measurement to improve school climate programming.
Executive Director & Secretary, American Civil Rights Project
Biography
Dan Morenoff is the executive director at the American Civil Rights Project and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
His work focuses on protecting and, where necessary, restoring the primacy of all Americans' shared civil rights against the identitarian alternative.
Before practicing law, Morenoff served on the legislative staff of Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX). Morenoff holds a B.A. from Columbia College of Columbia University in the City of New York and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School. He has also served as an officer or director of several community organizations in Dallas, Texas.
Legal Fellow, Center for the Separation of Powers, Pacific Legal Foundation
Biography
Alison Somin joined Pacific Legal Foundation in May 2020 as a legal fellow in the Center for the Separation of Powers and part of the equality before the law practice group.
Before joining the Pacific Legal Foundation team, Alison was a special assistant and counsel for over a decade to Gail Heriot, a member of the bipartisan United States Commission on Civil Rights. She also has deep roots in the liberty movement. Alison was a Koch Associate at the National Federation for Independent Business Legal Foundation and, during law school, completed summer clerkships at the Institute for Justice and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. She holds a J.D. from Emory University School of Law and an A.B. in history from Dartmouth College.
Her work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Daily Journal, Texas Journal of Law and Politics, and The Federalist Society’s Engage magazine and blog.
She lives in northern Virginia with her husband Ilya; two children; and golden retriever Willow. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, baking and cooking, children’s art projects, and training and exercising Willow.
Vice President, Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law, Advancing American Freedom
Biography
John G. Malcolm oversees Advancing American Freedom’s work to increase understanding of the Constitution and the rule of law as Vice President of the organization’s Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law. Malcolm brings to the challenge a wealth of legal expertise and experience in both the public and private sectors.
Prior to joining Advancing American Freedom in 2025, Malcolm was the Vice President of the Institute for Constitutional Government and the Director of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation. Prior to joining Heritage in 2012, Malcolm was general counsel at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, as well as a distinguished practitioner in residence at Pepperdine Law School. From 2004 to 2009, Malcolm was executive vice president and director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association.
Malcolm served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division from 2001 to 2004, where he oversaw sections on computer crime and intellectual property, domestic security, child exploitation and obscenity, and special investigations. Immediately prior to that, he was a founding partner in the Atlanta law firm of Malcolm & Schroeder, LLP.
From 1990 to 1997, Malcolm was an assistant U.S. attorney in Atlanta, assigned to the fraud and public corruption section, and also an associate independent counsel, investigating fraud and abuse in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was honored with the Director’s Award for Superior Performance for his work in connection with the successful prosecution of Walter Leroy Moody Jr., who assassinated an 11th Circuit judge and the head of the Savannah chapter of the NAACP.
A graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia College, Malcolm began his career as a law clerk to a federal district court judge and a federal appellate court judge, and as an associate at the Atlanta-based law firm of Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan (new Eversheds Sutherland). Malcolm, who resides in Washington, D.C., serves on the Board of Trustees of the Washington National Opera and is a Senate-confirmed member of the Board of Directors of the Legal Services Corporation, the largest funder of civil legal aid in the United States.
Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law, University of California at Berkeley; Senior Research Fellow, School of Civic Leadership, Civitas Institute, University of Texas at Austin; Nonresident Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Biography
John Yoo is the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law. He is also Distinguished Visiting Scholar, School of Civic Leadership and Senior Research Fellow, Civitas Institute, at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
His most recent book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Supreme Court, co-authored with Robert Delahunty, was published in 2023. Professor Yoo’s other books include Defender-in-Chief: Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power;Striking Power: How Cyber, Robots, and Space Weapons Change the Rules for War, Point of Attack: Preventive War, International Law, and Global Welfare, and Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George Bush.
Professor Yoo has published more than 100 articles in academic journals on subjects including national security, constitutional law, international law, and the Supreme Court. He also regularly contributes to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and National Review, among others.
Professor Yoo has served in all three branches of government. He was an official in the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on national security and terrorism issues after the 9/11 attacks. He served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. He has been a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and federal appeals Judge Laurence Silberman. He has been a visiting professor at Seoul National University in South Korea, the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel, Keio University in Japan, Trento University in Italy, the University of Chicago, and the Free University of Amsterdam.
Professor Yoo supervises the Public Law and Policy Program and the California Constitution Center. He also serves on the boards of the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Federalist Society’s Separation of Powers and Federalism Division, the Universidad Cientifica del Sur Law School, and the Asia-Pacific Law Institute at Seoul National University. He is a winner of the Federalist Society’s Paul Bator award and been the Edwin Meese III Originalism Lecturer at the Heritage Foundation.
Professor Yoo graduated from Yale Law School and summa cum laude from Harvard College.
