Justice Sarah Hawkins Warren was appointed to the Supreme Court of Georgia by Governor Nathan Deal and was sworn in on September 17, 2018. She previously served as Solicitor General for the State of Georgia under Attorney General Chris Carr.
Justice Warren earned a B.A. in Public Policy and Spanish, magna cum laude, from Duke University. After graduation, Justice Warren served as Deputy Press Secretary for the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Justice Warren received her J.D., magna cum laude, from Duke University School of Law, where she served as Editor in Chief of Law and Contemporary Problems and on the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society.
Following her graduation from law school, Justice Warren served as a law clerk to then-Chief Judge J.L. Edmondson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and to the Honorable Richard J. Leon of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. She also practiced as a litigation partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP in Washington, D.C., where she represented clients before state and federal courts and was outside counsel to Georgia in Florida v. Georgia, No. 142 Original (United States Supreme Court).
In 2015, Justice Warren and her family returned home to Georgia, where she began service in the Office of Attorney General Sam Olens as Deputy Solicitor General and Special Counsel for Water Litigation. In January 2017, she was appointed Solicitor General by Attorney General Chris Carr, and in that role served as the chief appellate lawyer for the State of Georgia and the primary constitutional law advisor to the Attorney General. As Solicitor General, Justice Warren represented Georgia in multi-state litigation and in appeals before state and federal courts, including in an argument before the United States Supreme Court.
Justice Warren currently serves on the Duke Law School Board of Visitors, the Berry College Board of Trustees, and the Advisory Board for the Atlanta Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, Blaise, and their three children.
Stephen Hammer is a litigation associate in the Dallas office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
Before joining the firm, Mr. Hammer served as a law clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States, Judge Gregory G. Katsas of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Mr. Hammer graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he served as managing editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Before law school, Mr. Hammer served as an infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne Division of the United States Army. His military decorations include the Bronze Star. Mr. Hammer received an M.Phil. in theology from the University of Oxford, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship. He received an A.B. summa cum laude in classics from Princeton University and graduated as Latin salutatorian.
Mr. Hammer is a member of the Texas and District of Columbia bars.
Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Agriculture
Biography
Devon Westhill is the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The U.S. Senate confirmed President Donald Trump’s nomination of Westhill on October 7, 2025.
Westhill returns to the USDA where he previously headed the civil rights office as Deputy Assistant Secretary in President Trump’s first term. His previous government appointments also include service at the U.S. Department of Labor, liaison to the Administrative Conference of the U.S., and liaison to the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Prior to returning to government service, Westhill was President and General Counsel of a nonprofit civil rights organization.
Westhill has testified on civil rights matters before Congress, federal agencies, and as an expert witness in federal court. He has spoken hundreds of times at college campuses, conferences, and on radio and TV programs, and he is frequently quoted in print publications, and his writing has appeared in numerous national outlets. A U.S. Navy veteran, Westhill earned his BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his JD from the University of Florida.
T. Terrell Sessums and Gerald Sohn Professor in Constitutional Law, University of Florida Levin College of Law
Biography
Professor Wright joined the Levin College of Law in 1998 and serves as the T. Terrell Sessums and Gerald Sohn Professor in Constitutional Law. At UF Law she has taught various subjects including, constitutional law, property, trusts and estates, legal history, feminist theory, constitutional law of property, and theories of property. As a legal historian, her research has delved into 19th century English divorce and marriage law, 19th century American property rights involving railroads and utilities, and women’s rights and constitutional protections in the 19th and early 20th centuries. She has written extensively, including several book chapters, on recreational trails and rails-to-trails conversions, on the history of English family law, on the Equal Rights Amendment, on constitutional takings law, on the logistics of drone delivery systems, and on the necessity for legal reforms in intestacy and probate law to better address land loss and the heirs’ property problem. Professor Wright has written dozens of articles, published in journals as diverse as the Iowa Law Review, the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, the Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law, Environmental Law, the Wisconsin Law Review, the Australia Journal of Legal History and Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic world. She has written two chapters, on transfer-on-death deeds and on rail-trail conversions, for the preeminent property treatise, Powell on Real Property. And her empirical work on testate and intestate distributions has earned her a grant from the ACTEC foundation, as well as acclaim in the probate and trusts field. Her articles have tackled child custody in England; religion, law and women’s rights in India; the ratification issues in the Equal Rights Amendment; and the property rights in a drone delivery highway. She has authored a popular Trusts and Estates casebook and co-authored a skills book for introducing students to the practice of trusts and estates and a chapter in a forthcoming Disaster Law Handbook. Her most recent book is on the noted Chancery case in which the Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, lost custody of his children because of his revolutionary and atheistic writings. And her work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and numerous federal and state courts.
Wright has taught at the Arizona State University Law School, Indiana University School of Law at Indianapolis, and Georgetown Law Center. She received a B.A. in English Literature from Cornell University, an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Arizona, an M.A. in Liberal Education from St. John’s College, a J.D. from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University. She is also serving as the co-director of the Center for Governmental Responsibility, the largest and oldest public policy law center in Florida.
Associate Professor of Law, University of Florida Levin College of Law
Biography
Professor Ben Johnson is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He researches and writes on governance by committees. Sometimes, the governing committee is a board of directors. Other times, it is a committee of justices at the Supreme Court. His research has won awards from national organizations in law (AALS) and political science (APSA) and can be found in law reviews and peer reviewed outlets. His recent work on the Supreme Court has been published in the Columbia Law Review and Alabama Law Review. Earlier work on district judges with financial conflicts (published in the North Carolina Law Review) led to a large exposé in the Wall Street Journal. His game theoretic model of corporate fiduciary duties is forthcoming at the BYU Law Review. He has ongoing projects on the Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket, corporate fiduciary duties, shareholder voting, and machine learning.
Professor Johnson teaches Corporations (the only course in the curriculum where students learn to build and maintain institutions that can make the world a better place long after they are gone), Empirical Methods for Lawyers, and topics on the federal judiciary.
Michael J. and Jane R. Horvitz Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Biography
Daniel Ortiz, who came to Virginia in 1985, has a wide variety of interests. A Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude Yale graduate, he earned a triple major in mathematics, English and history, the arts and letters. Now as a member of the Virginia law faculty, he teaches constitutional law, administrative law, electoral law, civil procedure and legal theory. In 1992 he received the Z Society Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of Virginia. He served as the Harrison Foundation Research Professor in 1992-95, the Elizabeth D. and Richard A. Merrill Research Professor in 1996-99, and the Joseph C. Carter, Jr., Research Professor in 2000-03.
After graduation from Yale, Ortiz spent two years on a Marshall Scholarship at the University of Oxford, where he completed a Master of Philosophy degree in English studies. Then he returned to Yale for law school and received his J.D. in 1983. He clerked for Judge Stephen G. Breyer of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. He was a visiting professor at the University of Southern California in 1991 and 1994-96 and at the University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall) in 1999.
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.
Stephen Hammer is a litigation associate in the Dallas office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
Before joining the firm, Mr. Hammer served as a law clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States, Judge Gregory G. Katsas of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Mr. Hammer graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he served as managing editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Before law school, Mr. Hammer served as an infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne Division of the United States Army. His military decorations include the Bronze Star. Mr. Hammer received an M.Phil. in theology from the University of Oxford, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship. He received an A.B. summa cum laude in classics from Princeton University and graduated as Latin salutatorian.
Mr. Hammer is a member of the Texas and District of Columbia bars.
Corinne principally practices in environmental law, with an emphasis on litigation, regulatory compliance, internal investigations, and defense against government investigations and enforcement actions.
Corinne draws on wide experience at the U.S. Department of Justice, including serving as Senior Counsel in the Office of the Associate Attorney General, which oversees all civil litigation on behalf of the United States, and as Counselor in the Office of the Attorney General.
Corinne most recently served as Counsel and Chief of Staff in the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where she assisted in managing a 600-person division that included 400 lawyers. In this role she helped manage the Division’s civil and criminal litigation arising under more than 150 environmental and natural resources laws.
She also worked closely with the General Counsel’s Offices for multiple federal agencies, including the EPA, Departments of Interior, Defense, Energy, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well as the White House and Counsel on Environmental Quality to advise high-ranking officials on policy and litigation risks associated with the environmental and natural resource laws.
She has personally argued cases in three U.S. Courts of Appeals, and multiple district courts, and served as the lead or co-lead counsel in district court litigation defending agency regulations, approvals, and permits related to oil and gas operations and other energy extraction projects.
Her roles in government have given her a unique perspective into the decision-making processes in the federal government.
In the private sector, Corinne counsels clients on environmental compliance across a variety of industries, including energy, chemical, manufacturing, and mining sectors. In the transactional context, she assists in the drafting and negotiating of the environmental terms in purchase and sale agreements, lease agreements, credit agreements, and disclosures for debt and equity offerings and public filings. She has also drafted comments on behalf of clients to agencies on proposed rules with significant implications for the oil and gas industry.