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Chief Justice, Tennessee Supreme Court
Justice Jeff Bivins took office as a member of the Tennessee Supreme Court on July 16, 2014. He was appointed to this position by Governor Bill Haslam. He was elected to the remainder of the full term in August 2016. Effective September 1, 2016, his colleagues elected him to the position of Chief Justice, a position he served in until September 2021. Prior to his appointment to the Tennessee Supreme Court, Justice Bivins was a judge on the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals from August 2011 until July 2014. Previously, Justice Bivins also served as a Circuit Court Judge for the 21st Judicial District of Tennessee, covering Williamson, Hickman, Lewis, and Perry Counties. He was appointed to the trial court position in March 2005. Justice Bivins was elected to a full eight-year term in 2006. He also previously served in a circuit judge position from July 1999 through August 2000. He is a 1986 graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Law. He received a B.A. Degree, magna cum laude, in 1982 from East Tennessee State University, with a major in political science and a minor in criminal justice. Justice Bivins is the immediate past President of the Tennessee Judicial Conference. Prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court, Justice Bivins served on the Board of Judicial Conduct and its predecessor, the Court of the Judiciary. Justice Bivins also previously served on the Tennessee Judicial Evaluation Commission. He is a member of the John Marshall American Inn of Court, having served as President from 2003-2008, and the Harry Phillips American Inn of Court. He is a member of the American Bar Association, the Tennessee Bar Association, and the Williamson County Bar Association. He also is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, the Tennessee Bar Foundation, and the Nashville Bar Foundation. He is a former member of the Williamson County Commission. Prior to his appointment to the trial bench, Justice Bivins practiced law with the firm of Boult, Cummings, Conners & Berry PLC in Nashville, Tennessee. He also served as Assistant Commissioner and General Counsel for the Tennessee Department of Personnel.
Founding Dean & Professor, Kenneth F. Kahn School of Law at High Point University
Hon. Mark Martin is the founding dean and professor of law at the Kenneth F. Kahn School of Law at High Point University.
Mark served as Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court from 2014-2019. He also served on that Court as an Associate Justice, on the North Carolina Court of Appeals, and on a North Carolina Superior Court.
The Chief Justice of the United States appointed Mark to the Committee on Federal-State Jurisdiction of the United States Judicial Conference. He also served on the board of directors of the Conference of Chief Justices.
Mark chairs the Thomson Reuters Judicial Advisory Council. He is a member of the American Law Institute, where he assists with the Third Restatement, Conflict of Laws, and serves on the Region 15 Advisory Committee.
Mark has served on the adjunct faculties of Duke University, North Carolina Central University, and the University of North Carolina law schools. Mark co-taught a course on the various modes of constitutional interpretation with Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. of the United States Supreme Court from 2020-2022.
President, JCN
Carrie Campbell Severino is the president of the JCN, and co-author with Mollie Hemingway of the bestselling book Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Court. As a go-to expert on the confirmation process, Mrs. Severino has been extensively quoted in the media. She regularly appears on television, including FOX, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and ABC’s This Week.
Severino writes and speaks on a wide range of judicial issues, including the constitutional limits on government, the federal nomination process, and state judicial selection. She has testified before Congress on constitutional questions and briefed Senators on judicial nominations, and regularly files briefs in high-profile Supreme Court cases. She was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and to Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School (J.D.), Duke University (B.A., Biology), and Michigan State University (M.A., Linguistics).
Senior Legal Fellow, Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law, Advancing American Freedom
Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School
Professor Heidi Kitrosser joined the University of Minnesota Law School faculty in 2006. She was a visiting professor at the Law School from 2005-06, and an assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School from 2003-2006.
Kitrosser is an expert on the constitutional law of federal government secrecy and on separation of powers and free speech law more broadly. She has written, spoken, and consulted widely on these topics. Her book, Reclaiming Accountability: Transparency, Executive Power, and the U.S. Constitution, was published in 2015 by the University of Chicago Press. It was awarded the 2014 IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law / Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize. Kitrosser’s articles have appeared in many venues, including Supreme Court Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Journal of National Security Law and Policy, Minnesota Law Review, and Constitutional Commentary.
Kitrosser is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow. She is spending the 2017-18 school year using her fellowship to work on a new book about the law and policy of whistleblowing among federal government employees and contractors.
Kitrosser graduated from UCLA in 1992, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with a B.A. in political science. She received her J.D. degree from Yale Law School in 1996. During her third year at Yale, she won the Harlan Fiske Stone Prize for best oral argument in the Morris Tyler Moot Court of Appeals.
Following law school, she clerked for Judge William Rea on the District Court for the Central District of California and for Judge Judith Rogers on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She also worked as an associate at the Washington, D.C., office of Jenner & Block.
For more information, download Professor Kitrosser’s 
curriculum vitae.
Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
Hon. Jennifer Mascott served as Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Separation of Powers Institute at The Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law before her appointment to the federal bench. On July 16, 2025, President Donald J. Trump nominated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (Delaware), and she was confirmed on October 9, 2025.
Prior to her confirmation, Judge Mascott wrote extensively in administrative and constitutional law, statutory interpretation, and the separation of powers. Her scholarship—published in leading journals including the Stanford Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, and Supreme Court Review—was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and multiple federal courts. She also contributed Supreme Court commentary for NBC Universal.
Before joining Catholic Law, she was an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of The C. Boyden Gray Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. In 2022 she became co-author of Beermann, Cass & Diver’s Administrative Law: Cases and Materials (9th ed.). In 2023 she received the Justice Joseph Story Award for excellence in scholarship, teaching, and advancing the rule of law.
Judge Mascott also served as a Council Member of the ABA’s Administrative Law Section and as a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States. She frequently testified before Congress on executive power, regulatory reform, and judicial jurisdiction, and participated in multiple Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
From 2019 to 2021, she took leave from academia to serve as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and later as Associate Deputy Attorney General, where she argued federal cases and assisted with Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation. Earlier in her career, she clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and for then-Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit.
Judge Mascott earned her J.D. summa cum laude from the George Washington University Law School and her B.A. from the same institution.
James G. Phillipp Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School
Julian Davis Mortenson writes on constitutional and international law. His current book project—The Founders' President (under contract, Harvard University Press)—develops a comprehensive account of presidential power at the American Founding. He is also co-authoring a new constitutional law casebook, scheduled for publication by Foundation Press in 2020.
Professor Mortenson is an award-winning teacher and an active litigator. Representative constitutional matters include his work as lead counsel in a pre-Obergefell suit that required Michigan to recognize the marriages of more than 300 same-sex couples; his representation of discharged military service members challenging the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law; and his work as one of the principal drafters of the merits briefs in the landmark case Boumediene v. Bush, which secured the right of Guantanamo detainees to challenge their incarceration. He regularly litigates complex transnational matters in the U.S. courts, and has served as arbitrator, counsel, and expert witness in a wide variety of commercial and investor-state disputes.
Before joining the faculty, Professor Mortenson worked at the law firm WilmerHale, in the President's Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and as a law clerk for both Justice David H. Souter and The Hon. J. Harvie Wilkinson III. Prior to law school, he was a management consultant with a client portfolio spanning the finance, manufacturing, oil and gas, and information technology industries. Professor Mortenson was salutatorian of his class at Stanford Law School and received an AB in history, summa cum laude, from Harvard College.
Professor of Law, American University Washington College of Law
Robert L. Tsai is Professor of Law at American University and a prize-winning essayist in constitutional law and history. Though he was born in Taiwan, he has always considered America his home. In fact, one of the proudest moments of his life was the day he was sworn in as a U.S. citizen. Tsai spent his formative years in the Pacific Northwest, working in his parents’ cafe in charming Port Townsend, Washington, and dreaming about the world beyond his small town. He left the area for college and earned a B.A. magna cum laude in History and Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received the Carey McWilliams Prize for his honors thesis on the political significance of early Christian teachings.
He then headed to Yale Law School, where he helped edit the Yale Law Journal, served on the Board of the Morris Tyler Moot Court, and was awarded Honorable Mention for Oral Advocacy as a Harlan Fiske Stone Prize Finalist. After graduating from law school, he learned the intricacies of America’s justice system by working as a law clerk for federal judges in New York and Boston: U.S. District Judge Denny Chin (later appointed by President Obama to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit) and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Hugh H. Bownes (a Carter appointee who passed away in 2003).
After two years of judicial tutelage, Tsai relocated to the South to become a civil rights lawyer in Georgia. Those exhilarating years working with students, clergy, protesters, prisoners, and the homeless left a lasting impression. His first teaching gig was at the University of Oregon Law School, where he earned tenure, along with awards for teaching and research from the law school and the university.
Tsai is the author of three books, Practical Equality: Forging Justice in a Divided Nation (W.W. Norton Feb. 19, 2019), America’s Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community (Harvard 2014), and Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture (Yale 2008). Practical Equality, which will be published by W.W. Norton in February 2019, is a call to arms to do the hard work of equality, brimming with historical lessons for how to make social progress in tough times. America’s Forgotten Constitutions, which explores how citizens have written a wide range of alternative constitutions to resist mainstream constitutional law, has been called “captivating,” “magisterial,” and “a remarkable feat of excavation.” Eloquence and Reason, his book on the development of America’s free speech values, has been described as “fresh,” “sophisticated,” and “compelling.”
Tsai’s research spans constitutional law, legal history, democratic theory, American political culture, social movements, criminal procedure, presidential leadership, and radical constitutionalism. He has written about the legal obstacles placed in the way of black civil rights activists, President Franklin Roosevelt and freedom of religion, the philosophy of John Brown and his followers, modern white supremacy and the militia movement, the Republic of New Afrika’s ideas about the Constitution, the historical treatment of migrants, early socialism in America, the rise and fall of the “one world” movement, President Obama’s reversal on same-sex marriage, and ideas of equality in the poetry and fiction of Langston Hughes.
His work has been published by the Journal of American History, Contemporary Political Theory, Constitutional Commentary, Perspectives on Politics, Yale Law Journal, Michigan Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Washington University Law Review, and Boston University Law Review. His popular essays have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Politico, Boston Review, and Slate. He has been interviewed by the New York Times, NPR, and CNN. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C.
Attorney General, South Carolina
Alan Wilson was elected South Carolina’s Fifty-First Attorney General on November 2, 2010, and took office on January 12, 2011, becoming the nation’s youngest Attorney General.
This marks his third stint in the office. Previously, he served as a prosecution division intern under Charlie Condon and as an Assistant Attorney General under Henry McMaster.
As South Carolina’s Attorney General, Wilson is the state’s chief prosecutor, chief securities officer, and the state’s chief legal counsel. The office is comprised of more than two hundred employees and nearly seventy-five attorneys who manage nearly 8,000 active case files.
Wilson has focused on keeping our families safe and defending the Constitution.
He has assembled an unprecedented coalition consisting of the Attorney General’s office, the State Law Enforcement Division, every sheriff, the Police Chief’s Association, and all 16 solicitors. Together, they are actively advancing legislative priorities to ensure South Carolina is the safest place to live, work, and raise a family.
As Attorney General, Wilson has defended the Constitution and the laws of this state even if it means challenging the federal government. He has protected South Carolina’s right-to-work; helped lead the 26-state challenge to the federal health care mandate; and successfully safeguarded South Carolina’s voter identification and immigration laws in court.
Today, he is actively engaged in state and federal litigation to provide safe harbor to South Carolina’s ports, shield the state’s energy interests at Yucca Mountain, as well as a constitutional challenge of Dodd-Frank.
Prior to his election, Wilson served as an Assistant Solicitor and as an Assistant Attorney General before entering private practice with the Columbia firm of Willoughby & Hoefer, P.A. He began his legal career working for the late Judge Marc H. Westbrook.
Growing up, public service was paramount in the Wilson house. Alan and his three brothers have all achieved the rank of Eagle Scout. All four presently serve our nation in uniform.
Wilson joined the National Guard immediately after graduating from college. He was called to serve in Iraq where he led troops through enemy fire and earned the Combat Action Badge. Today, he continues his military service by providing legal support for soldiers and assisting in the prosecution of military crimes as a Lt. Colonel in the Judge Advocate General Corps.
He is a graduate of Francis Marion University and the University of South Carolina School of Law. Wilson and his wife, Jennifer, have two young children, Michael and Anna Grace.
Senior Fellow, Claremont Institute and Adjunct Professor, John Hopkins University
Ken Masugi, non-resident Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, has had diverse careers in academia, think-tanks, and government. He teaches graduate courses for Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Advanced Studies in American Government in Washington, DC. He has held positions at a variety of universities and college programs, including a federal prison and Princeton University. He taught for three years at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he was John M. Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor.
Masugi has also served in the federal government for ten years, as a special assistant and speechwriter to the heads of the Departments of Labor and Justice and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He is the co-author, co-editor, or editor of 10 books on American politics and author of over 100 articles and reviews on American politics, political philosophy, constitutional development, and films. He is a regular columnist for the web magazine American Greatness. He has recorded CDs of lectures on American presidential rhetoric and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. He has helped develop the Claremont Institute as Director of the Bicentennial of the Constitution project, Editor of The Claremont Review of Books, and inaugural director of the Center for Local Government.
Masugi is currently preparing a monograph on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and a series of studies on Aristotle’s political philosophy. He is working on a book on the Declaration of Independence and changing American diversity. He is the recipient of several academic honors, including a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Cologne, Germany (1975-76), and has lectured at a variety of American and international institutions. He holds his B.A., with honors, from Claremont McKenna College and his Ph.D. from The New School for Social Research.
Entrepreneur and Author of WOKE, INC.
Conservative leaders have called Vivek Ramaswamy one of “the most compelling conservative voices in the country” and “one of the towering intellects” in America.
Vivek Ramaswamy is a New York Times bestselling author and a successful entrepreneur who has founded multiple successful enterprises. A first-generation American, he is the founder and executive chairman of Roivant Sciences, a new type of biopharmaceutical company focused on the application of technology to drug development. He founded Roivant in 2014 and led the largest biotech IPOs of 2015 and 2016, eventually culminating in successful clinical trials in multiple disease areas that led to FDA-approved products.
Mr. Ramaswamy was born and raised in southwest Ohio. He graduated summa cum laude in Biology from Harvard in 2007 and began his career as a successful biotech investor at a prominent hedge fund. Mr. Ramaswamy continued to work as an investor while earning his law degree at Yale.
Mr. Ramaswamy was featured on the cover of Forbes magazine in 2015 for his work in drug development. In 2020 he emerged as a prominent commentator on stakeholder capitalism, free speech, and woke culture. He has authored numerous articles and op-eds, which have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, National Review, Newsweek, and Harvard Business Review.
Mr. Ramaswamy serves on the board of directors of the Philanthropy Roundtable, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, and St. Xavier High School.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit
Judge William Duane Benton is a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit. He joined the court in 2004 after being nominated by former President George W. Bush. Prior to his appointment, Judge Benton served as the chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court. During his service on the court he received his masters of laws from the University of Virginia, completed the senior executives program at Harvard University’s John F Kennedy School of Government, and completed a post-graduate appellate judges course at New York University’s Institute of Judicial Administration.
Prior to serving on the Supreme Court of Missouri, Judge Benton was appointed by then-Governor John Ashcroft as director of the state’s department of revenue. Judge Benton also worked as a judge advocate general for the United States Navy, during which time he received his master’s degree in business administration and accountancy from the University of Memphis.
Judge Benton earned his law degree from Yale Law School and was the managing editor of the Yale Law Journal.
Professor of Law, Temple University Beasley School of Law
Professor Craig Green has taught and written in the fields of Administrative Law, American Legal History, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, and Federal Courts; he has also taught in the field of Reproductive Rights. Other teaching interests include Conflicts of Law, Remedies, Civil Procedure II, Complex Civil Litigation, Civil and Political Rights, First Amendment, Separation of Powers, Legislation, Federalism, Constitutional History, History of American Judging, and Sentencing. In 2009 and 2015, Green received Temple Law School’s George P. Williams Award as “Outstanding Professor of the Year,” and in 2010 he received Temple University’s Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Green’s research has addressed the role of federal courts in overseeing the executive branch, and the significance of iconic cases like Erie v. Tompkins in legal discourse. He has published articles concerning wartime detention, federal common law, judicial activism, precedential interpretation, equal protection, the federal sentencing guidelines, constitutional history, the economic recession of 2008, and customary international law. He has been invited to present research to the Sentencing Commission’s legal staff, as a keynote speaker at the Japanese-American Society for Legal Studies Annual Meeting in Kyoto, as a participant in the Turkish Institute for Justice’s conference “The Balance Between Freedom and Security in Fighting against Terrorism,” and as an organizing panelist for the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists at the University of Warwick. In 2012, Green received Temple Law School’s Friel-Scanlan Award for Outstanding Scholarship.
In 2018, Green received a Ph.D from Princeton University’s History Department for completing his dissertation, “Creating American Land: A Territorial History from the Albany Plan to the U.S. Constitution.” The dissertation seeks to explain (1) how the United States’ imperial legal structure emerged from Revolution’s anti-imperial moment, (2) how American states and statehood emerged from the legal destruction of British colonies, (3) how Native American ideas about territory influenced and were affected by the law of Britain and the United States, and (4) what “law” meant in a context where institutional enforcement was most often impossible.
Green has an active interest in appellate litigation, and has served on moot courts for Supreme Court advocates at the University of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court Institute, the Georgetown Law Center’s Supreme Court Institute, the National Association of Attorneys General, and law firms in Washington D.C.
