Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Biography
Judge Nelson was confirmed to the Ninth Circuit in October 2018,as the youngest Circuit Judge to serve from Idaho and he has chambers in his hometown of Idaho Falls.Prior to his confirmation, Judge Nelson served for nine years as General Counsel of Idaho Falls-based Melaleuca, Inc., a consumer goods company. He previously worked in Washington, DC, where he served in all three branches of the federal government, including as Special Counsel for Supreme Court nominations to the Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee; Deputy General Counsel to the White House Office of Management and Budget; Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the United States Department of Justice; and a law clerk to Judge Henderson of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He has argued in most of the federal courts of appeals and worked on dozens of Supreme Court briefs. He started in the Washington, DC office of Sidley Austin as an appellate lawyer, after clerking for Judges Mosk and Brower of the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal at The Hague, and fornow-Judge Tom Griffith, then-Senate Legal Counsel, during the impeachment trial of President Clinton. Judge Nelson earned his B.A. from Brigham Young University and his J.D., with honors, from BYU Law School. Judge Nelson has been a member of the Federalist Society since 1998.
Kannon is the head of our Supreme Court & Appellate practice. He has argued 39 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and has argued more than 150 appeals in courts across the country, including every federal court of appeals and numerous state courts.
Kannon is ranked as a “Star Individual” in appellate law by Chambers USA, where a client notes, “It’s hard to think of enough superlatives to describe his talent, his judgment, his ability, his experience – he is as good as it gets.” Legal 500 U.S. recognizes Kannon in its Hall of Fame for appellate work. A client shares, “His work is the best in the business, and he is a wonderful human being in addition to being a world-class appellate litigator.”
In 2024 and 2022, Kannon was a finalist for the American Lawyer’s “Litigator of the Year” award. He was named “Appellate Litigator of the Year” by Benchmark Litigation in 2021 and was a 2026 finalist for that recognition.
Before entering private practice, Kannon served as an Assistant to the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Before coming to MSU College of Law, Professor Kalt worked at the Washington D.C. office of Sidley and Austin in one of the top appellate law practices in the country. He earned his juris doctor from Yale Law School, where he was an editor on the Yale Law Journal. After law school, he served as a law clerk for the Honorable Danny J. Boggs, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. Professor Kalt’s research focuses on structural constitutional law and juries. At MSU Law, Professor Kalt teaches Constitutional Law, Torts, and Administrative Law.
J.D. Yale Law School, 1997; A.B., with Highest Distinction, University of Michigan, 1994
Founder and Executive Director, National Security Institute; Assistant Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Biography
Jamil N. Jaffer is the Founder and Executive Director of the National Security Institute at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University where he also serves as an Assistant Professor of Law, Director of the National Security Law and Policy Program, and Director of the Cyber, Intelligence, and National Security LLM Program. Jamil also teaches classes on counterterrorism, intelligence, surveillance, cybersecurity, and other national security matters, as well as a summer course held abroad with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. Jamil is also affiliated with Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and previously served as a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution from 2016 to 2019.
Jamil is also a Venture Partner with Paladin Capital Group, where he assists the firm with investments across the full range of its themes and theses, including a focus on dual-use national security technologies. Jamil also serves on the board of directors of RangeForce, a cybersecurity training and readiness platform startup and Tozny, a digital identity startup, and on the advisory boards of U.S. Strategic Metals, North America’s largest primary producer of cobalt, a critical mineral used in EV batteries, aerospace, and other national security applications; and Constella Intelligence, a deep and dark web intelligence startup. Jamil also serves as an advisor to Beacon Global Strategies, a strategic advisory firm and Duco, a technology platform startup that connects corporations with geopolitical and international business experts. Jamil is also the managing director of Trigraph Caveat Capital, a private investment vehicle.
Among other things, Jamil currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Greater Washington Board of Trade, the Board of Advisors for the Global Cyber Alliance, and the Advisory Board of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ Center on Cyber and Tech Innovation, the Executive Committee of the Reagan Institute Strategy Group. Jamil is also a Fellow at the Academy for Judaic, Christian, and Islamic Studies, an advisor to the Concordia Summit, and is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Intelligence Policy, the Board of Directors of Speech First, and the Executive Committee of the International Law and National Security Practice Group of the Federalist Society.
Immediately prior to his current positions, from 2015-2021, Jamil served as a senior business leader at IronNet Cybersecurity, helping take the company from a bootstrapped first-year technology products startup through two rounds of venture capital fundraising, growing from 40 employees to over 300, and through its listing on New York Stock Exchange. In his role as IronNet's Senior Vice President for Strategy, Partnerships & Corporate Development, Jamil worked directly for the co-CEOs of the company, Gen (ret.) Keith B. Alexander, the former Director of the National Security Agency and Founding Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, and Bill Welch, the former COO of Zscaler and Duo; in that role, Jamil led all of the company’s strategic and technology partnership efforts, including developing go-to-market and technology integration plans with some of the largest cloud platforms and cybersecurity companies in the market, evaluating potential acquisition targets, and developing overall corporate strategy and thought leadership around collective security and collaborative defense in the cyber arena.
Prior to his time at IronNet, Jamil served on the leadership team of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as Chief Counsel and Senior Advisor under Chairman Bob Corker (R-TN), where he worked on key national security and foreign policy issues, including leading the drafting of the proposed Authorization for the Use of Military Force against ISIS in 2014 and 2015, the AUMF against Syria in 2013, and revisions to the 9/11 AUMF against al Qaeda. Jamil was also the lead architect of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act and two sanctions laws against Russia for its first intervention in Ukraine.
Prior to joining SFRC, Jamil served as Senior Counsel to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence under Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) where he led the committee’s oversight of NSA surveillance, NRO intelligence issues, and NGA analytic and collection matters, as well as intelligence community-wide counterterrorism issues. Jamil was also the lead architect of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, the nation’s first cyber threat intelligence sharing legislation that was signed into law in 2015.
In the Bush Administration, Jamil served in the White House as an Associate Counsel to the President, handling Defense Department, State Department, and intelligence community matters, and serving as one of the White House Counsel’s primary representatives to the National Security Council Deputies Committee.
Prior to the White House, Jamil served on the leadership team of the Justice Department’s National Security Division as Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for National Security, where he focused on counterterrorism and intelligence matters. At NSD, Jamil helped lead the division’s work on In re: Directives, the first ever two-party litigated matter in the FISA Court and the second case before the FISA Court of Review in its 30-year history. Jamil also led NSD’s efforts on the President’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), including the drafting of NSPD-54/HSPD-23, and related classified matters, and advised the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. Cyber Command’s predecessor organization, the Joint Function Component Command for Network Warfare (JFCC-NW), on matters related to cyber intelligence collection and offensive cyber activities. For his work on these matters, Jamil was awarded the Assistant Attorney General’s Award for Special Initiative and was among the group of lawyers awarded the Director of National Intelligence’s 2008 Legal Award (Team of the Year – Cyber Legal).
Jamil also served in other positions in the Justice Department, including in the Office of Legal Policy, where he worked on the confirmations of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. to the United States Supreme Court.
Jamil also served as a lawyer in private practice at Kellogg Huber, a Washington, DC-based litigation boutique, as a policy advisor to Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), and as a staff member or senior advisor on a number of political campaigns, including two presidential campaigns and a presidential transition team. While in law school, Jamil was a member of the University of Chicago Law Review, managing editor of the Chicago Journal of International Law, and National Symposium Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. Following law school, Jamil served as a law clerk to Judge Edith H. Jones of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and, later in his career, as a law clerk to then-Judge Neil M. Gorsuch when he first joined the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit as well as a law clerk to Justice Neil Gorsuch when he joined the U.S. Supreme Court.
Jamil has published multiple op-eds and academic articles on national security, foreign policy, cybersecurity, counterterrorism, encryption, and intelligence matters, and is the co-author of a book chapter with former NSA Director Gen. (Ret.) Keith B. Alexander on national security and the press in National Security, Leaks, and the Freedom of the Press: The Pentagon Papers Fifty Years On (2021) and a book chapter with former CIA Director Gen. (ret.) Mike Hayden on ISIS, al Qaeda, and other international terrorist groups in Choosing to Lead: American Foreign Policy for a Disordered World (2015). Jamil has also written book chapters on cybersecurity and surveillance, as well as op-eds and policy papers with former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, former National Counterterrorism Center Director Matt Olsen, and Congressman Mike Waltz (R-FL), among others.
Jamil has previously taught graduate-level courses in intelligence law and policy at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and the National Intelligence University, served an outside advisor to the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, and has recently testified before committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives on China, cybersecurity, counterterrorism, and other national security matters. Jamil has also recently appeared on a range of national television and radio outlets including CNN, Fox News, Fox Business, MSNBC, Bloomberg, PBS, Voice of America, and National Public Radio, and in various print and online publications, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the Washington Post on a range of national security matters including cybersecurity, counterterrorism, surveillance, encryption, privacy, and foreign policy issues.
Jamil holds degrees from UCLA (BA, cum laude), the University of Chicago Law School (JD, with honors), and the United States Naval War College (MA, with distinction).
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit
Biography
Michael B. Brennan was confirmed and sworn in as a Circuit Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in May 2018.
He previously worked as a partner in the Milwaukee law firm of Gass Weber Mullins LLC, where he tried cases and handled appeals in federal and state courts, as a judge on the Milwaukee County Circuit, where he presided over a variety of criminal and civil calendars, and as an assistant district attorney in the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office.
Brennan’s undergraduate degree is from the University of Notre Dame, and his law degree from Northwestern University School of Law, where he was an editor on the law review and the moot court champion. He served as a law clerk on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Michael F. Cannon is the Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies. His scholarship spans public health; regulation of clinicians, medical facilities, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices; employer‐sponsored and other private health insurance; Medicare; Medicaid; CHIP; the Veterans Health Administration; medical malpractice litigation; administrative law; international health systems; political philosophy; and more. Cannon is “an influential health‐care wonk” (Washington Post) and “the most famous libertarian health care scholar” (Washington Examiner). Washingtonian magazine named Cannon one of Washington, DC’s “Most Influential People” in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Cannon has appeared on ABC, Al Jazeera, BBC, CBS, CNN, CNBC, C‑SPAN, Fox News Channel, NPR, and other broadcast media. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal; the New York Times; USA Today; the Washington Post; the Los Angeles Times; SCOTUSBlog; Forum for Health Economics and Policy; JAMA Internal Medicine; Health Matrix: Journal of Law‐Medicine; Harvard Health Policy Review; the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics; the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law; and Quinnipiac Health Law Journal. His latest book is Recovery: A Guide to Reforming the U.S. Health Sector.
Cannon was previously a domestic policy analyst for the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, where he advised the Senate leadership on health, education, labor, welfare, and the Second Amendment. He is a member of the Board of Advisers of Harvard Health Policy Review and the Federalist Society Regulatory Transparency Project’s FDA & Health Working Group.
Cannon holds an MA in economics and a JM in law and economics from George Mason University and a BA in American government from the University of Virginia.
After serving on the United State Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit from 2005, Judge Griffith stepped down from the bench in 2020. Currently he is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, a Fellow at the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University, and Special Counsel in the Washington, DC office of the law firm of Hunton Andrews Kurth. Most recently, he was a member of President Biden's Commission on the Supreme Court. He is the author of Civic Charity and the Constitution , and the co-author, along with former judges Michael Luttig and Michael McConnell, of Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election. https://lostnotstolen.org/ . Before being appointed to the D. C. Circuit, Judge Griffith was the General Counsel at BYU; Senate Legal Counsel, the non-partisan chief legal officer of the U. S. Senate; and a partner at Wiley, Rein & Fielding. Long active in rule-of-law programs in former communist nations, Judge Griffith is a member of the international advisory board of the CEELI Institute in Prague. He is a graduate of BYU and the University of Virginia School of Law and is a member of the American Law Institute.
Eric Dreiband represents clients in investigations, litigation, and counseling in civil rights, employment discrimination, whistleblower, wage and hour, and other matters. Prior to rejoining Jones Day in 2021, Eric served as the 18th Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and he also served as the 12th General Counsel of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Under Eric's leadership, DOJ's Civil Rights Division set enforcement records for prosecutions of law enforcement officers and sexual harassment, religious liberty, and servicemember cases; charged the highest number of hate crimes cases in decades; significantly expanded resources for human trafficking prosecutions; prosecuted race and other forms of illegal discrimination in education, employment, housing, lending, and voting; reached historic disability rights settlements with several states; opposed unlawful COVID-19-related civil liberty restrictions; and successfully litigated to protect the Constitutional and civil rights of all people in the United States.
As EEOC general counsel, Eric led the Commission's litigation of the federal employment antidiscrimination laws, and he issued the Regional Attorneys' Manual, which established the policies of EEOC's litigation program. Eric also served at the Department of Labor (DOL) as deputy wage and hour administrator and directed DOL's enforcement of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and other laws.
From 1997 to 2000, Eric served as a prosecutor in the Office of Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr.
Eric has spoken and written extensively about civil rights and other employment laws, and he has testified about these subjects before committees of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
Judge William Hawley Atwell Chair of Constitutional Law, SMU Dedman School of Law
Biography
Professor Carpenter is the Judge William Hawley Atwell Chair of Constitutional Law. He previously served as the Charles J. and Inez Wright Murray Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at SMU, teaching Constitutional Law I as well as LGBT Rights and the Law. This fall he will teach Constitutional Law II.
Prior to joining SMU, Professor Carpenter taught for 16 years at the University of Minnesota, where he served as a Distinguished University Teaching Professor and the Earl R. Larson Professor of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law. He won multiple teaching awards. He is also an editor of Constitutional Commentary.
The Texas native received his B.A. degree in history, magna cum laude, from Yale College and received his J.D., with honors, from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the University of Chicago Law Review. After serving as a law clerk for Fifth Circuit Judge Edith Jones, he practiced at the firms Vinson & Elkins LLP in Houston, and at Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin, P.C. in San Francisco.
As the author of numerous articles and an award-winning book —FLAGRANT CONDUCT: THE STORY OF LAWRENCE V. TEXAS (W.W. Norton & Co., 2012), about the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that invalidated America's sodomy laws — he is often asked by the media to comment on constitutional law, the First Amendment, and LGBT Rights and the Law. Since 2005, he has been an active blogger on the popular legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, which is hosted by the Washington Post.
