Associate Professor of Law, Center for Intellectual Property and Entrepreneurship, University of Missouri School of Law
Biography
Professor Lietzan researches, writes, and teaches primarily in the areas of food and drug regulation, intellectual property, and administrative law. Some of her recent scholarship has focused on the nature and purpose of the new drug approval system, federal regulation of fecal microbiota transplantation, federal regulation of products derived from cannabis, the political economy of the Hatch-Waxman (generic drug) statute, and incentives to study already approved drugs for new uses. She is an award-winning teacher, and she has been an elected member of the American Law Institute since 2006.
Professor Lietzan brings to her scholarship and teaching eighteen years of private practice experience, eight of them as a partner in the food and drug group at Covington & Burling in Washington, DC. In practice, she handled a wide range of complex legal problems and broader legislative and regulatory policy questions affecting FDA-regulated companies. This work included lifecycle management and strategy issues, regulatory strategy and advocacy, white collar defense, congressional investigations, briefing in products liability cases, and international regulatory policy work. She was involved in every major amendment to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) between 1997 and 2014 and was deeply immersed for more than a decade in the development of the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act of 2010. She has been consistently identified by her peers in private practice as a “Best Lawyer in America” in the categories of FDA law (since 2013) and Biotechnology Law (since 2007).
Professor Lietzan has held one leadership position or another at the Food and Drug Law Institute (FDLI) since 2004, including a stint on its Board of Directors from 2008 to 2012. She also held leadership positions in the American Bar Association’s Section of Science and Technology Law for fourteen years.
Professor Lietzan received a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina, where she graduated with honors in history. She holds a master’s degree in history from UCLA and a law degree with high honors from Duke Law School.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit
Biography
Stephanos Bibas is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Judge Bibas was previously a professor of law and criminology at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. As director of the Penn Law Supreme Court Clinic, he argued six cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and filed briefs in dozens of others. He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University in 1989 with a B.A. in political theory and from Oxford University in 1991 with a B.A. in jurisprudence. He then earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1994.
After graduating from Yale Law, Judge Bibas clerked for Judge Patrick Higginbotham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court and was a litigation associate at Covington & Burling LLP in Washington, D.C. Thereafter, Judge Bibas served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he successfully prosecuted the world’s leading expert in Tiffany stained glass for hiring a grave robber to steal priceless Tiffany windows from cemeteries. Before his tenure at Penn Law, Judge Bibas taught at the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Iowa College of Law and was a research fellow at Yale Law School. He has published two books and seventy scholarly articles.
Senior Vice President for Legal Studies, Cato Institute
Biography
Clark Neily is senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute. His areas of interest include constitutional law, overcriminalization, civil forfeiture, police accountability, and gun rights. Neily is the author of Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and National Review Online, as well as various law reviews, including the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, George Mason Law Review, Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, NYU Journal of Law and Liberty, and Texas Review of Law and Politics. Neily is a frequent guest speaker and lecturer for the Federalist Society, Institute for Humane Studies, and American Constitution Society.
Before joining Cato in 2017, Neily was a senior attorney and constitutional litigator at the Institute for Justice and director of the Institute’s Center for Judicial Engagement. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law, where he teaches constitutional litigation and public-interest law.
Neily served as co-counsel in District of Columbia v. Heller, the historic case in which the Supreme Court held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun for self-defense.
Neily began his legal career as a law clerk to Judge Royce Lamberth on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. After that he spent four years in the trial department of the Dallas-based firm Thompson & Knight. Neily received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Texas, where he was Chief Articles Editor of the Texas Law Review.
Communications Director, Family Institute of Connecticut
Biography
Christina Bennett joined the Family Institute of Connecticut as their Communications Director in 2018. Since 2005 Christina has served as a pro-life advocate and missionary. Prior to working for FIC Christina worked as the Client Services Manager for a CT Pregnancy Resource Center. Christina has a Bachelors Degree in Business Communications from Southern Connecticut State University. She is a licensed minister, a speaker with Ambassadors International, and a writer for Live Action News.
Eric Gjede is vice president for government affairs with CBIA, Connecticut’s leading business organization. He represents the views of Connecticut businesses on labor, employment, and transportation issues. He serves as CBIA’s state ethics compliance counsel. He also directs CBIA’s Labor and Employment Law Council and helps support the organization’s Taxation and Finance Committee.
Speaker Information
Ryan O'Donnell
Shareholder, Pullman Comley LLC
Biography
Ryan A. O’Donnell is a shareholder in the Hartford office of Siegel, O’Connor, O’Donnell & Beck, P.C., where he represents public and private sector clients in labor and employment matters before state and federal courts and administrative agencies. Mr. O’Donnell specializes in collective bargaining negotiations and labor relations law.
Speaker Information
Thomas G. Hungar
Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Biography
Thomas G. Hungar is a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Gibson Dunn. His practice focuses on appellate litigation, and he assists clients with congressional investigations and complex trial court litigation matters as well. He has presented oral argument before the Supreme Court of the United States in 28 cases, including some of the Court’s most important patent, antitrust, securities, and environmental law decisions, and he has also appeared before numerous lower federal and state courts.
Thomas served as General Counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives from July 2016 until January 2019. As General Counsel, he provided legal advice and litigation representation on a non-partisan basis to the House and its leadership, members, officers, and staff, and he worked closely with numerous House committees in connection with their oversight and investigative activities. Previously, he served as a Deputy Solicitor General of the United States. In that position, he supervised business-related appellate litigation for the federal government, with particular emphasis on patent, antitrust, securities, and environmental appellate cases, and he also oversaw appellate litigation in banking, bankruptcy, tax, government contracts, communications, copyright, labor, trademark, and international trade matters. In private practice, Thomas’s appellate experience has encompassed those areas as well as class actions, constitutional law, employment law, product liability, administrative procedure, insurance coverage and bad faith, and general commercial litigation. He has handled scores of business-related appeals in the Supreme Court and lower appellate courts, and has briefed and argued many high-profile matters.
Thomas is a Fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers and is a frequent lecturer in his areas of expertise. While at the Department of Justice, he served as Appellate Counsel to the Intellectual Property Task Force Executive Staff, and he was awarded the John Marshall Award for Outstanding Legal Achievement, the Department’s highest award presented to attorneys for contributions and excellence in legal performance, in recognition of his handling of patent-law matters before the Supreme Court.
Most recently, Thomas has garnered national recognition for his Appellate Practice in The Legal 500 – United States, Best Lawyers in America, and in Chambers USA, which has repeatedly highlighted Thomas for his “expertise in appellate litigation” and experience with employment and antitrust disputes, as well as Congressional Investigations. Thomas was also recently named a “Litigation Star” by Benchmark Litigation.
Thomas served as an Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States from 1992-1994. He also served as a law clerk to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court and to Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He received his law degree from Yale Law School in 1987, where he was a Senior Editor of the Yale Law & Policy Review. He received his Bachelor of Science degree magna cum laude in mathematics/computer science and economics from Willamette University in 1984.
Thomas is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy and civil liberties. He worked as special assistant to President Reagan and editor of the political magazine Inquiry. He writes regularly for leading publications such as Fortune magazine, National Interest, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Times. Bandow speaks frequently at academic conferences, on college campuses, and to business groups. Bandow has been a regular commentator on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. He holds a J.D. from Stanford University.
Deputy Coordinator for Countering Violent Extremism, U.S. Department of State
Biography
Christopher K. Harnisch is the Deputy Coordinator for Countering Violent Extremism. In this capacity, he is responsible for developing and implementing strategies to counter terrorist messaging and recruitment, including terrorists’ use of the Internet. He also oversees terrorist detention policy.
Prior to his appointment to the Bureau of Counterterrorism, Harnisch served as the Director for Transnational Threats and the Director for Afghanistan at the National Security Council. A Virginia native, he returned to the area following several years in Silicon Valley where he served as a Strategic Sourcing and Operations Product Development Manager at Apple. Before his time in the private sector, Harnisch worked in the public policy and defense arenas. From 2011 to 2012, he served as an Army Intelligence Officer on NATO’s counter-corruption task force in Afghanistan. Previous to that, he worked on the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, where he researched and wrote about al-Qa’ida’s emerging safe havens, focusing especially on those in Yemen and Somalia. He served on the staff of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Chris earned a B.A. in International Studies from Middlebury College and an MBA and M.A. in International Relations from Yale University.
He has published pieces on foreign policy in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and National Review Online, and he has appeared as a guest analyst on various public panels and television and radio broadcasts. Recently, he has worked on initiatives aimed at bridging the civil-military divide, including co-chairing the Veterans Summit at Yale University. He is a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Deputy Director, Program on Extremism, George Washington University
Biography
Seamus Hughes is the Deputy Director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. He is an expert on terrorism, homegrown violent extremism, and countering violent extremism (CVE). Hughes has authored numerous reports for the Program including ‘ISIS in America: From Retweets to Raqqa’ and ‘The Travelers: American Jihadists in Syria and Iraq.’ He regularly provides commentary to media outlets, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, BBC, PBS, and CBS’ 60 Minutes. He has testified before the U.S. Congress on multiple occasions.
Hughes previously worked at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), serving as a lead staffer on U.S. government efforts to implement a national CVE strategy. He regularly led engagements with Muslim American communities across the country, provided counsel to civic leaders after high-profile terror-related incidents, and met with families of individuals who joined terrorist organizations. Hughes created a groundbreaking intervention program to help steer individuals away from violence through non-law enforcement means, and worked closely with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, Fusion Centers, and U.S. Attorney Offices.
Prior to NCTC, Hughes served as the Senior Counterterrorism Advisor for the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He organized over a dozen congressional hearings on the threat of homegrown violent extremism, and led fact-finding delegations to the various European and Middle Eastern countries. He authored two reports for the Senate: “A Ticking Time Bomb: Counterterrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government’s Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack” and “Zachary Chesser: A Case Study in Online Islamist Radicalization and Its Meaning for the Threat of Homegrown Terrorism.”
Hughes has authored numerous legislative bills, including sections of the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act and the Special Agent Samuel Hicks Families of Fallen Heroes Act. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland, and a recipient of the National Security Council Outstanding Service Award and two NCTC Director’s Awards for outstanding service. He teaches classes at George Washington University and Georgetown University.
Harold Brown Chair; Director, Transnational Threats Project; and Senior Adviser, International Security Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Biography
Seth G. Jones holds the Harold Brown Chair, is director of the Transnational Threats Project, and is a senior adviser to the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He teaches at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and the Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School.
Prior to joining CSIS, Dr. Jones was the director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation. He also served as representative for the commander, U.S. Special Operations Command, to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations. Before that, he was a plans officer and adviser to the commanding general, U.S. Special Operations Forces, in Afghanistan (Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command–Afghanistan). In 2014, Dr. Jones served on a congressionally mandated panel that reviewed the FBI’s implementation of counterterrorism recommendations contained in the 9/11 Commission Report.
Dr. Jones specializes in counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, unconventional warfare, and covert action, including a focus on al Qaeda and ISIS. He is the author of A Covert Action: Reagan, the CIA, and the Cold War Struggle in Poland (W.W. Norton, 2018), Waging Insurgent Warfare (Oxford University Press, 2016), Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of al Qa'ida after 9/11 (W.W. Norton, 2012), and In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (W.W. Norton, 2009). Dr. Jones has published articles in a range of journals, such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and International Security, as well as newspapers and magazines like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Dr. Jones is a graduate of Bowdoin College and received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Margaret Thatcher Fellow, Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, The Heritage Foundation
Biography
Robin Simcox is the Margaret Thatcher Fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, where he specializes in counter-terrorism and national security policy.
Simcox has testified before Congress on multiple occasions on issues related to ISIS, al-Qaeda and associated movements. He has also provided oral evidence to a committee of Parliament established to examine British intelligence policy.
Simcox’s commentary has been published in newspapers such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The (London) Telegraph, and The Guardian. It also has appeared in magazines and journals such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, West Point’s CTC Sentinel, and The Weekly Standard. He regularly appears on a variety of broadcast and cable news outlets, including Fox News Channel, MSNBC, CNN, CBS, BBC, and Sky News.
Prior to arriving at Heritage in January 2016, Simcox was a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, a foreign policy think tank in London. While there, he authored several important works on the terrorist group al-Qaeda, including "Al-Qaeda in the United States," a 728-page monograph profiling every known court conviction in America linked to al-Qaeda.
In joining Heritage’s Thatcher Center for Freedom and assuming the fellowship that bears the name of the former British prime minister, he became part of the leading policy center in Washington dedicated to strengthening the Anglo-American “special relationship” as well as U.S. and British leadership of the broader transatlantic alliance. Established in 2005, the Thatcher Center is the only public policy center in the world dedicated to advancing the vision and ideals of Lady Thatcher, who died in 2013.
Robin received a master of science degree in U.S. foreign policy from the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London, and a bachelor of arts degree in international history from the University of Leeds. He studied for a year at the University of Newcastle, Australia.
Shaka Mitchell serves as a Senior Fellow for the American Federation for Children.
He brings experience from several high-performing charter school networks, including Rocketship Education and LEAD Public schools, that serve over 2,500 students in Nashville.
Shaka began his career in education as the Associate Director of Policy and Planning at the D.C.-based Center for Education Reform. He then led outreach efforts at the Institute for Justice, a constitutional law firm based in Arlington, VA.
He is an alumnus of Belmont University where he teaches American Government and Constitutional Law as an adjunct faculty member. He earned his Juris Doctorate from the Wake Forest University School of Law where he sits on the Board of Advisors for the Journal of Law and Policy. Shaka is a co-founder of MoreMarrowDonors.org, a non-profit committed to providing scholarships to bone marrow donors who are matches for patients with various blood diseases. Shaka is the Chair of the Tennessee State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
He is a member of the American Enterprise Institute’s Leadership Network and Aspen Institute Civil Society Fellowship. Shaka and his wife Stephanie are members of Edgefield Church in Nashville and are active in several non-profit organizations.