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Vice President, Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law, Advancing American Freedom
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.
Deputy Solicitor General of the United States, Department of Justice
Deputy Solicitor General of the United States
Partner, Arnold & Porter
John Elwood is the head of Arnold & Porter’s Appellate and Supreme Court practice. He has argued before the Supreme Court nine times, and appeared before most of the federal courts of appeals. He has successfully argued cases across a broad cross-section of subjects, with particular experience in environmental law, the False Claims Act, government contracting, and federal criminal law
Mr. Elwood’s work has earned him recognition as one of Washington’s top Supreme Court lawyers (Washingtonian, 2013), as one of “a small group of lawyers” with an “outsized influence at the U.S. Supreme Court” (Reuters, 2014), and as one of the country’s most innovative lawyers (Financial Times, 2014). Chambers USA reports that “[t]he much-admired John Elwood is praised for his advocacy skills” (2013), and describes Mr. Elwood as “phenomenal” (2014), “incredibly talented” (2012), and “a much-loved and widely respected lawyer who is quick on his feet” (2010).
Before joining the firm, Mr. Elwood served in senior-level positions in the U.S. Department of Justice. Beginning as an Assistant to the Solicitor General, and continuing with the firm, he has briefed more than 20 merits cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, and has briefed approximately 135 cases at the certiorari stage. As the senior Deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel, he advised the White House and federal agencies on a range of constitutional, statutory, and regulatory issues.
Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA School of Law
Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), as well as the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA School of Law. He recently retired from teaching at UCLA, after 30 years there, and is now focusing on research.
Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (8th ed. 2023), and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed. 2016), as well as over 100 academic law journal articles, mostly on First Amendment law. He is a member of The American Law Institute; the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Free Speech Law; and the creator and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a leading legal blog founded in 2002 (hosted at the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017 and now at Reason Magazine).
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
Judge Readler earned his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Michigan. After graduating, he served as a law clerk to Judge Alan Norris of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Judge Readler then began practicing law in the Columbus office of the international law firm Jones Day, eventually spending ten years as a partner in the firm’s Issues and Appeals Practice Group. While at Jones Day, Judge Readler appeared in state and federal trial and appellate courts around the country, most frequently the Supreme Court of Ohio and the Sixth Circuit. Judge Readler also successfully argued before the United States Supreme Court in McQuiggin v. Perkins on behalf of an inmate claiming actual innocence. His other pro bono representations include representing capital defendants before the Tenth Circuit and the Supreme Court of Ohio, as well as representing defendants sentenced to life in prison before the Sixth Circuit. While at Jones Day, Judge Readler traveled to Nairobi with Lawyers Without Borders to train Kenyan lawyers in prosecuting domestic violence cases, and he was also a recipient of the American Marshall Memorial Fellowship awarded by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Following his career in private practice, Judge Readler served as Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division of the United States Department of Justice from 2017 to 2019. In that role, Judge Readler led and supervised over 1,000 lawyers in the Department’s largest litigating division, briefing and arguing several cases on behalf of the United States in federal courts across the country, including high-profile cases significant to the Administration and the Department. In March 2019, Judge Readler was confirmed to serve as a Circuit Judge on the Sixth Circuit. He resides in Columbus.
Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture
Judge Stephen Alexander Vaden was appointed as the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture on July 7, 2025. Alongside Secretary Brooke L. Rollins, Deputy Secretary Vaden leads the Department’s operations and implements policies that support America’s food and farm systems. A native of Union City, Tennessee, Deputy Secretary Vaden brings expertise in agricultural policy, law, and rural development. Previously, he served as a judge on the U.S. Court of International Trade and as General Counsel of USDA. Throughout Deputy Secretary Vaden’s time as General Counsel, he led successful Supreme Court litigation, advanced regulatory reform, and supported the implementation of the 2018 Farm Bill. He is a graduate of Yale Law School and Vanderbilt University. A public servant with strong agricultural roots, Deputy Secretary Vaden is committed to revitalizing rural America and ensuring an abundant, affordable, and safe U.S. food supply.
Executive Vice President, Goldwater Institute
Christina Sandefur is the Executive Vice President at the Goldwater Institute. She develops policies and litigates cases advancing healthcare freedom, free enterprise, private property rights, free speech, and taxpayer rights.
Christina is a co-drafter of the Right to Try initiative, now federal law, which protects terminally ill patients' right to try safe investigational treatments that have been prescribed by their physician but are not yet FDA-approved. She has won important victories for property rights in Arizona and works nationally to promote the Institute's Private Property Rights Protection Act, a state-level reform that requires government to pay owners when regulations destroy property rights and reduce property values.
Christina is the co-author of the book Cornerstone of Liberty: Private Property Rights in 21st Century America (2016). She is a frequent guest on national television and radio programs, has provided expert legal testimony to various legislative committees, and is a frequent speaker at conferences. She is the recipient of the 2018 Buckley Award in recognition of her leadership in the freedom movement, and she is an Advisory Board Member of the Network of enlightened Women. Christina serves on the board of the Phoenix Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society and is a member of the executive committee for the Federalist Society's Regulatory Transparency Project: FDA & Health.
Christina is a graduate of Michigan State University College of Law and Hillsdale College.
Senior Attorney, Institute for Justice
Paul Avelar is the Managing Attorney of the Institute for Justice Arizona Office. He joined the Institute in March 2010 and litigates free speech, property rights, economic liberty, school choice and other constitutional cases in federal and state courts.
As the head of IJ’s national Braiding Freedom Initiative, Paul represents natural hair braiders across the country to protect their right to earn an honest living. The Initiative uses lawsuits, activism and research to remove laws that require potential braiders to undergo hundreds of costly training hours just to braid hair. Since IJ launched the Braiding Freedom Initiative in 2014, 12 additional states have freed braiders from unnecessary licensing burdens. Paul drafted the model Natural Hair Braiding Protection Act, which has been adopted in Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Texas and South Dakota. He is currently representing braiders in Missouri, where state laws infringe upon their right to earn an honest living.
In his free speech work, Paul has challenged numerous laws that trample First Amendment rights. In Arizona Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett, he represented candidates and independent groups in a successful U.S. Supreme Court challenge to the “matching funds” provision of Arizona’s publicly financed elections system. He represented grassroots groups and individuals in Arizona, Mississippi and Washington, where state laws burdened their political speech by requiring them to register with the government, to navigate complex regulations and to face fines and possible criminal penalties merely because they talked about political issues. In Washington, Paul protected a lawyer’s right to defend, pro-bono, the First Amendment rights of political speakers. Through litigation and legislation, Paul leads the fight against abusive civil forfeiture laws in Arizona and elsewhere.
Paul also co-authored the most comprehensive published study of economic liberty protections in the Arizona Constitution. The Chief Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court appointed Paul to the Task Force on the Review of the Role and Governance Structure of the State Bar of Arizona, where he dissented from the majority report and called on leaders to substantially reform the Bar and state regulation of the practice of law. He often speaks at law schools across the country about constitutional issues and his work at IJ.
Prior to joining IJ-AZ, Paul worked as an attorney in Philadelphia. He clerked for Judge Roger Miner on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Justice Andrew Hurwitz on the Arizona Supreme Court, and Judge Daniel Barker on the Arizona Court of Appeals.
Paul graduated manga cum laude from the Arizona State University College of Law in 2004 and was elected to the Order of the Coif. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 2000.
Shareholder, Greenberg Traurig, LLP
Dominic E. Draye has litigated at every level of the state and federal judiciary—from state trial court to the Supreme Court of the United States. His practice focuses on constitutional, regulatory, and environmental matters, and he has represented clients in both the public and private sectors. In the federal appellate courts, Mr. Draye has represented clients in the Second, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, and D.C. Circuits.
Before joining Greenberg, Mr. Draye served as the Solicitor General of Arizona, where he briefed and argued the State’s highest-profile civil and criminal appeals and served as lead counsel for several multi-state coalitions litigating over agency rulemaking in the D.C. Circuit. Prior to government service, Mr. Draye was a litigator in the Washington, D.C., office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP, where his practice focused on legal issues and appeals.
Mr. Draye is a sought-after speaker on topics of administrative and constitutional law. He clerked for Hon. Edith H. Jones on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and attended the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Managing Partner, Statecraft
Kory Langhofer is the Managing Attorney at Statecraft PLLC, a law firm focusing on government and political law. His practice is concentrated in campaign finance, constitutional litigation, and political matters. He has previously worked as a federal prosecutor, as litigation counsel to the presidential campaigns for Mitt Romney and Donald Trump, and as general counsel for the 2016-2017 presidential transition team.
Kory received his A.B. in political science, summa cum laude, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as an Editor of The Yale Law Journal.
Research Fellow, CATO Institute
Jay Schweikert is a research fellow with the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice. His research and advocacy focuses on accountability for prosecutors and law enforcement, plea bargaining, Sixth Amendment trial rights, and the provision and structuring of indigent defense.
Before joining Cato, Schweikert spent four years doing civil and criminal litigation at Williams & Connolly LLP. He holds a JD from Harvard Law School, where he was an articles editor for the Harvard Law Review, and chaired the Harvard Federalist Society’s student colloquium program. Following law school, Schweikert clerked for Judge Diane Sykes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
He holds a BA in political science and economics from Yale University.
Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School
Christopher J. Walker is a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining Michigan law faculty in 2022, he spent a decade teaching at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. He previously clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court, worked on the Civil Appellate Staff at the U.S. Department of Justice, and served on the Senate Judiciary Committee staff for the Gorsuch Supreme Court confirmation. Professor Walker’s research focuses on administrative law, regulation, and law and policy at the agency level. Outside the law school, he chaired the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice in 2020-21 and served as one of forty Public Members of the Administrative Conference of the United States from 2016-2022, and he continues to serve in both organizations in various capacities. He also works of counsel at the U.S. Chamber Litigation Center. In 2022, he received the Federalist Society’s Joseph Story Award.
Distinguished University Chair and Professor of Law, University of St. Thomas School of Law
Michael Stokes Paulsen is Distinguished University Chair & Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas, where he has taught since 2007. Professor Paulsen was previously the McKnight Presidential Professor of Law & Public Policy and Associate Dean at the University of Minnesota Law School, where he taught from 1991-2007. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, Yale Law School, and Yale Divinity School. He has served as a federal prosecutor, as Attorney-Advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, and as counsel for the Center for Law & Religious Freedom.
Paulsen has taught as a visiting professor at Princeton University, Pepperdine University, Georgetown University, Bethel University, Uppsala University (Sweden), Daystar University (Kenya), and University of the Andes (Chile). He has been a guest lecturer at universities around the nation, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Penn, NYU, Georgetown, Virginia, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan, University of Chicago, and Northwestern.
Professor Paulsen is the author of more than ninety scholarly articles and book chapters on a wide variety of constitutional law topics, published in law journals including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, and the Northwestern University Law Review. He is the author or co-author of three books, including The Constitution: An Introduction (Basic Books, 2015) (co-authored with Luke Paulsen) and the casebook The Constitution of the United States, now in its fifth edition with Foundation Press, co-authored with Michael McConnell, Samuel Bray, and Will Baude.
Partner, Gibson Dunn
Thomas H. Dupree, Jr. is a partner in the Washington, DC office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. He is a member of the firm's litigation department and its Appellate and Constitutional Law practice group, and serves as the hiring partner for the DC office.
Mr. Dupree is an experienced trial and appellate advocate. He has argued more than 70 appeals in the federal courts, including in all thirteen circuits as well as the United States Supreme Court. He has represented clients throughout the country in a wide variety of trial and appellate matters, including cases involving punitive damages, class actions, product liability, arbitration, intellectual property, employment, and constitutional challenges to federal and state statutes.
In 2007, Mr. Dupree was appointed Deputy Assistant Attorney General. He served in the Civil Division at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2007 to 2009, ultimately becoming the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General. In that capacity, he served as the division's second-in-command, overseeing the more than 900 lawyers in the Civil Appellate, Commercial, Federal Programs and Torts branches, as well as the Office of Immigration Litigation and the Office of Consumer Litigation. Mr. Dupree was responsible for managing many of the government's most significant cases involving regulatory, commercial, constitutional and national security matters on behalf of virtually all of the federal agencies, the White House, and senior federal officials. Before being named the division's top deputy, Mr. Dupree ran its largest litigating branch, managing a staff of 280 lawyers.
Chambers and Partners named Mr. Dupree one of the leading appellate lawyers in the United States in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. He received similar honors in 2010, when he was ranked as one of the top ten appellate litigators under age 40 by Law360. In 2009, the National Law Journal and Legal Times selected him as one of the top 40 lawyers under 40 in Washington, DC, as did Washingtonian magazine in 2006. Based on surveys of hundreds of corporate counsel, Mr. Dupree was named a "Client Service All-Star" by BTI Consulting Group in a 2013 report for his "overall legal prowess" and his "ability to deliver a plan of action that yields results."
Legal Times has called Mr. Dupree "no stranger to high-profile work." Among other things, he played a substantial role in the successful representation of George W. Bush before the United States Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, and represented New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady in challenging his "Deflategate" suspension.
In 2014, Mr. Dupree argued and won, by a unanimous 9-0 vote, a landmark personal jurisdiction case in the United States Supreme Court, Daimler AG v. Bauman. For this achievement, American Lawyer magazine named him Litigator of the Week, noting that he "won over both the liberal and conservative wings of the court."
Other matters Mr. Dupree has handled include:
Mr. Dupree appears frequently on national television as a legal analyst. He is a regular guest on Fox News Channel, and has appeared on "The O'Reilly Factor" and "The Kelly File," as well as on CNN's "Situation Room" and C-Span's "America & The Courts," among other programs. He has also been quoted in numerous print publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and many others, discussing legal issues and developments. Mr. Dupree has also testified before Congress on constitutional and separation-of-powers issues, including the President's authority to act through executive order.
Mr. Dupree graduated cum laude from Williams College, and with Honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where he served as an Editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Jerry E. Smith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Partner, Keller Postman
Ashley Keller is one of the founding Partners of Keller Postman LLC. An experienced trial and appellate lawyer, Ashley helps set strategic direction across virtually all of the firm’s cases. He represents clients in a wide variety of practice areas and types of claims, including product-liability, antitrust, class action, and arbitration matters.
Ashley is one of the leaders of Keller Postman’s national product-liability practice. He leverages his ability to detangle complex concepts and develop novel legal theories to support individual client matters and as counsel on numerous product-liability multidistrict litigation matters. He chairs the plaintiffs’ Law & Briefing Committee in the Zantac (Ranitidine) Product Liability MDL in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
Ashley also litigates complex antitrust and class action matters. Among his notable cases, Ashley represents numerous States in antitrust litigation against Google for monopolizing products and services used by advertisers and publishers in online-display advertising.
Ashley also has played a central role in developing the firm’s pioneering arbitration practice, which includes pursuing individual arbitrations for clients whose claims are subject to arbitration clauses with class-action waivers. In part through managing the complexity of pursuing these individual claims simultaneously, the firm has secured millions in settlements for more than 500,000 employees and consumers.
Before launching Keller Postman, Ashley co-founded the litigation finance firm Gerchen Keller Capital, which grew to more than $1.3 billion in assets under management and was the world’s largest private investment manager focused on legal and regulatory risk prior to being acquired by Burford Capital in 2016.
Previously, Ashley was a partner at Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott LLP, The American Lawyer’s litigation boutique of the year. While there, he handled various trial and appellate matters involving multi-billion-dollar securities and patent cases, contract disputes, mass torts, and class actions.
Ashley also worked as an analyst at Alyeska Investment Group, a Chicago-based market-neutral hedge fund, where he focused on investments in companies facing litigation and other complicated regulatory matters.
Ashley was named a 2021 Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Trailblazer by the National Law Journal. He is also listed on Lawdragon’s 500 Leading Lawyers in America, Lawdragon’s 500 Leading Plaintiff Consumer Lawyers, Lawdragon’s Leading Plaintiff Financial Lawyers, National Trial Lawyers’ Top 100, and Illinois Super Lawyers.
Ashley was a law clerk for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy at the Supreme Court of the United States and Judge Richard Posner at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, received his M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, where he graduated first in his class.
