Associate Professor of Law, Cumberland School of Law, Samford University
Biography
Brannon P. Denning is Associate Professor of Law at Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama. Prior to joining the Cumberland School of Law in 2003, Professor Denning taught at the Southern Illinois University School of Law in Carbondale, Illinois for four years. At Cumberland, Professor Denning teaches Constitutional Law I & II, the First Amendment, and Professional Responsibility. During the Summer of 2005, he was a visiting professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law.
Professor Denning has written extensively on the Commerce Clause, the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine, the constitutional amending process, the confirmation process, the Second Amendment, and on foreign affairs matters. His articles have appeared in the American Journal of International Law, Constitutional Commentary, Foreign Affairs, the Minnesota Law Review, the William and Mary Law Review, and the Wisconsin Law Review, among other journals and periodicals. He has also collaborated with Yale law professor Boris I. Bittker on a treatise on the Commerce Clause and is co-editor of a one-of-a-kind coursebook on gun control and gun rights.
Professor Denning earned a B.A. in political science, magna cum laude, from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He received a J.D., magna cum laude, from the University of Tennessee in 1995, and an LL.M. from Yale University in 1999.
The University of Tennessee College of Law, Visiting Professor, 2005. Taught Constitutional Law during the Summer Term.
Cumberland School of Law, Samford University, Associate Professor, 2003-present. Tenure awarded Spring, 2005.
Southern Illinois University School of Law, Assistant Professor, 1999-2003. Taught constitutional law, legal ethics, Illinois constitutional law, and Introduction to Legislative and Administrative Process. Tenure awarded Spring, 2003.
Yale Law School, Research Associate & Senior Fellow, 1997-1998. Collaborated with Professor Boris I. Bittker researching and writing Bittker on the Regulation of Interstate and Foreign Commerce (Aspen Law & Business).
Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell, P.C., Associate, 1995-1997. Member of health law group in the Memphis, Tennessee office of the state’s largest law firm.
Yale Law School, LL.M., 1999 The University of Tennessee College of Law, J.D., magna cum laude, Order of the Coif, 1995 The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, B.A., magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 1992
Stephen & Barbara Friedman Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution
Biography
Robert Kagan is the Stephen & Barbara Friedman Senior Fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. He is a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. His new book is The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World (Knopf, 2018). His previous book was The New York Times bestseller, The World America Made (Knopf, 2012).
He is also the author of Return of History and the End of Dreams (Knopf, 2008), Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World from its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the 20th Century (Knopf 2006), Of Paradise and Power (Knopf 2003), and A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990 (Free Press, 1996).
For his writings, Politico Magazine named Kagan one of the “Politico 50” in 2016, the “thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics in 2016.” His most recent pieces include “The Twilight of the Liberal World Order” in “Brookings Big Ideas for America” and “Backing into World War III” in Foreign Policy.
He served in the State Department from 1984 to 1988 as a member of the policy planning staff, as principal speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and as deputy for policy in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs. He is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and holds a doctorate in American history from American University.
Professor Emeritus of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Biography
Jeremy A. Rabkin is a Professor Emeritus of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. Before joining the faculty in June 2007, he was for over two decades a professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Professor Rabkin serves on the board of directors of the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest law firm based in Washington, D.C. Previously he was a board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the board of academic advisors of the American Enterprise Institute.
Professor Rabkin’s books include Law Without Nations? (Princeton University Press, 2005). He authored “If You Need a Friend, Don’t Call a Cosmopolitan,” a chapter in Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship (Sigal R. Ben-Porath & Rogers M. Smith eds., University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). His articles have appeared in major law reviews and political science journals and his journalistic contributions in a range of magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
Professor of History and Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage, Hillsdale College
Biography
After reading Litterae Humaniores at Wadham College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship from 1971-1974, Paul A. Rahe completed a Ph.D. in ancient history at Yale University under the direction of Donald Kagan in 1977. In subsequent years, he taught at Cornell University, Franklin and Marshall College, and the University of Tulsa, where he spent twenty-four years before accepting a position at Hillsdale College, where he is Professor of History and Political Science and holds The Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage.
Professor Rahe’s entire scholarly career has been focused on studying the origins and evolution of self-government within the West. His range is considerable. His first book, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (1992), was 1200 pages in length and surveyed the origins and development of self-government in ancient Greece and Rome, its re-emergence in a new form in the Middle Ages, the transformation it underwent at the hands of the political philosophers of early modernity, and the statesmanship of the American Founding Fathers. Within the first thirteen months of publication, the hardback edition sold out. Thereafter, it reappeared as an alternative selection of the History Book Club. In 1994, it was reissued in a three-volume paperback edition by the University of North Carolina Press, and it remains in print.
In the course of his career, Professor Rahe has published dozens of chapters on related subjects in edited books and scholarly articles in journals such as The American Journal of Philology, Historia, The American Journal of Archaeology, The American Historical Review, The Review of Politics, The American Journal of Business and Professional Ethics, The Journal of the Historical Society, The National Interest, The Woodrow Wilson Quarterly, and History of Political Thought. He spent two years in Istanbul, Turkey in the mid-1980s as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs; he has been awarded research fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Earhart Foundation; and he has held research fellowships at the Center for Hellenic Study, the National Humanities Center, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D. C. , Clare College at Cambridge University, All Souls College at Oxford University, and the American Academy in Berlin; and he has given a host of public lectures at universities in the United States and abroad – most recently at the Hebrew University and at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, at the Sorbonne in Paris, at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in England and the Free University in Berlin. In 1997-98, he was named to the Templeton Honor Rolls for Education in a Free Society by The John M. Templeton Foundation, and in 2006 the Society for French Historical Studies awarded him the Koren Prize for the Best Article Published in French History the preceding year.
Professor Rahe co-edited Montesquieu’s Science of Politics: Essays on the Spirit of Laws(2001) with David W. Carrithers and Michael A. Mosher, and he edited Machiavelli’s Liberal Republican Legacy (2006). His second book, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic, which examines the political thought inspired by the abortive republican experiment that took place in England in the period stretching from 1649 to 1660, was published by Cambridge University Press in April, 2008. His third and fourth books, Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic and Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville on the Modern Prospect, were published by Yale University Press in 2009. For his fifth book, The Spartan Way of War, which he hopes to have finished by the end of 2010, Professor Rahe has received a contract from Yale University Press.
Professor of Law, South Texas College of Law Houston
Biography
Josh Blackman is a national thought leader on constitutional law and the United States Supreme Court. Josh’s work was quoted during two presidential impeachment trials. He has testified before Congress and advises federal and state lawmakers. Josh regularly appears on TV, including NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and the BBC. Josh is also a frequent guest on NPR and other syndicated radio programs. He has published commentaries in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and leading national publications.
Since 2012, Josh has served as a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston. He holds the Centennial Chair of Constitutional Law. Josh is an Adjunct Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Josh has written more than seven dozen law review articles that have been cited more than a thousand times. Josh was selected as the Jurist of the Year by the Texas Journal of Law & Public Policy, received the inaugural Meese III Originalism Award, and was awarded the Inaugural Joseph Story Award. Josh was selected by Forbes Magazine for the “30 Under 30” in Law and Policy. Josh is the President of the Harlan Institute, and founded FantasySCOTUS, the Internet’s Premier Supreme Court Fantasy League. He blogs at the Volokh Conspiracyand posts@JoshMBlackman.
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.
Linda Chavez is Chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity. She has published opinions and columns in newspapers across the country and appears regularly on cable news. Chavez is the author of the three books: Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation, An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal, and Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics. She has been honored by the Library of Congress as a "Living Legend" and as nominee for Secretary of Labor by President George W. Bush.
Chavez has held many appointed positions and has served on numerous corporate and nonprofit boards. Among her appointed positions has been Chairman, National Commission on Migrant Education (1988-1992); White House Director of Public Liaison (1985); Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1983-1985); and member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (1984-1986). Chavez was also the Republican nominee for U.S. Senator from Maryland in 1986 and was elected by the United Nations' Human Rights Commission to serve a four-year term as U.S. Expert to the U.N. Sub-commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities.
Chavez earned her BA from the University of Colorado.
James A. Thomas Distinguished Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Cleveland-Marshall Solo Practice Incubator, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University
Biography
Chris Sagers, the James A. Thomas Distinguished Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Cleveland-Marshall Solo Practice Incubator, joined the faculty in the fall of 2002. He has taught courses in Antitrust, Banking Regulation, Business Organizations, Law & Economics, Administrative Law, Legislation and the Regulatory State, and a seminar concerning the theory of the firm. He has testified before the U.S. Congress and the Antitrust Modernization Commission. He is author of Apple, Antitrust, and Irony (Harvard Univ. Press 2016) and Antitrust Examples & Explanations, co-author (with Theresa Gabaldon of George Washington University) of a casebook on business organizations from Aspen Publishing, and co-author of Sullivan, Grimes & Sagers, The Law of Antitrust, a leading hornbook. His articles have appeared in the Georgetown Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, and other leading journals. He has been quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Huffington Post, and National Public Radio, and he is a frequent panelist and lecturer.
He frequently participates in important antitrust litigation, by consulting with plaintiffs and enforcement officials pro bono and authoring briefs amicus curiae in federal courts of appeals. He is a member of the American Law Institute, a Senior Fellow of the American Antitrust Institute, and a leadership member of the ABA Antitrust Section. In 2015 he was awarded the University's campus-wide Distinguished Research Award for Faculty. The law school's alumni association has awarded him the Walter G. Stapleton Award for Faculty Excellence and he has twice been elected Teacher of the Year by the students at large.
Before joining the faculty, Professor Sagers practiced law for four years in Washington, D.C., first at Arnold & Porter and then at Shea & Gardner. He earned his law and public policy degrees at the University of Michigan and was an editor of the Michigan Law Review. Hailing originally from the peaceful obscurity of small-town Iowa, Professor Sagers lives with his wife and two sons in the nicest little town in America, Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
Josh is the founder of Lodestar Law and Economics, PLLC. On January 1, 2013, the U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed Wright as a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). He is a leading scholar in antitrust law, economics, intellectual property, regulation, and consumer protection, and has published more than 100 articles and book chapters, co-authored a leading antitrust casebook, and edited several book volumes focusing on these issues. Commentators have recognized Wright as “widely considered his generation’s greatest mind on antitrust law,” and his academic work ranks him as one of the most cited antitrust academics in the world. Wright was also awarded the Paul M. Bator Award by the Federalist Society in 2014 to “an academic who demonstrated excellence in legal scholarship, a commitment to teaching, a concern for students, and who has made a significant public impact.” Wright also served as the Executive Director of the Global Antitrust Institute, the world’s premiere academic institute focused upon antitrust education for judges and regulators and has taught hundreds of judges and thousands of regulators from dozens of countries.
Wright’s practice focuses upon helping clients solve complex competition, consumer protection, and regulatory problems by providing legal and economic analysis, strategic advice and counseling, and economic expert testimony.
Professor and Director, Prolife Center, University of St. Thomas School of Law
Biography
Teresa Collett, J.D., is professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, where she serves as director of the school's Prolife Center. Collett received her doctorate at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. As a well-known advocate for the protection of human life and the family, Collett specializes in the subjects of marriage, religion and bioethics in her research.
Collett has published numerous legal articles and is the co-author of a law casebook on professional responsibility and co-editor of a collection of essays exploring “catholic” and “Catholic” perspectives on American law. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, and has testified before committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, as well as before legislative committees in several states.
In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Collett to a five-year term on the Pontifical Council for the Family. Her appointment was renewed by His Holiness Pope Francis until 2016 when the responsibilities of the Council were assumed by the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life. In 2013, she served as a delegate to the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) for the Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations.
She represented Congressman Ron Paul and various medical groups in the defense of the U.S. federal ban of partial-birth abortion, and the governors of Minnesota and North Dakota defending the N.H. requirement of state parental involvement prior to performance of an abortion on a minor before the U.S. Supreme Court. Collett is often asked to represent the interests of government officials before federal appellate courts. She has served as special attorney general for the states of Oklahoma and Kansas, as well as assisting other state attorneys general in defending laws protecting human life and marriage. Prior to joining St. Thomas in 2003, Collett taught at the South Texas College of Law, where she established the nation's first annual symposium on legal ethics.
District Court Judge, United States Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit
Biography
Bianco has served as a United States District Court judge for the Eastern District of New York since 2006. Most notably, he presided over several cases involving the MS-13 gang.
Prior to his confirmation to the bench, he spent portions of his career working in government, as both senior counsel/deputy assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice Criminal Division from 2004 to 2006, and as an assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1994 to 2003. Bianco also worked in private practice as counsel at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP from 2003 to 2004, and as an associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP from 1991 to 1992 and 1993 to 1994.
Bianco clerked for Judge Peter K. Leisure on the District Court for the Southern District of New York from 1992 to 1993. He received his J.D. from Columbia University School of Law in 1991 and his B.A. from Georgetown University in 1988.
Bianco has been a member of the Federalist Society since 2004.