Founder, Libertas-West Project
Karen Lugo is a constitutional law consultant and national security analyst. She was Director of the Center for Tenth Amendment at Texas Public Policy Foundation from 2013 to 2015. When living in California, she was Co-Director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence Center. From 2005 – 2012, she was a clinical visiting and adjunct professor at Chapman University School of Law where she co-taught the advanced Constitutional Law Clinic. Karen has co-authored and written circuit-level and Supreme Court amicus briefs on such issues as FISA Surveillance, Healthcare Reform, Arizona’s Border Security, Gay Marriage, The Ten Commandments, Eminent Domain, Christian Clubs on University Campuses, and Material Support for Terrorists.
Karen is the founder of the Libertas-West Project, a center for study Islamic integration and radicalization issues. In this capacity, she consulted with the Center for Security Policy to write a book on local over-watch of mosque construction and community engagement called: Mosques in America: A Guide to Accountable Permit Hearings and Continuing Citizen Oversight.
Karen writes and speaks for European and American groups on the importance of basing assimilation efforts on principles of Western exceptionalism. She presented a policy brief to the French Conseil d’Etat analyzing the legal implications of banning the burqa. Ms. Lugo has written one of the most comprehensive overviews of sharia law in American courts, American Family Law and Sharia-Compliant Marriages, for the Federalist Society law journal, Engage. She has written several white papers on the American Law for American Courts legislation and sharia tribunals in America.
Ms. Lugo was an appointee to the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She also taught a Human Rights law course on the contrast between French and English Enlightenment theories in Strasbourg, France.
Until moving from California, Ms. Lugo was a member of the David Horowitz Freedom Center Board of Directors. She was also a regular guest on the Orange County PBS local issues debate program, Inside OC, and she is a contributor to Pajamas Media, National Review Online, City Journal, American Spectator, American Greatness, Townhall.com, American Thinker, Daily Caller, and Family Security Matters. She has been interviewed by dozens of radio hosts and has spoken for civic groups on constitutional and cultural concerns.
Attorney at Law, Solo Practitioner
Herb Grey was admitted to the Oregon State Bar in 1981 and for the first 14 years practiced mostly insurance defense litigation in state and federal courts. Since 1994 he has been a solo practitioner in Beaverton with a general civil practice that includes estate planning, probate, protective proceedings, general business matters and a variety of litigation in both state and federal courts. Herb also has extensive experience in litigation of constitutional and civil rights claims with an emphasis on religious liberty and conscience matters. He is admitted to practice before all Oregon trial and appellate courts, as well as the U.S. District Court for Oregon, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court.
Senior Counsel, Senior Vice President of Corporate Engagement, Alliance Defending Freedom
Jeremy Tedesco serves as senior counsel and senior vice president of corporate engagement for Alliance Defending Freedom. In this role, Tedesco leads ADF’s efforts to combat corporate cancel culture and build a business ethic that respects free speech, religious freedom, and human dignity.
Immediately preceding his current role, Tedesco served as senior vice president for communications, during which time he was a lead convener of the Philadelphia Statement, a movement dedicated to restoring free speech and civil discourse. Tedesco also launched a regular video series called Freedom Matters, profiling ADF clients, cases, and issues. The program included 24 videos in its first year, which more than 31 million people viewed.
Previously, Tedesco litigated First Amendment cases at the highest levels. He was part of the legal team that represented cake artist Jack Phillips in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission before the U.S. Supreme Court and argued Phillips’ case at the Colorado Court of Appeals. He was also the lead brief writer in two other U.S. Supreme Court wins, Reed v. Town of Gilbert and Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn. Tedesco has also argued six times before five different federal appellate courts and founded and directed the ADF Center for Conscience Initiatives, where he led efforts to protect individuals from government-coerced speech.
Numerous media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, CNN, The New York Times, USA Today, PBS, NPR, and National Review, have interviewed Tedesco or published his comments.
Tedesco earned his Juris Doctor in 2004 from the Regent University School of Law.
General Counsel, James Madison Center for Free Speech
Professor, University of North Carolina at Wilmington
Mike Adams is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW). He writes a weekly column for The Daily Wire and speaks frequently on First Amendment and pro-life issues. After graduating from Mississippi State University in 1993 with a PhD in Criminology, his research emphasized social psychological causes of crime and delinquency. He won the Faculty Member of the Year Award from the Office of the Dean of Students in 1998 and again in 2000. Later, after his involvement in a free speech controversy in the wake of the 9/11 attack his research emphasis shifted to threats to free speech, due process, and academic integrity in higher education. In 2006, he was denied a promotion full professor and filed suit in federal court alleging that UNCW retaliated against him for his criticism the diversity movement in general as well as his criticism of specific policies within his own university. The retaliation lawsuit set up a legal challenge concerning whether Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), which denied First Amendment protection to public employees who were commenting about their “official duties,” applied to college professors. In Adams v. UNCW (2011), the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled in his favor. The ruling set up a federal trial on the issue of retaliation, which he also won before a jury in federal district court in Greenville, North Carolina.
Professor of History, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center
KC Johnson is professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where he has taught since 1999. He has written 13 books on topics in U.S. political history, U.S. foreign policy, and legal and policy debates surrounding campus due process and civil liberties. His Duke lacrosse case blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, was named ABA Journal’s Best Ethics Blog in 2007; and he continues to blog on higher-ed matters at the blog Minding the Campus.
FIRE
Executive Director, General Counsel, Christian Legal Fellowship
Derek B.M. Ross, LL.B. (Western), LL.M. (Toronto), is the Executive Director & General Counsel for Christian Legal Fellowship, where he oversees all aspects of the organization's operations, education and training programs, publications, and advocacy. He maintains a litigation practice with a focus on human rights and religious freedom, and has acted as lead or co-counsel for public interest interveners in 13 cases involving the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including 5 before the Supreme Court of Canada. He has appeared before every level of court in Ontario, as well as the Courts of Appeal in British Columbia and Nova Scotia. He has also appeared before numerous legislative and Parliamentary committees to present submissions on constitutional and legal issues.
Mr. Ross previously served as Director of Legal Affairs for the Canadian Council of Christian Charities, Canada's largest association of religious organizations, where he served on the Canada Revenue Agency's Technical Issues Working Group and as the general editor of the Charities Handbook, 19th Edition (2014), a comprehensive legal guide for Canadian charities. Prior to that, he practiced civil litigation with a focus on public, education, and municipal law.
Mr. Ross has served as an Executive Member of the Charity and Not-for-Profit Law sections and the Constitutional, Civil Liberties, and Human Rights Law sections of both the Canadian Bar Association and the Ontario Bar Association. He regularly presents at legal conferences and law faculties on constitutional and charity law. He is editor-in-chief of the Christian Legal Journal, a quarterly periodical examining the relationship between law and religion. His writings have appeared in numerous publications, including Policy Options, Lawyer's Weekly, Canadian Lawyer, Montreal Gazette, Public Discourse, and the Chronicle-Herald. His work has been cited in the Senate of Canada and several Parliamentary reports. He is the general editor of a forthcoming special edition of the Supreme Court Law Review (2018).
Mr. Ross spent his formative years growing up in Port Hedland, Australia, surrounded by the rugged beauty of the Pilbara Outback, and considers himself a Quasi-Aussie (he can still speak fluent Australian, if you ask him). As much as he loves his second Aussie home, he couldn’t be prouder to be a Canadian (and a Canadiens fan).
Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies, Manhattan Institute
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Previously he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute.
Shapiro is the author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (2025) and Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020), coauthor of Religious Liberties for Corporations? (2014), and editor of 11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review (2008-18). He has contributed to a variety of academic, popular, and professional publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, and Newsweek. He also regularly provides commentary for various media outlets, writes the Shapiro’s Gavel newsletter on Substack, and once appeared on the Colbert Report.
Shapiro has testified many times before Congress and state legislatures and has filed more than 500 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court. He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, is a member of the board of fellows of the Jewish Policy Center, was an inaugural Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute, and has been an adjunct law professor at the George Washington University and University of Mississippi. He is also the chairman of the board of advisers of the Mississippi Justice Institute, a barrister in the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court, and a former member of the Virginia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Earlier in his career, Shapiro was a special assistant/adviser to the Multi-National Force in Iraq on rule-of-law issues and practiced at Patton Boggs and Cleary Gottlieb. Before entering private practice, he clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He holds an AB from Princeton University, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School.
L. Q. C. Lamar Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law
Thomas C. Arthur holds degrees from Yale Law School and Duke University, where he was an Angier B. Duke Scholar and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Before coming to Emory, he practiced law for eleven years with the Washington, DC office of Kirkland & Ellis. In 1982, he left his law firm partnership to join the Emory Law faculty.
Arthur teaches antitrust, civil procedure, and administrative law, and he has been active on the executive committee of the Antitrust Section of the Association of American Law Schools. His articles in the California and Tulane law reviews have been credited with the founding of a new, "statutory" school of antitrust analysis. His 1991 Emory Law Journal article (co-authored with Professor Richard D. Freer) provoked a nationally noted debate over an important new statute governing the jurisdiction of federal courts. A major antitrust article, "The Costly Quest for Perfect Competition: Kodak and Nonstructural Market Power," was published in the New York University Law Review (vol. 69, April 1994).
Law Clerk, United States District Court for the District of Columbia
Matthew is a law clerk for the Honorable Royce C. Lamberth on the
United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Following his
clerkship, he will begin work as a litigation associate in the New York
office of Sullivan & Cromwell, focusing primarily on white collar crime
and internal investigations. He graduated from the University of
Texas School of Law in 2017.
Topics
What Does DOJ’s Statement of Interest Filed in the Harvard Case Mean?
Recently, the Department of Justice filed a Statement of Interest in a lawsuit against Harvard University...
Civil Rights Commissions: Enforcers of Social Justice
Karen J. Lugo, Herbert G. Grey, Jeremy Tedesco
Whether called Human Rights, Human Relations, or Civil Rights Commissions, many cities and counties and...
Ted Suhl Litigation Update
James Bopp
Criminal Law & Procedure Practice Group Teleforum
On July 20, 2016, Ted Suhl, a former head of a behavioral health company in...
The Student Right to Counsel
Mike S. Adams, KC Johnson, Adam Kissell
Federalist Society Review, Volume 19
Note from the Editor: This article argues that a student right to counsel in quasi-criminal...
Topics
Affirmative Action Confusion at the College of Charleston
Fast Action! On July 29, 2018, the Charleston Post and Courier ran a story entitled Affirmative...
Litigation Update: Trinity Western University v. Law Society of Upper Canada
Derek Ross
Religious Liberties Practice Group Teleforum
Trinity Western University (“TWU”) is a private institution organized around a specific viewpoint: evangelical Christianity. ...
Masterpiece Cakeshop: The Decision [SCOTUSbrief]
Ilya Shapiro
Short video featuring Ilya Shapiro
Masterpiece Cakeshop was one of the most highly anticipated Supreme Court cases of 2018. What...
Topics
Trump Administration Withdraws Guidance on Affirmative Action In Admissions
On Wednesday, July 3, the Departments of Education and Justice announced that they withdrew a...
Can Fake News Be Regulated? [POLICYbrief]
Thomas Carlton Arthur
Short video featuring Thomas C. Arthur
On April 11, 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified at a congressional hearing regarding questionable...
Courthouse Steps Decisions: Lozman v. Riviera Beach/Chavez-Meza v. U.S.
Matthew Wilkins
On Tuesday, June 19th, 2018, the Supreme Court handed down two decisions in Lozman v....