Partner, Stone Pigman Walther Wittmann LLC
Mr. Thomson concentrates his practice in white collar criminal defense, government investigations, and corporate compliance. He has tried over 50 criminal trials to verdict in federal and state courts, and has experience in appellate litigation. His practice also includes civil litigation and information security. Prior to joining Stone Pigman, Mr. Thomson had a 23 year career as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice. He served on special assignment with the National Security Agency, where he worked on matters involving information assurance and intelligence collection.
Prior to private practice, Mr. Thomson was recognized numerous times by government agencies, including a Special Commendation Award given by the U.S. Attorney General for completing the Justice Department's Leadership Excellence and Achievement Program; Special Commendation by FBI Director for outstanding performance for successful corruption prosecution after Hurricane Katrina; Special Award from the U.S. Postal Service for prosecution of corrupt employee; Special Award by New Orleans Police Department, ATF and U.S. Department of Justice for his contributions to Project Exile; and Special Awards for Outstanding Contributions to Drug Law Enforcement from the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Senior Legal Fellow, Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law, Advancing American Freedom
Immigration Policy Analyst, Cato Institute
David J. Bier is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. He is an expert on visa reform, border security, and interior enforcement, and his work has been cited in the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Politico, and many other print and online publications.
From 2013 to 2015, Mr. Bier drafted immigration legislation as senior policy advisor for Congressman Raúl Labrador, a member of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security. Previously, he worked as the immigration policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and most recently as the director of immigration policy at the Niskanen Center.
Mr. Bier has a B.A. in political science from Grove City College in Pennsylvania.
Professor of Law and Jamie L. Whitten Chair in Law and Government, University of Mississippi School of Law
Christopher Green (https://law.olemiss.edu/faculty-directory/christopher-green/) is Professor of Law and Jamie L. Whitten Chair in Law and Government at the University of Mississippi, where he has taught since 2006. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School, and has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. He clerked for Judge Rhesa H. Barksdale on the Fifth Circuit and is the author of Equal Citizenship, Civil Rights, and the Constitution: The Original Sense of the Privileges or Immunities Clause (2015) and a large number of articles and essays on constitutional theory and the Fourteenth Amendment, including the two-part Original Sense of the (Equal) Protection Clause and Clarity and Reasonable Doubt in Early State-Constitutional Judicial Review. He is an affiliated scholar with the University of San Diego Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, U.S. Department of Justice
Jessie K. Liu was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on September 14, 2017, as the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, and took office on September 24, 2017.
Ms. Liu was an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Columbia from 2002 to 2006, prosecuting violent crime, drug trafficking, firearms, and fraud offenses in both the Superior Court and Criminal Divisions, and briefing and arguing appeals in the D.C. Court of Appeals and the U.S. District Court for the D.C. Circuit. She subsequently served in several senior positions in the U.S. Department of Justice, including as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division, Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General for national security matters, and Deputy Chief of Staff for the National Security Division. Most recently, she was Deputy General Counsel at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, advising the Secretary of the Treasury and other senior Treasury officials on national security, law enforcement, and intelligence issues.
In addition, Ms. Liu has been a partner at the law firms of Morrison & Foerster LLP and Jenner & Block LLP, where her practice focused on litigation, investigations, and compliance.
Ms. Liu clerked for then-Chief Judge Carolyn Dineen King of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Houston, Texas. She received her A.B., summa cum laude, from Harvard University in 1995 and her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1998.
Associate Deputy Attorney General, United States Department of Justice
Steve Cook currently serves as Associate Deputy Attorney General in the United States Department of Justice. In March of 2017, he was appointed to serve as the Deputy Attorney General’s point person on the Task Force for Crime Reduction and Public Safety—a task force created at the direction of the President to develop a nationwide strategy to reduce crime. He now serves as the Director of Law Enforcement Affairs for the U.S. Department of Justice. Prior to his current appointment, he served as the chief of the Criminal Division in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Tennessee where he had been an Assistant United States Attorney for 30 years. During those 30 years, he worked in the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force; the General Crimes Section handling white-collar crime, fraud, and public corruption; and was the deputy criminal chief in the Narcotics and Violent Crime Section. In those positions, he received dozens of awards and letters of commendation including the Directors Award for Superior Performance in connection with his work prosecuting violent gang members. He is also the immediate past president of the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys.
Prior to coming to the United States Attorney’s Office, Mr. Cook clerked for a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and before that worked as a deputy sheriff and then as a police officer for seven years in Knoxville, Tennessee. Mr. Cook earned his Doctor of Jurisprudence from the University of Tennessee in 1984, with high honors, and was a member of the Tennessee Law Review.
Mr. Cook was chosen as one of The Politico’s 50 in 2017 for his work on national criminal justice issues. He has testified multiple times before Congress in connection with proposed criminal justice legislation including bills involving the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and sentencing reform. He has appeared as a guest on numerous radio and television programs with regional and national audiences (including the O’Reilly Factor and Sean Hannity Show) and has appeared as a frequent panelist on forums and discussion panels (including programs hosted by the Washington Post, Atlantic Magazine, and Hastings Law Journal).
Finally, Mr. Cook has served as a speaker or instructor at hundreds of events across the country ranging from events with international audiences to local police training.
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.
Assistant Professor of Law, Campbell University School of Law
Zachary C. Bolitho joined the Campbell Law School faculty after developing a reputation as a skilled trial and appellate lawyer. He teaches courses in Criminal Procedure, Criminal Law, Evidence, Federal Courts, and Trial Advocacy. Bolitho is an accomplished teacher, having been named “Professor of the Year” in both 2014-15 and 2015-16 following a vote of the third-year class.
He took a leave of absence during the 2017-18 academic year to work on the staff of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Bolitho was ultimately promoted to Chief of Staff and Associate Deputy Attorney General, serving as one of the Deputy Attorney General’s principal legal and policy advisors. Additionally, the Attorney General appointed Bolitho to serve as the Department of Justice’s ex officio member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
Prior to Campbell Law, Bolitho served as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Tennessee. During his time as a federal prosecutor, Bolitho handled a wide variety of cases including several high profile matters. In addition to prosecuting cases in U.S. District Court, he briefed and argued cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Before becoming a federal prosecutor, Bolitho was a litigation associate with the law firm Jones Day. He also completed a judicial clerkship with Judge David W. McKeague of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Bolitho received his J.D. from The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law. He graduated summa cum laude, was elected to the Order of the Coif, served as a law review editor, and won a national moot court championship. Before attending law school, Bolitho graduated from Mount Union College where he was the top student in his graduating class.
Senior Vice President for Legal Studies, Cato Institute
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.
Attorney, Geragos & Geragos
As the Principal with the internationally known trial lawyer firm of Geragos & Geragos, Mark Geragos cemented his national reputation as a trial lawyer a dozen years ago with back-to-back State and Federal Court jury trial acquittals for renowned Whitewater figure Susan McDougal, later securing a presidential pardon for Ms. McDougal for a conviction sustained prior to his representation of her.
During the last decade, Geragos has won two consecutive dismissals of murder charges against clients by proving flawed eyewitness identification. One of those clients later won a $1.7 million settlement when the Geragos firm sued the City of Glendale for their false arrest of that client. In another twelve-week murder trial where the victim was the defendant's four-year-old daughter, Geragos was the lead lawyer where the jury did not convict his client. He was the attorney who successfully represented Chris Brown last year.
Geragos won dismissal of prostitution charges against James Bond movie director Lee Tamahori; dismissal of all felony charges - including kidnapping and torture - for Hung Bao Zhong, the recognized exiled leader of China's shadow government with an estimated 38 million followers worldwide; dismissal of murder charges for the third time for a USC co-ed charged with murder in the death of her fetus; and dismissal of a decades-old murder charge against Japanese national Kazuyoshi Miura, a case christened the "Japanese O.J. Case" by Japanese media.
Geragos was one of the lead lawyers in a pair of groundbreaking Federal Class Action Lawsuits against New York Life Insurance and AXA Corporation for insurance policies issued in the early 20th century during the genocide of over 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turk Regime, eventually settling these two cases for more than $37.5 million. He is currently suing the Government of Turkey for reparations arising out of the Armenian Genocide.
Geragos is the only lawyer besides Johnnie Cochran ever named "Lawyer of the Year" in both Criminal and Civil arenas. California Law Business Magazine named Geragos "One of the 100 Most Influential Attorneys in California" three years in a row, and Geragos has repeatedly been voted by his peers as one of Los Angeles' SuperLawyers. His $59 million jury verdict in a trade secrets case against pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Corporation was voted both "Top Ten Verdicts in 2008 in California" by the Daily Journal, as well as "Top Fifty Verdicts in the United States" by the National Law Journal.
Mark Geragos has represented some of the most prominent figures in the world. His client list has included former Congressman Gary Condit, former first brother Roger Clinton, Academy Award-nominated actress Winona Ryder, pop star Michael Jackson, Nicole Ritchie, singer Chris Brown, hip hop stars Nathaniel "Nate Dogg" Hale and Sean "Diddy" Combs (aka Puff Daddy), international arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian, and the Sarkisyan family, whose seventeen-year-old daughter died when Cigna Corporation refused to authorize a liver transplant. For the last several years, Geragos has represented Barry Bonds' personal trainer, Greg Anderson, in his matter relating to the Federal Investigation into steroid use in Professional Sports.
Geragos has regularly appeared as both guest and legal commentator on the "Today Show," "Good Morning America," "Dateline NBC," "Larry King Live," "Greta Van Susteren's On the Record," "60 minutes," and "48 hours," and has lectured extensively and authored numerous articles and Law Review publications on the subject of Media and the Law.
Mark Geragos attended Haverford College in Pennsylvania as an undergraduate, and later earned his Juris Doctorate from Loyola Law School. He was born in Los Angeles.
Professor of Law, Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University
Professor Ben Gershman is one of the original faculty members at Pace Law and has taught as a visiting professor at Cornell Law School and Syracuse Law School. While in private practice he specialized in criminal defense litigation. A former prosecutor with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office for six years, he is the author of numerous articles as well as two books on prosecutorial and judicial ethics. He served for four years with the Special State Prosecutor investigating corruption in the judicial system. He is one of the nation’s leading experts on prosecutorial misconduct. He is active on several Bar Association committees, and is a frequent pro bono litigator. Professor Gershman has taught in the London Law Program, and was named James D. Hopkins Professor for the 2007–2009 academic years.
Professor of Law and Co-Director, Ordered Liberty Program, University of Louisville
Luke Milligan is a Professor of Law and criminal defense lawyer who works from the U.S. and Hungary.
He was previously with Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., where he practiced white-collar criminal defense. Published widely on the law of criminal procedure, his scholarship on the Fourth Amendment inspired the establishment of a litigation and public relations center at one of the world’s top public interest firms, the Institute for Justice, in Arlington, Virginia. He is a co-founder of the Ordered Liberty Program (with Prof. Justin Walker, now Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit). He sits on the Board of Advisors of the Cato Supreme Court Review in Washington, D.C.
He’s been a visiting professor at Emory University School of Law, as well as on the law faculties of the University of Lisbon and the University of Milan. In Hungary, he is the founder and co-director of the Ordered Liberty School in Central Europe, based at Ludovika University in Budapest.
Of Counsel to a U.S.-based law firm, he’s represented individuals in a wide array of state and federal prosecutions. In 2020 and 2021, he fought the COVID-19 mandates in the U.S. He was lead counsel to U.S. Senator Rand Paul in landmark separation-of-powers litigation, stripping the Governor of Kentucky of “inherent authority” under the constitution, and, in turn, bringing an end to all statewide COVID-19 orders (notably, curfews, capacity limits, and masking requirements). He holds a tenured faculty position at the University of Louisville, where he teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Jurisprudence, and Natural Law & Natural Rights. He’s been named Professor of the Year by alumni and hooding professor by five graduating classes.
He began his career as law clerk to the Hon. Edith Brown Clement of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and the Hon. Martin L.C. Feldman of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. He received a J.D., with honors, from Emory University, where he was Articles Editor of the Emory Law Journal.
He and his wife, Sarah Peterson, have three sons, John, Mark, and Luke, Jr.
CEO, Asset Forfeiture Law, LLC
As a federal prosecutor, Stefan D. Cassella was one of the federal government’s leading experts on asset forfeiture and money laundering law for over thirty years. He now serves as an expert witness and consultant to law enforcement agencies and the private sector as the CEO of AssetForfeitureLaw, LLC.
As a Deputy Chief of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section and later as the Chief of the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore, Maryland, Mr. Cassella litigated some of the Government’s most significant forfeiture and money laundering cases and drafted many of the federal forfeiture and money laundering statutes.
He is the author of Asset Forfeiture Law in the United States, a one-volume resource designed to lead the practitioner, prosecutor, judge and policy maker through the labyrinth of statutes, rules and cases that govern this dynamic area of the law, and of more than 40 law review articles on money laundering and forfeiture. He has trained state and federal prosecutors and agents and their counterparts in numerous foreign countries, including over 200 lectures at the National Advocacy Center at the University of South Carolina.
Mr. Cassella is also the author and publisher of the Money Laundering and Forfeiture Digest, a monthly compendium of the forfeiture and money laundering cases decided by the federal courts that is circulated to hundreds of state, federal and foreign prosecutors and lawyers, law enforcement agents, academics and policy makers in the U.S. and abroad.
General Counsel, Center for Individual Rights
Darpana Sheth joined CIR as General Counsel in May 2025. She is a nationally recognized constitutional litigator with over two decades of experience serving in in leadership roles at other nonprofit organizations.
Before joining CIR, Darpana served for four years as Vice President of Litigation for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Prior to that, Darpana was a Senior Attorney with the Institute for Justice, where she also served as Director of the Institute’s National Initiative to End Forfeiture Abuse.
Before finding her calling as a public-interest attorney, Darpana served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of New York and worked in private practice as a litigation associate at the Manhattan law firm of Chadbourne & Parke, LLP. She also served as law clerk to the Honorable Jerome A. Holmes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
A native of Philadelphia, Darpana graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and History. She earned her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center.
General Counsel, Center for Individual Rights
Darpana Sheth joined CIR as General Counsel in May 2025. She is a nationally recognized constitutional litigator with over two decades of experience serving in in leadership roles at other nonprofit organizations.
Before joining CIR, Darpana served for four years as Vice President of Litigation for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Prior to that, Darpana was a Senior Attorney with the Institute for Justice, where she also served as Director of the Institute’s National Initiative to End Forfeiture Abuse.
Before finding her calling as a public-interest attorney, Darpana served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of New York and worked in private practice as a litigation associate at the Manhattan law firm of Chadbourne & Parke, LLP. She also served as law clerk to the Honorable Jerome A. Holmes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
A native of Philadelphia, Darpana graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and History. She earned her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center.
Senior Fellow, Stand Together Trust
Vikrant Reddy is a senior fellow at Stand Together Trust, specializing in the area of criminal justice reform. Reddy previously served as a senior policy analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), where he managed the launch of TPPF’s national Right on Crime initiative in 2010. He has worked as a research assistant at the Cato Institute, as a judicial clerk to the Hon. Gina M. Benavides in Texas, and as an attorney in private practice. He is a member of the State Bar of Texas, and he serves on the Executive Committee of the Criminal Law Practice Group of the Federalist Society. He is also an appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Texas State Advisory Committee.
Reddy’s research and scholarly opinions have appeared in a range of national media outlets, including USA Today, National Review, The Federalist, and others.
Reddy earned his law degree from the Southern Methodist University School of Law. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin.
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