President, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; Lecturer in, Stanford Law School
Larry Kramer joined Stanford Law School in 2004 as Richard E. Lang Professor of Law and Dean. As the school’s 12th dean, he has spearheaded significant educational reforms, including dramatically expanding joint degree programs as part of a multidisciplinary approach to legal studies, enlarging the clinical education program to promote reflective lawyering, revamping programs to foster a public service ethos, and building the international law program to support a growing emphasis on globalization in legal practice.
Dean Kramer has written and taught in such varied fields as constitutional law, conflict of laws, civil procedure, federalism and its history, and the role of courts in society. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Law Institute. In December 2008, Equal Justice Works named Dean Kramer to its Board of Directors. He has appointments (by courtesy) with the Stanford University Department of History and with the Graduate School of Business. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Dean Kramer served as Associate Dean for Research and Academics and Russell D. Niles Professor of Law at New York University School of Law; professor of law at the University of Chicago and University of Michigan law schools; and consultant for Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw LLP. Early in his career, Dean Kramer clerked for Justice William J. Brennan Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Henry J. Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Constitutional Law Center, Stanford Law School
Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and Faculty Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, he served as a Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was nominated by President George W. Bush, a Republican, and confirmed by a Democratic Senate by unanimous consent. McConnell has previously held chaired professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah, and visiting professorships at Harvard and NYU. He teaches courses on constitutional law, constitutional history, First Amendment, and interpretive theory. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law and theory, especially church and state, equal protection, and separation of powers. His book, “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution,” was published by Princeton University Press in 2020, based on the Tanner Lectures in Human Values, which he delivered at Princeton in 2019. His latest book, co-authored with Nathan Chapman, “Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience,” was published by Oxford University Press in mid-2023. McConnell has argued sixteen cases in the United States Supreme Court, most recently Carney v. Adams (2020). defending a provision of the Delaware Constitution requiring political balance on that state’s courts. More recently, he was co-counsel in Gonzalez v. Google. He earned his B.A. from Michigan State University and his J.D. from the University of Chicago, and has received honorary degrees from Notre Dame University and Michigan State. He served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. and D.C. Circuit Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright. He has been Assistant General Counsel of the Office of Management & Budget, Assistant to the Solicitor General of the Department of Justice, and a member of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board. He is Senior of Counsel to the law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, and is co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Review Board.
Carl and Shelia Spaeth Professor of Law; Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life, Stanford Law School
Bernadette Meyler, JD ’03, is a scholar of British and American constitutional law and of law and the humanities. She returned in 2013 to Stanford Law School, where she had previously served as Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights. Her research and teaching bring together the sometimes surprisingly divided fields of legal history and law and literature. They also examine the long history of constitutionalism, reaching back into the English common law ancestry of the U.S. Constitution. Professor Meyler’s current book projects stem from these respective areas of her scholarship. Theaters of Pardoning (Cornell UP, forthcoming 2019) demonstrates that the representation of pardoning tracks changing conceptions of sovereignty within the plays and politics of seventeenth-century England. In doing so, the book considers how the shared audiences of dramatic and historical tragicomedy—whether Kings, students at the Inns of Court, or potential jurors—brought concepts from the literary into the legal arena and back again. Common Law Originalism shifts to the American context, looking at the multiple eighteenth-century common law meanings—both colonial and English—of various constitutional terms and phrases. Based on this variety, as well as on the practices of common law interpretation with which members of the Founding generation were familiar, the book argues that we should, in large part, reject the pursuit of a singular and determinate original meaning; instead, it contends, we must embrace a more vigorous debate in the present over contested constitutional meanings. Professor Meyler is also the co-editor of several collections of essays in law and the humanities designed to introduce scholars and students to the field, including, with Elizabeth Anker, New Directions in Law and Literature (Oxford UP, 2017) and, with Simon Stern and Maksymilian Del Mar, The Oxford Handbook of Law and the Humanities (Oxford UP, forthcoming 2019).
After receiving her BA in Literature with a focus on Classics at Harvard University, Professor Meyler obtained her JD from Stanford Law School and completed a PhD in English at UC, Irvine as a Mellon Fellow in Humanistic Studies and a Chancellor’s Fellow. Following law school, Professor Meyler clerked for the Hon. Robert A. Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Professor Meyler previously taught at Cornell University, where she served, most recently, as Professor of Law and English and Faculty Director of Research at the Cornell Law School. She also visited Princeton University as the inaugural Mellon/LAPA Fellow in Law and the Humanities.
Co-President, Stanford Student Chapter
Professor of Law & Helen L. Crocker Faculty Scholar, Stanford Law School
Jud Campbell joined the faculty of Stanford Law School in 2023. He previously served as a professor of law at the University of Richmond School of Law and as a visiting professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School and at Harvard Law School. His academic focus is constitutional history and First Amendment law. His publications include articles in the Stanford Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Texas Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, and Law and History Review. After completing his J.D. at Stanford Law School, he clerked for Judge Diane S. Sykes on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and for Judge José A. Cabranes on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He then served as the Executive Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and two master’s degrees from the London School of Economics, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar.
Dr. Dasgupta served as Assistant Secretary for Trade and Economic Security, responsible for a comprehensive national security portfolio. His duties included oversight of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), Team Telecom, the Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force (FLETF), Information and Communications Technology and Services (ICTS), Arctic security initiatives, the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort (ICE) Pact, and related trade matters. Sohan Dasgupta also served as political head of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), supporting U.S. foreign policy and national security objectives. Previously, he had served as Deputy General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Dr. Dasgupta holds a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif; a PhD in international trade and arbitration from the University of Cambridge; MSc from the University of Oxford; and BA in Economics–Operations Research and History from Columbia University. He commenced his legal career with clerkships on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia.
Dr. Dasgupta has addressed the Hungarian, Romanian, and Guatemalan parliaments, and has spoken at the invitation of Members of the U.S. Congress, the British Parliament, the European Union Parliament, the Congress of the Philippines, and the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador.
Co-President, Stanford Student Chapter
Fellow, Center for Law and Biosciences, Stanford Law School
Roland Nadler is a 2015-2016 Fellow at the Center for Law and the Biosciences. He works on legal and ethical challenges posed by the increasing sophistication of neuroscience. In particular, he focuses on the conceptual evolution of legal doctrine in response to shifting popular and scientific understandings of the brain, encompassing issues of harm and injury, guilt and responsibility, autonomy and justice. Roland studied philosophy and cognitive science as an undergraduate at Harvard before working with the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia, where he completed an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies. He recently completed his JD at Stanford Law School. Roland has served as a member of the Student & Postdoctoral Fellow Committee of the International Neuroethics Society since its formation, and previously worked as an external consultant with the MacArthur Research Network on Law & Neuroscience. In 2016, he will serve as a law clerk for the District of Maine.
Professor, University of Minnesota Law School
Ilan Wurman is the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches administrative law and constitutional law. He previously taught at Arizona State University. He writes primarily on the Fourteenth Amendment, administrative law, separation of powers, and constitutionalism. His academic writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Minnesota Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the Texas Law Review among other journals.
Professor Wurman is the author of a casebook, Administrative Law Theory and Fundamentals: An Integrated Approach (Foundation Press 2d ed. 2024). He is also the author of A Debt Against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism (Cambridge 2017), and The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment (Cambridge 2020). His next book, The Constitution of 1789: A New Introduction, is also forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Professor Wurman practices law with the firm Tully Bailey. He has litigated a variety of administrative law and constitutional law cases, including cases involving COVID-19 restrictions, transmission lines, and Appointments Clause challenges. He also devised winning public nuisance theories to force city governments to address the increasingly challenging public camping crises throughout the country.
Professor of Law & Helen L. Crocker Faculty Scholar, Stanford Law School
Jud Campbell joined the faculty of Stanford Law School in 2023. He previously served as a professor of law at the University of Richmond School of Law and as a visiting professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School and at Harvard Law School. His academic focus is constitutional history and First Amendment law. His publications include articles in the Stanford Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Texas Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, and Law and History Review. After completing his J.D. at Stanford Law School, he clerked for Judge Diane S. Sykes on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and for Judge José A. Cabranes on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He then served as the Executive Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and two master’s degrees from the London School of Economics, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar.
Dr. Dasgupta served as Assistant Secretary for Trade and Economic Security, responsible for a comprehensive national security portfolio. His duties included oversight of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), Team Telecom, the Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force (FLETF), Information and Communications Technology and Services (ICTS), Arctic security initiatives, the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort (ICE) Pact, and related trade matters. Sohan Dasgupta also served as political head of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), supporting U.S. foreign policy and national security objectives. Previously, he had served as Deputy General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Dr. Dasgupta holds a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif; a PhD in international trade and arbitration from the University of Cambridge; MSc from the University of Oxford; and BA in Economics–Operations Research and History from Columbia University. He commenced his legal career with clerkships on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia.
Dr. Dasgupta has addressed the Hungarian, Romanian, and Guatemalan parliaments, and has spoken at the invitation of Members of the U.S. Congress, the British Parliament, the European Union Parliament, the Congress of the Philippines, and the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador.
Co-President, Stanford Student Chapter
Fellow, Center for Law and Biosciences, Stanford Law School
Roland Nadler is a 2015-2016 Fellow at the Center for Law and the Biosciences. He works on legal and ethical challenges posed by the increasing sophistication of neuroscience. In particular, he focuses on the conceptual evolution of legal doctrine in response to shifting popular and scientific understandings of the brain, encompassing issues of harm and injury, guilt and responsibility, autonomy and justice. Roland studied philosophy and cognitive science as an undergraduate at Harvard before working with the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia, where he completed an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies. He recently completed his JD at Stanford Law School. Roland has served as a member of the Student & Postdoctoral Fellow Committee of the International Neuroethics Society since its formation, and previously worked as an external consultant with the MacArthur Research Network on Law & Neuroscience. In 2016, he will serve as a law clerk for the District of Maine.
Professor, University of Minnesota Law School
Ilan Wurman is the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches administrative law and constitutional law. He previously taught at Arizona State University. He writes primarily on the Fourteenth Amendment, administrative law, separation of powers, and constitutionalism. His academic writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Minnesota Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the Texas Law Review among other journals.
Professor Wurman is the author of a casebook, Administrative Law Theory and Fundamentals: An Integrated Approach (Foundation Press 2d ed. 2024). He is also the author of A Debt Against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism (Cambridge 2017), and The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment (Cambridge 2020). His next book, The Constitution of 1789: A New Introduction, is also forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Professor Wurman practices law with the firm Tully Bailey. He has litigated a variety of administrative law and constitutional law cases, including cases involving COVID-19 restrictions, transmission lines, and Appointments Clause challenges. He also devised winning public nuisance theories to force city governments to address the increasingly challenging public camping crises throughout the country.
William F. Baxter-Visa International Professor of Law, Stanford Law School
Marcus Cole is a leading scholar of the empirical law and economics of commerce and finance, and teaches courses in the areas of Bankruptcy, Banking, Contracts, and Venture Capital. Professor Cole’s writings have explored questions such as why corporate bankruptcies are increasingly filed in Delaware, and what drives the financial structure of firms backed by venture capital. His current research interests involve the ways in which the world’s poor are using technology to solve their own problems, often in the face of government restrictions hindering such solutions. Professor Cole has served as a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and is a Fellow at the University of Amsterdam Center for Law and Economics. He has been a Visiting Professor at a number of institutions around the world, including the University of Amsterdam, the University of Vienna, the University of Leiden, Bucerius University in Hamburg, Germany, Northwestern University, Korea University, and Peking University School of Transnational Law in Shenzhen. Professor Cole has also served on the boards of several civic and charitable organizations, including that of the Central Pacific Region of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and Businesses United in Lending and Development (“BUILD”). He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Cato Supreme Court Review, the Academic Advisory Board of Bar-Bri, the Advisory Board of the Independent Institute’s Center on Culture and Civil Society, and is President of the Board of Directors of Rocketship Education, a national, non-profit charter school network, operating California’s most successful charter schools for low-income children. Before joining the Stanford Law faculty in 1997, Professor Cole was an associate with the Chicago law firm of Mayer Brown, and he clerked for Judge Morris Sheppard Arnold of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law
James Lindgren is a law professor at Northwestern University, with a BA from Yale and a JD and a PhD in (quantitative) sociology from the University of Chicago. He is a cofounder of the Section on Scholarship of the Association of American Law Schools and a former chair of its Section on Social Science and the Law. He has published in the Yale Law Journal and the Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, California, Northwestern, Georgetown, and UCLA Law Reviews, among others. His work includes "Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal " (Yale Law Journal, 2002) and "Term Limits for the Supreme Court: Life Tenure Reconsidered " (Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 2006). In Evans v. US (1992), the US Supreme Court adopted Lindgren's view of the overlap of bribery and federal extortion. He blogs at the Washington Post.
Richard E. Lang Professor of Law and Dean, Stanford Law School
Mary Elizabeth Magill was appointed the Richard E. Lang Professor of Law and Dean of Stanford Law School on September 1, 2012. She is the law school’s 13th dean. Before coming to Stanford she was on the faculty at the University of Virginia School of Law for 15 years, serving most recently as vice dean, the Joseph Weintraub–Bank of America Distinguished Professor of Law, and the Elizabeth D. and Richard A. Merrill Professor.
An expert in administrative law and constitutional structure, Dean Magill teaches administrative law, constitutional law, and food and drug law. Her scholarly articles have been published in leading law reviews, and she has won several awards for her scholarly contributions. She is a member of the American Law Institute, and served as a fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, and the Thomas Jefferson Visiting Fellow at Downing College, Cambridge University.
After completing her BA in history at Yale University in 1988, Dean Magill served as a senior legislative assistant for energy and natural resources for U.S. Senator Kent Conrad, a position she held for four years. She left the Hill to attend the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was articles development editor of the Virginia Law Reviewand received several awards for academic and scholarly achievement. After graduating in 1995, Dean Magill clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Former President & CEO, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Eugene B. Meyer, former President and CEO of the Federalist Society, has served as Executive Director, CEO, and/or President of the organization for more than 40 years. He is responsible for shepherding the organization from a small group of law students to a community of 90,000 lawyers, law students, academics, judges, and others interested in the rule of law. The Society now includes a Student Chapter at nearly every ABA-accredited law school in the country and Lawyers Chapters in 220 major cities across the nation. Gene earned his B.A. in history at Yale in 1975 and his M.A. in political science from the London School of Economics in 1976. Gene currently serves on the boards of the U.S. Chess Center, the Holman Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the advisory board of the Adam Smith Society. He holds the title of International Chess Master.
Co-President, Stanford Student Chapter
Associate Professor & Director, Constitutional Government Initiative, Wheatley Institute, Brigham Young University
James C. Phillips is the Constitutional Government Initiative Director and an associate professor at BYU’s Wheatley Institute. He is also a fellow with the UC-Berkeley School of Law’s Public Law and Policy Program and an academic affiliate with the D.C.-based law firm Schaerr|Jaffe. His scholarship has been cited by judges around the country, including at the U.S. Supreme Court, and has been covered in various media outlets, including the New York Times Magazine, USA Today, Reuters, CNN, and Fox News. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society's Religious Liberty Practice Group and the J. Reuben Clark Law Society Religious Liberty Committee.
Prior to joining Wheatley, Phillips was associate professor of law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law, where he taught Constitutional Law, Religion and the Constitution, Civil Procedure, Family Law, and Professional Responsibility and was named 1L Professor of the Year. Dr. Phillips has taught Administrative Law at BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, where he also helped conceive and design the Corpus of Founding-Era American English. He was also a Non-resident Fellow with Stanford Law School’s Constitutional Law Center.
Dr. Phillips has published dozens of academic articles, primarily in law journals, but also communications, business, and history journals. His longer pieces have been published in, for example, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and his shorter articles have been published in journals such as the Yale Law Journal Forum and the Duke Law Journal Online. Dr. Phillips has also written op-eds on constitutional issues for Newsweek, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register, Deseret News, and National Review.
Prior to his university posts, Dr. Phillips practiced law as a Constitutional Law Fellow for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and an associate for Kirton | McConkie. He has worked on dozens of cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as cases in federal and state courts throughout the country. He is a member of the bar in Utah and D.C. He clerked for Judge Thomas B. Griffith on the U.S. Court of Appeal for the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Thomas R. Lee on the Utah Supreme Court. Dr. Phillips earned his JD, Order of the Coif, from UC-Berkeley’s School of Law, where he was a member of the California Law Review. He also has a PhD in Jurisprudence & Social Policy from UC-Berkeley, an M.A. in Mass Communication from BYU, and a B.A. in History from Arizona State University.
Co-President, Stanford Student Chapter
Associate Professor, Claremont McKenna College
Jon A. Shields is associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and coauthor with Joshua Dunn of Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University.
William F. Baxter-Visa International Professor of Law, Stanford Law School
Marcus Cole is a leading scholar of the empirical law and economics of commerce and finance, and teaches courses in the areas of Bankruptcy, Banking, Contracts, and Venture Capital. Professor Cole’s writings have explored questions such as why corporate bankruptcies are increasingly filed in Delaware, and what drives the financial structure of firms backed by venture capital. His current research interests involve the ways in which the world’s poor are using technology to solve their own problems, often in the face of government restrictions hindering such solutions. Professor Cole has served as a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and is a Fellow at the University of Amsterdam Center for Law and Economics. He has been a Visiting Professor at a number of institutions around the world, including the University of Amsterdam, the University of Vienna, the University of Leiden, Bucerius University in Hamburg, Germany, Northwestern University, Korea University, and Peking University School of Transnational Law in Shenzhen. Professor Cole has also served on the boards of several civic and charitable organizations, including that of the Central Pacific Region of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and Businesses United in Lending and Development (“BUILD”). He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Cato Supreme Court Review, the Academic Advisory Board of Bar-Bri, the Advisory Board of the Independent Institute’s Center on Culture and Civil Society, and is President of the Board of Directors of Rocketship Education, a national, non-profit charter school network, operating California’s most successful charter schools for low-income children. Before joining the Stanford Law faculty in 1997, Professor Cole was an associate with the Chicago law firm of Mayer Brown, and he clerked for Judge Morris Sheppard Arnold of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law
James Lindgren is a law professor at Northwestern University, with a BA from Yale and a JD and a PhD in (quantitative) sociology from the University of Chicago. He is a cofounder of the Section on Scholarship of the Association of American Law Schools and a former chair of its Section on Social Science and the Law. He has published in the Yale Law Journal and the Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, California, Northwestern, Georgetown, and UCLA Law Reviews, among others. His work includes "Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal " (Yale Law Journal, 2002) and "Term Limits for the Supreme Court: Life Tenure Reconsidered " (Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 2006). In Evans v. US (1992), the US Supreme Court adopted Lindgren's view of the overlap of bribery and federal extortion. He blogs at the Washington Post.
Richard E. Lang Professor of Law and Dean, Stanford Law School
Mary Elizabeth Magill was appointed the Richard E. Lang Professor of Law and Dean of Stanford Law School on September 1, 2012. She is the law school’s 13th dean. Before coming to Stanford she was on the faculty at the University of Virginia School of Law for 15 years, serving most recently as vice dean, the Joseph Weintraub–Bank of America Distinguished Professor of Law, and the Elizabeth D. and Richard A. Merrill Professor.
An expert in administrative law and constitutional structure, Dean Magill teaches administrative law, constitutional law, and food and drug law. Her scholarly articles have been published in leading law reviews, and she has won several awards for her scholarly contributions. She is a member of the American Law Institute, and served as a fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, and the Thomas Jefferson Visiting Fellow at Downing College, Cambridge University.
After completing her BA in history at Yale University in 1988, Dean Magill served as a senior legislative assistant for energy and natural resources for U.S. Senator Kent Conrad, a position she held for four years. She left the Hill to attend the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was articles development editor of the Virginia Law Reviewand received several awards for academic and scholarly achievement. After graduating in 1995, Dean Magill clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Former President & CEO, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Eugene B. Meyer, former President and CEO of the Federalist Society, has served as Executive Director, CEO, and/or President of the organization for more than 40 years. He is responsible for shepherding the organization from a small group of law students to a community of 90,000 lawyers, law students, academics, judges, and others interested in the rule of law. The Society now includes a Student Chapter at nearly every ABA-accredited law school in the country and Lawyers Chapters in 220 major cities across the nation. Gene earned his B.A. in history at Yale in 1975 and his M.A. in political science from the London School of Economics in 1976. Gene currently serves on the boards of the U.S. Chess Center, the Holman Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the advisory board of the Adam Smith Society. He holds the title of International Chess Master.
Co-President, Stanford Student Chapter
Associate Professor & Director, Constitutional Government Initiative, Wheatley Institute, Brigham Young University
James C. Phillips is the Constitutional Government Initiative Director and an associate professor at BYU’s Wheatley Institute. He is also a fellow with the UC-Berkeley School of Law’s Public Law and Policy Program and an academic affiliate with the D.C.-based law firm Schaerr|Jaffe. His scholarship has been cited by judges around the country, including at the U.S. Supreme Court, and has been covered in various media outlets, including the New York Times Magazine, USA Today, Reuters, CNN, and Fox News. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society's Religious Liberty Practice Group and the J. Reuben Clark Law Society Religious Liberty Committee.
Prior to joining Wheatley, Phillips was associate professor of law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law, where he taught Constitutional Law, Religion and the Constitution, Civil Procedure, Family Law, and Professional Responsibility and was named 1L Professor of the Year. Dr. Phillips has taught Administrative Law at BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, where he also helped conceive and design the Corpus of Founding-Era American English. He was also a Non-resident Fellow with Stanford Law School’s Constitutional Law Center.
Dr. Phillips has published dozens of academic articles, primarily in law journals, but also communications, business, and history journals. His longer pieces have been published in, for example, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and his shorter articles have been published in journals such as the Yale Law Journal Forum and the Duke Law Journal Online. Dr. Phillips has also written op-eds on constitutional issues for Newsweek, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register, Deseret News, and National Review.
Prior to his university posts, Dr. Phillips practiced law as a Constitutional Law Fellow for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and an associate for Kirton | McConkie. He has worked on dozens of cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as cases in federal and state courts throughout the country. He is a member of the bar in Utah and D.C. He clerked for Judge Thomas B. Griffith on the U.S. Court of Appeal for the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Thomas R. Lee on the Utah Supreme Court. Dr. Phillips earned his JD, Order of the Coif, from UC-Berkeley’s School of Law, where he was a member of the California Law Review. He also has a PhD in Jurisprudence & Social Policy from UC-Berkeley, an M.A. in Mass Communication from BYU, and a B.A. in History from Arizona State University.
Co-President, Stanford Student Chapter
Associate Professor, Claremont McKenna College
Jon A. Shields is associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and coauthor with Joshua Dunn of Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University.
Dr. John Eastman is the former Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service and former Dean at Chapman University's Dale E. Fowler School of Law, where he had been a member of the faculty since 1999, specializing in Constitutional Law, Legal History, and Property. He is a founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute that he founded in 1999. He has a Ph.D. in Government from the Claremont Graduate School and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, and a B.A. in Politics and Economics from the University of Dallas. He serves as the Chairman of the Board of the National Organization for Marriage.
Prior to joining the Chapman law faculty, Dr. Eastman served as a law clerk to the Honorable Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States, and to the Honorable J. Michael Luttig, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and practiced law with the national law firm of Kirkland & Ellis. Dr. Eastman has also represented numerous clients in important constitutional law matters and has argued before the Supreme Court. On behalf of the Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, he has participated as amicus curiae before the Supreme Court of the United States, U.S. Courts of Appeals, and State Supreme Courts in more than one hundred cases of constitutional significance, including Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (the school vouchers case), Kelo v. New London, Ct. (eminent domain), and Van Orden v. Perry (the 10 Commandments case). He has also appeared as an expert legal commentator on numerous television and radio programs, including C-SPAN, Fox News, PBS, NewsHour, and The O'Reilly Factor.
Paul J. Schierl Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame Law School
Professor Richard W. Garnett teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, criminal law, the First Amendment, and law and religion. He is a leading authority on questions and debates regarding religious freedom and church-state relations, and is the founding director of Notre Dame Law School’s Program on Church, State, and Society.
Garnett clerked for the late Chief Justice of the United States, William H. Rehnquist, and also for the late Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, Richard S. Arnold. He earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1995 and his B.A., summa cum laude, from Duke University in 1990. He joined the faculty in 1999 after practicing law in Washington, D.C. with Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin.
Thomas W. Smith Fellow; Contributing Editor, City Journal, Manhattan Institute
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author. She is a recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize. Mac Donald’s work at City Journal has covered a range of topics, including higher education, immigration, policing, homelessness and homeless advocacy, criminal-justice reform, and race relations. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and The New Criterion. Mac Donald's newest book, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (2018), argues that toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture.
Mac Donald’s The War on Cops (2016), a New York Times bestseller, warns that raced-based attacks on the criminal-justice system, from the White House on down, are eroding the authority of law and putting lives at risk. Other previous works include The Burden of Bad Ideas (2001), a collection of Mac Donald’s City Journal essays, details the effects of the 1960s counterculture’s destructive march through America’s institutions. In The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan than Today’s (2007), coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, she chronicles the effects of broken immigration laws and proposes a practical solution to securing the country’s porous borders. In Are Cops Racist? (2010), another City Journal anthology, Mac Donald investigates the workings of the police, the controversy over so-called racial profiling, and the anti-profiling lobby’s harmful effects on black Americans.
A nonpracticing lawyer, Mac Donald clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and was an attorney-advisor in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a volunteer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She has frequently testified before U.S. House and Senate Committees. In 1998, Mac Donald was appointed to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s task force on the City University of New York. She has received numerous awards for her writing:
A frequent guest on Fox News and other TV and radio programs, Mac Donald holds a B.A. in English from Yale University, graduating with a Mellon Fellowship to Cambridge University, where she earned an M.A. in English and studied in Italy through a Clare College study grant. She holds a J.D. from Stanford University Law School.
At the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation's 2018 annual meeting in downtown Los Angeles, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called Mac Donald, “the greatest thinker on criminal justice in America today.”
Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz teaches constitutional law and federal jurisdiction, and he writes articles for the Harvard Law Review and the Stanford Law Review.
He is currently developing a new theory of constitutional interpretation and judicial review. The first installment, entitledThe Subjects of the Constitution, was published in the Stanford Law Review in May of 2010, and it is among the most downloaded articles about constitutional interpretation, judicial review, and/or federal courts in the history of SSRN. The second installment, The Objects of the Constitution, was published in May of 2011, also in the Stanford Law Review. And the comprehensive version is forthcoming as a book by Oxford University Press.
Rosenkranz has served and advised the federal government in a variety of capacities. He clerked for Judge Frank H. Easterbrook on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (1999-2000) and for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy at the U.S. Supreme Court (October Term 2001). He served as an Attorney-Advisor at the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice (November 2002 - July 2004). He often testifies before Congress as a constitutional expert—most recently before the House Financial Services Oversight Subcommittee, regarding the Obama Administration's use of bank settlement agreements to circumvent the Appropriations Clause. He has also filed briefs and presented oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court. His most recent Supreme Court brief, in Los Angeles v. Patel, was cited by Justice Alito in dissent.
Rosenkranz is a member of the New York Bar and the U.S. Supreme Court Bar. He is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He is a founding member of Heterodox Academy and a member of its Executive Committee. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Federalist Society and as the faculty advisor to the Georgetown chapter.
Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School
Dr. John Eastman is the former Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service and former Dean at Chapman University's Dale E. Fowler School of Law, where he had been a member of the faculty since 1999, specializing in Constitutional Law, Legal History, and Property. He is a founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute that he founded in 1999. He has a Ph.D. in Government from the Claremont Graduate School and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, and a B.A. in Politics and Economics from the University of Dallas. He serves as the Chairman of the Board of the National Organization for Marriage.
Prior to joining the Chapman law faculty, Dr. Eastman served as a law clerk to the Honorable Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States, and to the Honorable J. Michael Luttig, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and practiced law with the national law firm of Kirkland & Ellis. Dr. Eastman has also represented numerous clients in important constitutional law matters and has argued before the Supreme Court. On behalf of the Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, he has participated as amicus curiae before the Supreme Court of the United States, U.S. Courts of Appeals, and State Supreme Courts in more than one hundred cases of constitutional significance, including Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (the school vouchers case), Kelo v. New London, Ct. (eminent domain), and Van Orden v. Perry (the 10 Commandments case). He has also appeared as an expert legal commentator on numerous television and radio programs, including C-SPAN, Fox News, PBS, NewsHour, and The O'Reilly Factor.
Paul J. Schierl Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame Law School
Professor Richard W. Garnett teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, criminal law, the First Amendment, and law and religion. He is a leading authority on questions and debates regarding religious freedom and church-state relations, and is the founding director of Notre Dame Law School’s Program on Church, State, and Society.
Garnett clerked for the late Chief Justice of the United States, William H. Rehnquist, and also for the late Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, Richard S. Arnold. He earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1995 and his B.A., summa cum laude, from Duke University in 1990. He joined the faculty in 1999 after practicing law in Washington, D.C. with Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin.
Thomas W. Smith Fellow; Contributing Editor, City Journal, Manhattan Institute
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author. She is a recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize. Mac Donald’s work at City Journal has covered a range of topics, including higher education, immigration, policing, homelessness and homeless advocacy, criminal-justice reform, and race relations. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and The New Criterion. Mac Donald's newest book, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (2018), argues that toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture.
Mac Donald’s The War on Cops (2016), a New York Times bestseller, warns that raced-based attacks on the criminal-justice system, from the White House on down, are eroding the authority of law and putting lives at risk. Other previous works include The Burden of Bad Ideas (2001), a collection of Mac Donald’s City Journal essays, details the effects of the 1960s counterculture’s destructive march through America’s institutions. In The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan than Today’s (2007), coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, she chronicles the effects of broken immigration laws and proposes a practical solution to securing the country’s porous borders. In Are Cops Racist? (2010), another City Journal anthology, Mac Donald investigates the workings of the police, the controversy over so-called racial profiling, and the anti-profiling lobby’s harmful effects on black Americans.
A nonpracticing lawyer, Mac Donald clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and was an attorney-advisor in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a volunteer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She has frequently testified before U.S. House and Senate Committees. In 1998, Mac Donald was appointed to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s task force on the City University of New York. She has received numerous awards for her writing:
A frequent guest on Fox News and other TV and radio programs, Mac Donald holds a B.A. in English from Yale University, graduating with a Mellon Fellowship to Cambridge University, where she earned an M.A. in English and studied in Italy through a Clare College study grant. She holds a J.D. from Stanford University Law School.
At the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation's 2018 annual meeting in downtown Los Angeles, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called Mac Donald, “the greatest thinker on criminal justice in America today.”
Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz teaches constitutional law and federal jurisdiction, and he writes articles for the Harvard Law Review and the Stanford Law Review.
He is currently developing a new theory of constitutional interpretation and judicial review. The first installment, entitledThe Subjects of the Constitution, was published in the Stanford Law Review in May of 2010, and it is among the most downloaded articles about constitutional interpretation, judicial review, and/or federal courts in the history of SSRN. The second installment, The Objects of the Constitution, was published in May of 2011, also in the Stanford Law Review. And the comprehensive version is forthcoming as a book by Oxford University Press.
Rosenkranz has served and advised the federal government in a variety of capacities. He clerked for Judge Frank H. Easterbrook on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (1999-2000) and for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy at the U.S. Supreme Court (October Term 2001). He served as an Attorney-Advisor at the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice (November 2002 - July 2004). He often testifies before Congress as a constitutional expert—most recently before the House Financial Services Oversight Subcommittee, regarding the Obama Administration's use of bank settlement agreements to circumvent the Appropriations Clause. He has also filed briefs and presented oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court. His most recent Supreme Court brief, in Los Angeles v. Patel, was cited by Justice Alito in dissent.
Rosenkranz is a member of the New York Bar and the U.S. Supreme Court Bar. He is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He is a founding member of Heterodox Academy and a member of its Executive Committee. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Federalist Society and as the faculty advisor to the Georgetown chapter.
Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School
Senior Fellow and Research Coordinator, American Enterprise Institute
Karlyn Bowman compiles and analyzes American public opinion using available polling data on a variety of subjects, including the economy, taxes, the state of workers in America, environment and global warming, attitudes about homosexuality and gay marriage, NAFTA and free trade, the war in Iraq, and women’s attitudes. In addition, Ms. Bowman has studied and spoken about the evolution of American politics because of key demographic and geographic changes. She has often lectured on the role of think tanks in the United States and writes a weekly column for Forbes.com.
B.A., University of Wisconsin
Executive Vice President of Global Governance, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary, Walmart Inc.
Rachel Brand is Walmart’s executive vice president of global governance, chief legal officer, and corporate secretary. She oversees the company’s global legal, compliance, ethics, corporate governance, digital citizenship, aviation, investigative, and corporate security functions, including Walmart’s Emergency Operations Center.
Immediately before joining Walmart, Rachel served as the United States Associate Attorney General and holds the distinction of being the first woman to serve in this role. She had previously served in the U.S. Department of Justice as the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy during President George W. Bush’s administration. Her other government service includes an appointment by President Obama to serve as a Member of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, service as an Associate Counsel to the President at the White House, and judicial clerkships with Justice Charles Fried of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and Justice Anthony Kennedy at the Supreme Court of the United States. In the private sector, Rachel was a lawyer in private practice at two law firms in Washington, D.C. and served as the Vice President and Chief Counsel for Regulatory Litigation at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Litigation Center.
Rachel serves on the board of directors for the Walmart Foundation and is the executive sponsor for Walmart’s Tribal Voices Associate Resource Group. Outside of Walmart, she serves on the board of directors for the International Justice Mission and is a member of The American Law Institute.
Rachel earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Minnesota-Morris and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Lanny J. Davis & Associates, LLC
Lanny J. Davis counsels individuals, corporations and government contractors, and those under congressional scrutiny, on crisis management and legal issues by developing legal, media and legislative strategies that are designed to best produce a successful result for the client. He has experience in securities fraud and SEC investigations as well, and has found that utilizing such an integrated legal/media/lobbying approach can lead to quicker and less expensive settlements or even successfully litigated outcomes. Senior officials of public companies have also hired Lanny and his crisis group to defend themselves successfully against "short and distort" attacks and other market manipulations. For 25 years prior to 1996, before his tenure as special counsel to President Clinton, Lanny was a commercial, antitrust, government contracts and False Claims Act litigator (both in defense as well as plaintiff). He has argued numerous appellate cases in the U.S. courts of appeals.
In June 2005, President Bush appointed Lanny to serve on the five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created by the U.S. Congress as part of the 2005 Intelligence Reform Act. In that capacity, he received the highest level security clearances so that he could be fully briefed and "read in" to the various anti-terrorist surveillance and financial tracking programs at the highest classified level. From 1996 to 1998, Lanny served as special counsel to the president in the White House and was a spokesperson for the president and the White House on matters concerning campaign finance investigations and other legal issues. Lanny has participated in national, state and local politics for almost 30 years. He has served three terms (1980 to 1992) on the Democratic National Committee representing the state of Maryland, and during that period he served on the DNC Executive Committee and as chairman of the Eastern Region Caucus. In Montgomery County, Maryland, he served as chairman of the Washington Suburban Transit Commission.
Lanny has authored several books and lectured throughout the United States and Europe on various political issues. Between 1990 and 1996, Lanny was a bimonthly commentator on Maryland politics for WAMU-88.5/FM, a Washington, D.C. local affiliate of National Public Radio. He has been a regular television commentator and has been a political and legal analyst for MSNBC, CNN, Fox Cable, CNBC and network TV news programs. He has published numerous op-ed/analysis pieces in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and other national publications.
Lanny graduated from Yale Law School, where he won the prestigious Thurman Arnold Moot Court prize and served on the Yale Law Journal. A graduate of Yale University, Lanny served as chairman of the Yale Daily News.
Lanny is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia and Connecticut and before the Supreme Court of the United States and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Partner, Millbank LLP
Mr. Katyal, the former Acting Solicitor General of the United States, focuses on appellate and complex litigation. He has argued 54 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States.
He has extensive experience in matters of antitrust, corporate, constitutional, securities, technology, criminal, patent, copyright, trademark, ERISA, products liability, labor, employment and tribal law. In the 2022-23 Supreme Court term, he argued five separate cases (nearly 10% of the docket), including winning the landmark voting case Moore v. Harper, which Judge Michael Luttig described as “the most important case for American democracy in the almost two and a half centuries since America’s founding.” Judge Luttig also said Mr. Katyal’s argument “was the single best oral argument I have ever heard made in the Supreme Court of the United States.” His cases include successfully striking down the Guantanamo military tribunals, successfully defending the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act and successfully defending the Peace Cross in Maryland. His 2017 win in Bristol Myers Squibb v. Superior Court was a landmark victory for personal jurisdiction law and his 2006 win in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld was described by former Acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger as “simply the most important decision on presidential power and the rule of law ever. Ever.”
From 2010 to 2011, Mr. Katyal served as Acting Solicitor General of the United States, where he argued several major Supreme Court cases involving a variety of issues, such as his successful defense of the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, his victorious defense of former Attorney General John Ashcroft for alleged abuses in the war on terror, his unanimous victory against eight states who sued the nation's leading power plants for contributing to global warming, and a variety of other matters. As Acting Solicitor General, he was responsible for representing the federal government of the United States in all appellate matters before the US Supreme Court and the Courts of Appeals throughout the nation. He served as Counsel of Record hundreds of times in the US Supreme Court. He was also the only head of the Solicitor General's office to argue a case in the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, on the important question of whether certain aspects of the human genome were patentable.
After graduating from Yale Law School, Mr. Katyal clerked for The Honorable Guido Calabresi of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as well as for The Honorable Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the US Supreme Court. He also served in the Deputy Attorney General's Office at the Justice Department as National Security Advisor and as Special Assistant to the Deputy Attorney General during 1998-1999.
Mr. Katyal is a best-selling New York Times author and has published dozens of scholarly articles in law journals (including several in the Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal), as well as many op-ed articles in publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. He has testified numerous times before various committees of both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate.
W. H. Brady Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
Charles Murray is a political scientist, author, and libertarian. He first came to national attention in 1984 with the publication of Losing Ground, which has been credited as the intellectual foundation for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. His 1994 New York Times bestseller, The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994), coauthored with the late Richard J. Herrnstein, sparked heated controversy for its analysis of the role of IQ in shaping America’s class structure. Murray's other books include What It Means to Be a Libertarian (1997), Human Accomplishment (2003), In Our Hands (2006), and Real Education (2008). His most recent book, Coming Apart (Crown Forum, 2012), describes an unprecedented divergence in American classes over the last half century.
Senior Fellow and Research Coordinator, American Enterprise Institute
Karlyn Bowman compiles and analyzes American public opinion using available polling data on a variety of subjects, including the economy, taxes, the state of workers in America, environment and global warming, attitudes about homosexuality and gay marriage, NAFTA and free trade, the war in Iraq, and women’s attitudes. In addition, Ms. Bowman has studied and spoken about the evolution of American politics because of key demographic and geographic changes. She has often lectured on the role of think tanks in the United States and writes a weekly column for Forbes.com.
B.A., University of Wisconsin
Executive Vice President of Global Governance, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary, Walmart Inc.
Rachel Brand is Walmart’s executive vice president of global governance, chief legal officer, and corporate secretary. She oversees the company’s global legal, compliance, ethics, corporate governance, digital citizenship, aviation, investigative, and corporate security functions, including Walmart’s Emergency Operations Center.
Immediately before joining Walmart, Rachel served as the United States Associate Attorney General and holds the distinction of being the first woman to serve in this role. She had previously served in the U.S. Department of Justice as the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy during President George W. Bush’s administration. Her other government service includes an appointment by President Obama to serve as a Member of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, service as an Associate Counsel to the President at the White House, and judicial clerkships with Justice Charles Fried of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and Justice Anthony Kennedy at the Supreme Court of the United States. In the private sector, Rachel was a lawyer in private practice at two law firms in Washington, D.C. and served as the Vice President and Chief Counsel for Regulatory Litigation at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Litigation Center.
Rachel serves on the board of directors for the Walmart Foundation and is the executive sponsor for Walmart’s Tribal Voices Associate Resource Group. Outside of Walmart, she serves on the board of directors for the International Justice Mission and is a member of The American Law Institute.
Rachel earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Minnesota-Morris and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Lanny J. Davis & Associates, LLC
Lanny J. Davis counsels individuals, corporations and government contractors, and those under congressional scrutiny, on crisis management and legal issues by developing legal, media and legislative strategies that are designed to best produce a successful result for the client. He has experience in securities fraud and SEC investigations as well, and has found that utilizing such an integrated legal/media/lobbying approach can lead to quicker and less expensive settlements or even successfully litigated outcomes. Senior officials of public companies have also hired Lanny and his crisis group to defend themselves successfully against "short and distort" attacks and other market manipulations. For 25 years prior to 1996, before his tenure as special counsel to President Clinton, Lanny was a commercial, antitrust, government contracts and False Claims Act litigator (both in defense as well as plaintiff). He has argued numerous appellate cases in the U.S. courts of appeals.
In June 2005, President Bush appointed Lanny to serve on the five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created by the U.S. Congress as part of the 2005 Intelligence Reform Act. In that capacity, he received the highest level security clearances so that he could be fully briefed and "read in" to the various anti-terrorist surveillance and financial tracking programs at the highest classified level. From 1996 to 1998, Lanny served as special counsel to the president in the White House and was a spokesperson for the president and the White House on matters concerning campaign finance investigations and other legal issues. Lanny has participated in national, state and local politics for almost 30 years. He has served three terms (1980 to 1992) on the Democratic National Committee representing the state of Maryland, and during that period he served on the DNC Executive Committee and as chairman of the Eastern Region Caucus. In Montgomery County, Maryland, he served as chairman of the Washington Suburban Transit Commission.
Lanny has authored several books and lectured throughout the United States and Europe on various political issues. Between 1990 and 1996, Lanny was a bimonthly commentator on Maryland politics for WAMU-88.5/FM, a Washington, D.C. local affiliate of National Public Radio. He has been a regular television commentator and has been a political and legal analyst for MSNBC, CNN, Fox Cable, CNBC and network TV news programs. He has published numerous op-ed/analysis pieces in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and other national publications.
Lanny graduated from Yale Law School, where he won the prestigious Thurman Arnold Moot Court prize and served on the Yale Law Journal. A graduate of Yale University, Lanny served as chairman of the Yale Daily News.
Lanny is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia and Connecticut and before the Supreme Court of the United States and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Partner, Millbank LLP
Mr. Katyal, the former Acting Solicitor General of the United States, focuses on appellate and complex litigation. He has argued 54 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States.
He has extensive experience in matters of antitrust, corporate, constitutional, securities, technology, criminal, patent, copyright, trademark, ERISA, products liability, labor, employment and tribal law. In the 2022-23 Supreme Court term, he argued five separate cases (nearly 10% of the docket), including winning the landmark voting case Moore v. Harper, which Judge Michael Luttig described as “the most important case for American democracy in the almost two and a half centuries since America’s founding.” Judge Luttig also said Mr. Katyal’s argument “was the single best oral argument I have ever heard made in the Supreme Court of the United States.” His cases include successfully striking down the Guantanamo military tribunals, successfully defending the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act and successfully defending the Peace Cross in Maryland. His 2017 win in Bristol Myers Squibb v. Superior Court was a landmark victory for personal jurisdiction law and his 2006 win in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld was described by former Acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger as “simply the most important decision on presidential power and the rule of law ever. Ever.”
From 2010 to 2011, Mr. Katyal served as Acting Solicitor General of the United States, where he argued several major Supreme Court cases involving a variety of issues, such as his successful defense of the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, his victorious defense of former Attorney General John Ashcroft for alleged abuses in the war on terror, his unanimous victory against eight states who sued the nation's leading power plants for contributing to global warming, and a variety of other matters. As Acting Solicitor General, he was responsible for representing the federal government of the United States in all appellate matters before the US Supreme Court and the Courts of Appeals throughout the nation. He served as Counsel of Record hundreds of times in the US Supreme Court. He was also the only head of the Solicitor General's office to argue a case in the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, on the important question of whether certain aspects of the human genome were patentable.
After graduating from Yale Law School, Mr. Katyal clerked for The Honorable Guido Calabresi of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as well as for The Honorable Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the US Supreme Court. He also served in the Deputy Attorney General's Office at the Justice Department as National Security Advisor and as Special Assistant to the Deputy Attorney General during 1998-1999.
Mr. Katyal is a best-selling New York Times author and has published dozens of scholarly articles in law journals (including several in the Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal), as well as many op-ed articles in publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. He has testified numerous times before various committees of both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate.
W. H. Brady Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
Charles Murray is a political scientist, author, and libertarian. He first came to national attention in 1984 with the publication of Losing Ground, which has been credited as the intellectual foundation for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. His 1994 New York Times bestseller, The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994), coauthored with the late Richard J. Herrnstein, sparked heated controversy for its analysis of the role of IQ in shaping America’s class structure. Murray's other books include What It Means to Be a Libertarian (1997), Human Accomplishment (2003), In Our Hands (2006), and Real Education (2008). His most recent book, Coming Apart (Crown Forum, 2012), describes an unprecedented divergence in American classes over the last half century.
Professor of Law, University of Colorado Law School
Paul Campos left a position with a Chicago law firm to begin his teaching career at Colorado Law School in 1990. As a scholar, he has focused on constitutional law and legal theory. His graduate studies in English literature, which culminated in a thesis on Shakespeare's King Lear, provided him with rigorous training in literary theory that has been helpful in his current work in constitutional interpretation. He has written several well-regarded law review articles in this area, including "Against Constitutional Theory," published in the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, and "Advocacy in Scholarship," published in the California Law Review. Both of these articles have been noted as major critiques of the political and normative orientation of current constitutional theory. Professor Campos' regular column for the Rocky Mountain News (distributed by the Scripps Howard News Service), written for a general audience on political, social, and legal issues, has developed a considerable following. A packed house, drawn by his provocative take on a wide range of topics, attended his presentation of the 27th Annual Austin W. Scott, Jr. Lecture entitled "The Obesity Myth & The Lewinsky Scandal," which was based on his latest book project. His second book, Jurismania: The Madness of American Law, critiques the American legal system. Professor Campos also served as the first director of CU law school's Byron R. White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law.
Oppenheim Professor Emeritus of Antitrust and Trade Regulation Law, George Washington University Law School
Thomas D. Morgan is Oppenheim Professor of Antitrust and Trade Regulation Law Emeritus at George Washington University. He was Dean of the Emory University School of Law and on the faculties of the University of Illinois and Brigham Young University. He is co-author of Problems and Materials on Professional Responsibility (14th Ed. 2022), with Professors Mitt Regan and John Dzienkowski. Professor Morgan served as an Associate Reporter for both the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law (Third): The Law Governing Lawyers and the American Bar Association’s Ethics 2000 Commission. He is an Executive Committee member of the Federalist Society’s Professional Responsibility and Legal Education Practice Group and a member of the ABA Business Law Section’s Professional Responsibility committee. His book, “The Vanishing American Lawyer” (2010), was published by Oxford University Press.
Dean and Foundation Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law
Dean and Foundation Professor of Law Daniel D. Polsby joined the faculty of the law school in 1999 after serving 23 years on the Northwestern University law faculty, most recently (since 1990) as the Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law. He has held visiting appointments in the law schools of the University of Southern California, the University of Michigan, and Cornell University. He was appointed acting dean of the George Mason School of Law in 2004 and was named dean in 2005.
Dean Polsby has published dozens of articles on such diverse subjects as voting rights, family law, employment rights, and spectrum utilization. He is the author of the award-winning article, "The False Promise of Gun Control," the cover essay of the March 1994 Atlantic Monthly. The article is one of the most widely anthologized essays of recent years.
Dean Polsby received his B.A. from Oakland University (1964) and earned his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Minnesota (1971). He teaches Criminal Law, Family Law, Constitutional Law, and other subjects.
Faculty Associate, Contemporary History Institute, Ohio University
Richard K. Vedder is Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute and Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor of Economics and Faculty Associate, Contemporary History Institute, Ohio University. Professor Vedder is co-author (with Lowell Gallaway) of The Independent Institute book, Out of Work, the recipient of both the Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Award and Mencken Award Finalist for Best Book, and the Institute monograph, Can Teachers Own Their Own Schools?
Professor Vedder received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois, and he has been Senior Economist at the U.S. Joint Economic Committee and Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Study of American Business, Washington University, and he has taught at the University of Colorado, Claremont Men’s College, and MARA Institute of Technology. His other books include Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much,The American Economy in Historical Perspective; Poverty, Income Distribution, the Family and Public Policy (with L. Gallaway); Essays in Nineteenth Century Economic History; Essays in the Economy of the Old Northwest;Economic Impact of Government Spending: A Fifty State Analysis, and Variations in Business and Economic History. His hundreds of articles and reviews have appeared in numerous scholarly journals as well as such publications as the Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, National Review, Washington Times, andInvestor’s Business Daily.
A Conversation on Intellectual Diversity
Larry Kramer, Michael W. McConnell, Bernadette Meyler, Michael Rubin
Stanford Intellectual Diversity Conference
Why make a big deal out of intellectual diversity in academia, anyway? What are its...
Student Perspectives on Intellectual Diversity in Academia
Jud Campbell, Sohan Dasgupta, Jonathan Mondel, Roland Nadler, Ilan Wurman
Stanford Intellectual Diversity Conference
The proper education of America’s youth is arguably the most important social responsibility the university...
Student Perspectives on Intellectual Diversity in Academia
Jud Campbell, Sohan Dasgupta, Jonathan Mondel, Roland Nadler, Ilan Wurman
Stanford Intellectual Diversity Conference
The proper education of America’s youth is arguably the most important social responsibility the university...
Recent Research in Intellectual Diversity
Gilbert Marcus Cole, James T. Lindgren, Elizabeth Magill, Eugene B. Meyer, Jonathan Mondel, James C. Phillips, Michael Rubin, Jon A. Shields
Stanford Intellectual Diversity Conference
To foster meaningful discourse on intellectual diversity in academia, it is important to begin with the...
Recent Research in Intellectual Diversity
Gilbert Marcus Cole, James T. Lindgren, Elizabeth Magill, Eugene B. Meyer, Jonathan Mondel, James C. Phillips, Michael Rubin, Jon A. Shields
Stanford Intellectual Diversity Conference
To foster meaningful discourse on intellectual diversity in academia, it is important to begin with the...
Panel: American Multiculturalism: Its Force and Limits From 1776 to Today
John C. Eastman, Richard W. Garnett, Heather Mac Donald, Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, Mary Anne Case
18th Annual Faculty Conference
Since before the Revolution, American legal and political traditions have supported many forms of multiculturalism,...
Panel: American Multiculturalism: Its Force and Limits From 1776 to Today
John C. Eastman, Richard W. Garnett, Heather Mac Donald, Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, Mary Anne Case
18th Annual Faculty Conference
Since before the Revolution, American legal and political traditions have supported many forms of multiculturalism,...
Showcase Panel IV: ROUNDTABLE: Is the Future of the American Dream Bright?
Karlyn Bowman, Rachel L. Brand, Lanny J. Davis, Neal K. Katyal, Charles Murray
2014 National Lawyers Convention
America has always been a forward-looking country. What is the future for our young –...
Showcase Panel IV: ROUNDTABLE: Is the Future of the American Dream Bright?
Karlyn Bowman, Rachel L. Brand, Lanny J. Davis, Neal K. Katyal, Charles Murray
2014 National Lawyers Convention
America has always been a forward-looking country. What is the future for our young –...
Showcase Panel III: Higher Education: Run for the Benefit of Students or Faculty or Administrators?
Paul Campos, Thomas D. Morgan, Daniel Polsby, Richard K. Vedder
2014 National Lawyers Convention
**Due to technical difficulties, the first 20 minutes of this panel were not recorded.** Success...