Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission
Paul S. Atkins was sworn into office as the 34th Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 21, 2025, after being nominated by President Donald J. Trump on January 20, 2025, and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on April 9, 2025.
Prior to returning to the SEC, Chairman Atkins was most recently chief executive of Patomak Global Partners, a company he founded in 2009. Chairman Atkins helped lead efforts to develop best practices for the digital asset sector. He served as an independent director and non-executive chairman of the board of BATS Global Markets, Inc. from 2012 to 2015.
Chairman Atkins was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as a Commissioner of the SEC from 2002 to 2008. During his tenure, he advocated for transparency, consistency, and the use of cost-benefit analysis at the agency. Chairman Atkins also represented the SEC at meetings of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets and the U.S.-EU Transatlantic Economic Council. From 2009 to 2010, he was appointed a member of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Before serving as an SEC Commissioner, Chairman Atkins was a consultant on securities and investment management industry matters, especially regarding issues of strategy, regulatory compliance, risk management, new product development, and organizational control.
From 1990 to 1994, Chairman Atkins served on the staff of two chairmen of the SEC, Richard C. Breeden and Arthur Levitt, ultimately as chief of staff and counselor, respectively. He received the SEC’s 1992 Law and Policy Award for work regarding corporate governance matters.
Chairman Atkins began his career as a lawyer in New York, focusing on a wide range of corporate transactions for U.S. and foreign clients, including public and private securities offerings and mergers and acquisitions. He was resident for 2½ years in his firm's Paris office and admitted as conseil juridique in France.
A member of the New York and Florida bars, Chairman Atkins received his J.D. from Vanderbilt University School of Law in 1983 and was Senior Student Writing Editor of the Vanderbilt Law Review. He received his A.B., Phi Beta Kappa, from Wofford College in 1980.
Originally from Lillington, North Carolina, Chairman Atkins grew up in Tampa, Florida. He and his wife Sarah have three sons.
Partner, Schulte, Roth & Zabel LLP
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
Edith Jones graduated from Alamo Heights High School, where she was a National Merit Scholar. In 1971, she received her B.A. in Economics from Cornell University, graduating with honors. In 1974, she was awarded her J.D. at the University of Texas Law School, where she was a law review editor and received the Order of the Coif.
Judge Jones was the first female partner at Andrews, Kurth, Campbell & Jones (now Hunton Andrews Kurth) where she practiced various types of litigation and bankruptcy cases. Judge Jones went on the federal bench on June 1, 1985.
Judge Jones served as a former member of the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, and as a member of the Judicial Conference Commission on Bankruptcy Rules. Judge Jones served on the White House Fellows Commission. Judge Jones served on the board of the Sam Houston Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America. She has been a member of the Garland Walker Inn of Court in Houston for more than 20 years and its President for at least ten years. Judge Jones is also on the Board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation.
David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Paul G. Mahoney is a David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor and served as dean of the Law School from 2008-16. Mahoney's teaching and research areas are securities regulation, law and economic development, corporate finance, financial derivatives and contracts. He has published widely in law reviews and peer-reviewed finance and law and economics journals. His book, “Wasting a Crisis: Why Securities Regulation Fails,” was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015.
Mahoney joined the Law School faculty in 1990 after practicing law with the New York firm of Sullivan & Cromwell and clerking for Judge Ralph K. Winter, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court. He served as academic associate dean at the Law School from 1999 to 2004 and has held the Albert C. BeVier Research Chair and the Brokaw Chair in Corporate Law. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School, the University of Southern California Law School and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. He has also worked on legal reform projects in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Nepal.
Mahoney is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018 he joined Securities and Exchange Commission’s Investor Advisory Committee. He served as an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives from 2004 to 2007 and as a director of the American Law and Economics Association from 2002 to 2004. He is a past recipient of the All-University Outstanding Teacher Award and the Law School's Traynor Award for excellence in faculty scholarship.
Partner, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP
Annette L. Nazareth is a Davis Polk partner practicing in the firm’s Financial Institutions Group in the Washington DC office. She advises clients across a broad range of complex regulatory matters and transactions. She also works closely with Davis Polk’s SEC enforcement practice, counseling nonfinancial sector corporations that are subject to government regulatory and enforcement actions.
Ms. Nazareth was a key financial services policymaker for more than a decade. She joined the SEC Staff in 1998 as a Senior Counsel to Chairman Arthur Levitt and then served as Interim Director of the Division of Investment Management. She served as Director of the Division of Market Regulation (now the Division of Trading and Markets) from 1999 to 2005. As Director, she oversaw the regulation of broker-dealers, exchanges, clearing agencies, transfer agents and securities information processors. In 2005, she was appointed an SEC Commissioner. During her tenure at the Commission, she worked on numerous groundbreaking initiatives, including execution quality disclosure rules, implementation of equities decimal pricing, short sale reforms and modernization of the national market system rules. Ms. Nazareth also served as the Commission’s representative on the Financial Stability Forum from 1999 to 2008.
Since leaving the SEC in January 2008, she has served as Rapporteur for the Group of Thirty’s report, The Structure of Financial Supervision: Approaches and Challenges in a Global Marketplace and as Project Director for their report, Enhancing Financial Stability and Resilience: Macroprudential Policy, Tools and Systems for the Future. Earlier in her career, she held a number of senior legal positions at several investment banks.
Executive Vice President, The Federalist Society
Dean Reuter is Executive Vice President at the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. He has served in two federal government agency Offices of the Inspector General, as Counsel to the Inspector General and Deputy Inspector General, responsible for policing the use of federal funds granted and contracted through those agencies. As such, he helped conduct and oversee criminal investigations across the country. He is the principal author of the non-fiction book, The Hidden Nazi: The Untold Story of America's Deal with the Devil, and editor of Liberty’s Nemesis: The Unchecked Expansion of the State and Confronting Terror: 9/11 and the Future of American National Security. He was appointed by the President and served as Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and recently served as an appointee on the U.S. Commission on Presidential Scholars. He is a graduate of Hood College (BA with Honors) and the University of Maryland School of Law.
President, Americans for Tax Reform
Mr. Norquist, a native of Massachusetts, has been one of Washington’s most effective issues management strategists for over two decades.
Mr. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), a coalition of taxpayer groups, individuals and businesses opposed to higher taxes at the federal, state and local levels. ATR organizes the TAXPAYER PROTECTION PLEDGE, which asks all candidates for federal and state office to commit themselves in writing to oppose all tax increases. To date, 172 House members, and 34 Senators have taken the pledge. On the state level, 7 governors and over 1100 state legislators have taken the pledge.
Mr. Norquist also:
In the past, Mr. Norquist served as:
Mr. Norquist holds a Masters of Business Administration and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics, both from Harvard University. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Samah and his daughters, Grace.and Giselle.
Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life, McKnight Presidential Professor in Law, Distinguished McKnight University Professor, Harlan Albert Rogers Professor in Law, Associate Director, Corporate Institute, University of Minnesota Law School
Professor Kristin E. Hickman is the McKnight Presidential Professor in Law, a Distinguished McKnight University Professor, and Harlan Albert Rogers Professor in Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. She also has taught at Harvard Law School and Northwestern University School of Law. Professor Hickman teaches and writes primarily in the areas of administrative law, tax administration, and statutory interpretation. Her articles on these topics have appeared in the Columbia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Duke Law Journal, and other publications. She also co-authors the Administrative Law Treatise with Richard J. Pierce, Jr., and a casebook on federal administrative law with Pierce and Christopher J. Walker. Her scholarly work has been cited several times in opinions of the United States Supreme Court as well as regularly in lower court judicial opinions and court briefs.
In 2018-19, Professor Hickman served as Special Adviser to the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in Washington, D.C. She presently serves as a Senior Fellow, and previously served as a public member and chair of the judicial review committee, for the Administrative Conference of the United States. She also is a Fellow of the American College of Tax Counsel.
Professor Hickman received her B.S. degree in business administration with a concentration in accounting and a secondary major in history from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. After practicing for several years as a certified public accountant, Professor Hickman earned her J.D. degree, magna cum laude, from Northwestern University School of Law, where she was awarded the Raoul Berger Prize and the Lowden Wigmore Prize for her scholarly writings. Following law school, Professor Hickman clerked for The Honorable David B. Sentelle of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and practiced law as an associate with the Chicago office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, concentrating on corporate and international tax transactions and matters.
Senior Vice President, Government Affairs, Taxometry
R. Bruce Johnson joined Taxometry in 2015 following his term as Chairman of the Utah State Tax Commission. Prior to being named Chairman in 2009, Johnson served for 11 years as one of four commissioners of the body.
Johnson is a past president of the Federation of Tax Administrators and a past chair of the Multistate Tax Commission, where he served on its Executive Committee. He was the founding national Co-chair of the Streamlined Sales Tax Implementing States and has served on the Executive Committee of the Governing Board. He was a member of former Governor Olene Walker's Tax Advisory Group and was the principal draftsman of Governor Walker's Recommendations on a Tax Structure for Utah's Future. He was also a member of the Utah Tax Review Commission, a former Board Member of the National Tax Association and past chair of the American Bar Association Tax Section Committee on State and Local Taxes.
Prior to his appointment, Johnson was a partner in the law firm of Holme Roberts & Owen LLP, where he litigated state and local tax disputes and advised clients on state and local tax issues, tax exemption issues and issues relating to tax exempt municipal financing. Before joining Holme Roberts, he was a trial attorney for the Tax Division of the U. S. Department of Justice and received the Outstanding Trial Attorney Award from the Department of Justice. Johnson graduated from the University of Utah with a degree in accounting, cum laude, and is a Certified Public Accountant. He received his law degree, magna cum laude, from Brigham Young University, where he was a J. Reuben Clark Scholar.
Senior Fellow, Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Financial Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute
Peter J. Wallison holds the Arthur F. Burns Chair in Financial Policy Studies and is co-director of AEI’s program on Financial Policy Studies. Prior to joining AEI, he practiced banking, corporate and financial law at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, D.C., and New York. Mr. Wallison has held a number of government positions. From June 1981 to January 1985, he was General Counsel of the United States Treasury Department, where he had a significant role in the development of the Reagan Administration's proposals for deregulation in the financial services industry. During 1986 and 1987, Mr. Wallison was White House counsel to President Ronald Reagan, and between 1972 and 1976, he served first as Special Assistant to New York's Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and, subsequently, as counsel to Mr. Rockefeller as vice president of the United States.
Mr. Wallison was admitted to practice before the courts of New York and the District of Columbia, and is retired from practice in New York. He continues to be a member of the District of Columbia Bar Association. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 1963 and law degree from Harvard Law School in 1966.
Mr. Wallison is the author of Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency, published in December 2002 by Westview Press. On campaign finance, he is the author (with Joel Gora) of Better Parties, Better Government, (AEI Press 2009). On financial or regulatory matters, he is the author of Back From the Brink, a proposal for a private deposit insurance system, and co-author of Nationalizing Mortgage Risk: The Growth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; The GAAP Gap: Corporate Disclosure in the Internet Age; Competitive Equity: A Better Way to Organize Mutual Funds; Bad History, Worse Policy: How a False Narrative about the Financial Crisis Led to the Dodd-Frank Act (AEI Press 2013); and Hidden In Plain Sight: What Caused the World’s Worst Financial Crisis and Why it Could Happen Again (Encounter Books 2015). His most recent book is Judicial Fortitude: The Last Chance to Rein in the Administrative State, published by Encounter Books in October 2018.
He testifies frequently before committees of Congress, and is a frequent contributor to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal and other print and online journals. He has also been a speaker at many conferences on financial services, housing, the causes of the financial crisis, the Dodd-Frank Act, accounting, and corporate governance, and was a member of the Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee between 1995 and 2015. He was a member of the SEC Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting (2008), co-Chair of the Pew Financial Reform Task Force (2009), and a member of the congressionally- appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (2009-2011). In May 2011, for his work in financial policy, Mr. Wallison received an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from the University of Colorado.
Wayne A. Abernathy, Wild Bells
Wayne A. Abernathy is a former U.S. Treasury Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions under President George W. Bush, receiving the Alexander Hamilton Award in recognition of his service. In that office he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Prior to his work at the Treasury, Mr. Abernathy served as Staff Director of the Senate Banking Committee, under Chairman Phil Gramm.
Following his service at the Treasury, Mr. Abernathy worked for 15 years on the staff of the American Bankers Association, as Executive Vice President for Financial Institutions Policy and Regulatory Affairs.
Previous experience with the Senate Banking Committee includes serving as Staff Director of the Subcommittee on Securities during 1995-1998. From 1989 until 1994, Mr. Abernathy was a Republican economist for the committee. He previously worked as a senior legislative assistant for Senator Gramm during 1987-1989 and as an economist for the Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on International Finance and Monetary Policy during 1981-1986, under Chairman Jake Garn.
Mr. Abernathy earned his bachelor’s degree in International Studies from The Johns Hopkins University in 1978. In 1980, he received a master’s degree in International Studies from the School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University.
Partner, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP
Mr. Douglas is a partner in Davis Polk’s Financial Institutions Group, heading the firm’s bank regulatory practice and focusing on bank restructuring and resolutions and other issues arising from the current banking and financial crisis. He has been involved in some of the most difficult and sensitive matters during the crisis, including advising the boards of directors of Indymac and Bank United, counseling Citigroup with respect to FDIC matters, advising various parties on the fallout from the failure of Washington Mutual and advising various private equity firms on proposed investments in troubled or failed banks.
Mr. Douglas was appointed General Counsel of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1987 and continued in that capacity through 1989. This was a period of unprecedented stress on the financial system, and he was involved in the major bank failures and restructurings of the late 1980s, participated in the landmark Financial Institutions Regulatory Reform and Restructuring Act of 1989 and assisted in the organization of the Resolution Trust Corporation.
Mr. Douglas is regarded as one of the leading bank insolvency lawyers in the nation.
FOX Business Network Stocks Editor
Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Chicago Law School
Following his graduation from Harvard Law School, Judge Posner clerked for Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. From 1963 to 1965, he was assistant to Commissioner Philip Elman of the Federal Trade Commission. For the next two years, he was assistant to the solicitor general of the United States. Prior to going to Stanford Law School in 1968 as Associate Professor, Judge Posner served as general counsel of the President's Task Force on Communications Policy. He first came to the University of Chicago Law School in 1969, and was Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law prior to his appointment in 1981 as a judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He was the chief judge of the court from 1993 to 2000.
Judge Posner has written a number of books, including Economic Analysis of Law (9th ed., 2014); The Economics of Justice (1981); Law and Literature (3rd ed. 2009); The Problems of Jurisprudence (1990); Cardozo: A Study in Reputation (1990); The Essential Holmes (1992); Sex and Reason (1992); Overcoming Law (1995); The Federal Courts: Challenge and Reform (1996); Law and Legal Theory in England and America (1996); The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory (1999); Antitrust Law (2d ed. 2001); Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (2003); Catastrophe: Risk and Response (2004); Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11 (2005); How Judges Think (2008); A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression (2009); The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy (2010); The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice (coauthored with Lee Epstein and William M. Landes) (2013); and Reflections on Judging (2013). He also wrote books on the Clinton impeachment and Bush v. Gore, many articles in legal and economic journals, and book reviews in the popular press.
He has taught administrative law, antitrust, economic analysis of law, history of legal thought, conflict of laws, regulated industries, law and literature, the legislative process, family law, primitive law, torts, civil procedure, evidence, health law and economics, law and science, and jurisprudence. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Legal Studies and (with Orley Ashenfelter) the American Law and Economics Review. He is an Honorary Bencher of the Inner Temple and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and he was the President of the American Law and Economics Association from 1995 to 1996 and the honorary President of the Bentham Club of University College, London, for 1998. He has received honorary degrees from leading American and foreign universities, along with a number of awards, including the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Award in Law from the University of Virginia in 1994, the Marshall-Wythe Medallion from the College of William and Mary in 1998, the 2003 Research Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation, the 2003 John Sherman Award from the US Department of Justice, the Learned Hand Medal for Excellence in Federal Jurisprudence from the Federal bar Council in 2005, the Thomas C. Schelling Award from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2005, and the Ronald H. Coase Medal from the American Law and Economics Association in 2010.
Senior Fellow, Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Financial Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute
Peter J. Wallison holds the Arthur F. Burns Chair in Financial Policy Studies and is co-director of AEI’s program on Financial Policy Studies. Prior to joining AEI, he practiced banking, corporate and financial law at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, D.C., and New York. Mr. Wallison has held a number of government positions. From June 1981 to January 1985, he was General Counsel of the United States Treasury Department, where he had a significant role in the development of the Reagan Administration's proposals for deregulation in the financial services industry. During 1986 and 1987, Mr. Wallison was White House counsel to President Ronald Reagan, and between 1972 and 1976, he served first as Special Assistant to New York's Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and, subsequently, as counsel to Mr. Rockefeller as vice president of the United States.
Mr. Wallison was admitted to practice before the courts of New York and the District of Columbia, and is retired from practice in New York. He continues to be a member of the District of Columbia Bar Association. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 1963 and law degree from Harvard Law School in 1966.
Mr. Wallison is the author of Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency, published in December 2002 by Westview Press. On campaign finance, he is the author (with Joel Gora) of Better Parties, Better Government, (AEI Press 2009). On financial or regulatory matters, he is the author of Back From the Brink, a proposal for a private deposit insurance system, and co-author of Nationalizing Mortgage Risk: The Growth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; The GAAP Gap: Corporate Disclosure in the Internet Age; Competitive Equity: A Better Way to Organize Mutual Funds; Bad History, Worse Policy: How a False Narrative about the Financial Crisis Led to the Dodd-Frank Act (AEI Press 2013); and Hidden In Plain Sight: What Caused the World’s Worst Financial Crisis and Why it Could Happen Again (Encounter Books 2015). His most recent book is Judicial Fortitude: The Last Chance to Rein in the Administrative State, published by Encounter Books in October 2018.
He testifies frequently before committees of Congress, and is a frequent contributor to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal and other print and online journals. He has also been a speaker at many conferences on financial services, housing, the causes of the financial crisis, the Dodd-Frank Act, accounting, and corporate governance, and was a member of the Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee between 1995 and 2015. He was a member of the SEC Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting (2008), co-Chair of the Pew Financial Reform Task Force (2009), and a member of the congressionally- appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (2009-2011). In May 2011, for his work in financial policy, Mr. Wallison received an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from the University of Colorado.
Chief Program Officer, National Community Reinvestment Coalition
David Berenbaum serves as The National Community Reinvestment Coalition’s Chief Program Officer. David is responsible for implementing NCRC’s legislative, research, compliance, community lending, minority business and civil rights programs. He testified in 2007 before the House Financial Services Committee on solutions to the current foreclosure crisis in America and before the Senate Banking Committee hearing on solutions to the current sub-prime mortgage melt-down. His current national public policy and regulatory focus includes initiatives to expand CRA to reach all financial service providers, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act analysis, RESPA reform, enactment of a meaningful national responsible lending bill and related consumer protections. Mr. Berenbaum has achieved a national reputation as a civil rights expert and advocate. He attained national recognition for fair housing and related consumer protection advocacy and has appeared as an expert on numerous national news magazine shows – including Dateline NBC, 48 Hours, The CBS Evening News, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN and others. Recently, his work documenting fair lending compliance issues by mortgage brokers through mystery shopping in six cities and concerning about appraisal valuation practices was reported on by syndicated real estate columnist Ken Harney in two articles.
Mr. Berenbaum is responsible for coordinating NCRC’s fair housing and fair lending compliance initiatives, which in 2008 will be relaunched under the historic name “National Neighbors" and the establishment of NCRC’s new CDFI, which is a component of it’s National Homeownership Sustainability Fund. David is also one of the founders of NCRC’s Center for Responsible Appraisals and Valuations (CRAV). The CRAV celebrates appraisal best practices in cooperation with it’s stake holders, who include lenders, securitizers, appraisers, real estate professionals and other public and private sector leaders.
President, Cass & Associates, PC
Ronald A. Cass is Dean Emeritus of Boston University School of Law (where he was Dean from 1990-2004), President of Cass & Associates, PC, former Vice-Chairman and Commissioner of the U.S. International Trade Commission, former faculty member at Boston University School of Law and the University of Virginia Law School, and Distinguished Senior Fellow at the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. Dean Cass also sits as an arbitrator for commercial, international, and intellectual property rights disputes, and is a former United States member of the Panel of Conciliators of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. He is a member of the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States and has received seven presidential appointments, spanning Presidents Ronald Reagan to Donald J. Trump.
As a law professor, lecturer, and scholar, Dean Cass has been teaching and writing about a wide array of legal issues on topics such as administrative law and regulation, antitrust, constitutional law, communications, intellectual property, international trade, separation of powers, and legal process. He has published more than 160 scholarly books, chapters, articles, and papers, including a leading casebook on administrative law. Dean Cass has taught judges as well as students in schools of law, economics, business, and public policy and has held academic appointments in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
In addition to his academic work, Dean Cass has participated in numerous important legal cases as an amicus, consultant, or expert, and has advised businesses, law firms, investment funds, and government agencies on a range of trade, antitrust, intellectual property, and regulatory issues. He has a broad range of affiliations with professional groups, and has received numerous honors, fellowships and awards.
Dean Cass is a graduate of the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago Law School.
Senior Fellow, Mises Institute
Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute, providing thought and policy leadership on financial issues and the study of financial systems. His work includes cycles of booms and busts, financial crises with their political responses, housing finance, government-sponsored enterprises, risk and uncertainty, central banking, banking and financial regulation, corporate governance, retirement finance, student loans, and the politics of finance.
He previously served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department 2019-2021. He was a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the R Street Institute 2015-2019 and 2021, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 2004-2015. Among the many aspects of his AEI work, he developed the One Page Mortgage Form to give borrowers in clear form the key information they need in order to know what they are committing themselves to. He was President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004. There he invented the Mortgage Partnership Finance program, which successfully created front-end mortgage credit risk sharing beginning in 1997. His decades of banking experience include being a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 1991.
Pollock was a director of the CME Group 2004-2019 and of Ascendium Education Group 1989-2019. He is a director and past-chairman of the Great Books Foundation and a past president of the International Union for Housing Finance.
He is the co-author of Surprised Again! - The COVID Crisis and the New Market Bubble (2022), and the author of Finance and Philosophy—Why We’re Always Surprised (2018) and Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (2011), as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony.
Pollock is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University.
His work is available on alexjpollock.com.
Wayne A. Abernathy, Wild Bells
Wayne A. Abernathy is a former U.S. Treasury Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions under President George W. Bush, receiving the Alexander Hamilton Award in recognition of his service. In that office he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Prior to his work at the Treasury, Mr. Abernathy served as Staff Director of the Senate Banking Committee, under Chairman Phil Gramm.
Following his service at the Treasury, Mr. Abernathy worked for 15 years on the staff of the American Bankers Association, as Executive Vice President for Financial Institutions Policy and Regulatory Affairs.
Previous experience with the Senate Banking Committee includes serving as Staff Director of the Subcommittee on Securities during 1995-1998. From 1989 until 1994, Mr. Abernathy was a Republican economist for the committee. He previously worked as a senior legislative assistant for Senator Gramm during 1987-1989 and as an economist for the Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on International Finance and Monetary Policy during 1981-1986, under Chairman Jake Garn.
Mr. Abernathy earned his bachelor’s degree in International Studies from The Johns Hopkins University in 1978. In 1980, he received a master’s degree in International Studies from the School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University.
Professor of Law and Public Finance, NSU Florida Shepard Broad College of Law
Tim Canova is a Professor of Law and Public Finance at the NSU Shepard Broad College of Law, with broad experience in law teaching, private practice, and public policy. He teaches Constitutional Law II: First Amendment Law, Corporations, Business Entities, Regulation of Financial Institutions, and a Seminar on Law, Finance, and Markets at Nova. He previously taught at the Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law in Orange, California, where he served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and the inaugural Betty Hutton Williams Professor of International Economic Law. He was first granted tenure at the University of New Mexico School of Law and he has taught as a visitor at the University of Arizona and the University of Miami.
Canova's work crosses the disciplines of law, public finance, history, and economics. He has been a leading critic of private central banks, including the Federal Reserve. His work has been published in more than two dozen book chapters and articles in the U.S. and overseas, including in the Oxford University Press, Edward Elgar Publishing, Harvard Law & Policy Review, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Brooklyn Law Review, Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, and UC Davis Law Review. Canova was an early critic of financial deregulation and the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan. In the 1980s, he wrote critically of the federal bailout of Continental Illinois, the nation’s seventh largest commercial bank, and the collapse of the savings & loan industry. In the 1990s, prior to the Asian currency contagion, he argued against the International Monetary Fund’s capital account liberalization program. Throughout the Bush administration, he warned of an impending crisis in the bubble economy. Following the 2008 financial collapse, he lectured and published widely on the causes and consequences of the economic and financial crisis. In 2011, Canova was appointed by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to serve on an Advisory Committee on Federal Reserve Reform with leading economists, including Jeffrey Sachs, Robert Reich, James Galbraith, and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.
Canova also writes and advocates in the areas of campaign finance and election reform, a research agenda informed by his 2016 campaign challenging the then chair of the Democratic National Committee for her U.S. House of Representatives seat in a hotly contested election. Canova’s campaign went viral, raising $3.8 million from 209,000 individual donations and setting a record at the time for the highest percentage (76%) of small online donations for any campaign for federal office. The election results were marred by evidence of statistical anomalies, allegations of electronic voting irregularities, and an order by Florida’s 17th Judicial Circuit Court finding that the Broward County Elections Supervisor had illegally destroyed every ballot cast. In 2019, Canova testified to the Florida Advisory Committee of the United States Civil Rights Commission about the systematic electronic disenfranchisement of voters in Florida elections.
Canova received his A.B. degree from Franklin and Marshall College and his J.D. degree, cum laude, from the Georgetown University Law Center. He has a master’s diploma in graduate legal studies from the University of Stockholm where he was a Swedish Institute Visiting Scholar. He previously served as a legislative assistant to the late U.S. Senator Paul E. Tsongas and practiced law in New York City with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Ferdon.
Featured Article entitled “Central Bank Independence as Agency Capture: A Review of the Empirical Literature, Banking & Financial Services Policy Report 30:11 (Nov. 2011).
Principal, Ely & Company, Inc.
Bert Ely has specialized in deposit insurance and banking structure issues since 1981. In 1986, he became an early predictor of the S&L crisis and a taxpayer bailout of the FSLIC. In 1991, he was the first person to correctly predict the non-crisis in commercial banking; in 1992, he predicted an eventual taxpayer bailout of the Japanese banking system.
Bert continuously monitors conditions in the banking and S&L industries, monetary policy, and the growing federalization of credit risk. He has helped to draft legislation to enact the cross-guarantee concept for privatizing banking regulation and its related deposit insurance and systemic risks. He has testified on numerous occasions before congressional committees on banking issues and he often speaks on these matters to bankers and others.
Bert first established his consulting practice in 1972. Before that, he was the chief financial officer of a public company, a consultant with Touche, Ross & Company, and an auditor with Ernst & Ernst. He received his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1968 and his Bachelor's degree in economics in 1964 from Case Western Reserve University.
Wayne A. Abernathy, Wild Bells
Wayne A. Abernathy is a former U.S. Treasury Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions under President George W. Bush, receiving the Alexander Hamilton Award in recognition of his service. In that office he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Prior to his work at the Treasury, Mr. Abernathy served as Staff Director of the Senate Banking Committee, under Chairman Phil Gramm.
Following his service at the Treasury, Mr. Abernathy worked for 15 years on the staff of the American Bankers Association, as Executive Vice President for Financial Institutions Policy and Regulatory Affairs.
Previous experience with the Senate Banking Committee includes serving as Staff Director of the Subcommittee on Securities during 1995-1998. From 1989 until 1994, Mr. Abernathy was a Republican economist for the committee. He previously worked as a senior legislative assistant for Senator Gramm during 1987-1989 and as an economist for the Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on International Finance and Monetary Policy during 1981-1986, under Chairman Jake Garn.
Mr. Abernathy earned his bachelor’s degree in International Studies from The Johns Hopkins University in 1978. In 1980, he received a master’s degree in International Studies from the School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins 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.
Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown Law
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1971, Professor Seidman served as a law clerk for J. Skelly Wright of the D.C. Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He then was a staff attorney with the D.C. Public Defender Service until joining the Law Center faculty in 1976. He teaches a variety of courses in the fields of constitutional and criminal law. He is co-author of a constitutional law casebook and the author of many articles concerning criminal justice and constitutional law. His most recent books are Silence and Freedom (Stanford 2007), Our Unsettled Constitution: A New Defense of Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (Yale 2001) and Equal Protection of the Laws (Foundation 2002).
Tazewell Taylor Professor of Law and William H. Cabell Research Professor, William & Mary Law School
Jonathan H. Adler joined the William & Mary law faculty as the Tazwell Taylor Professor of Law and William H. Cabell Research Professor in 2025. Prior to joining the faculty, he was the inaugural Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law and the founding Director of the Coleman P. Burke Center for Environmental Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
Professor Adler is the author or editor of seven books, including Climate Liberalism: Perspectives on Liberty, Property and Pollution (Palgrave, 2023), Marijuana Federalism: Uncle Sam and Mary Jane (Brookings Institution Press, 2020), Business and the Roberts Court (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Rebuilding the Ark: New Perspectives on Endangered Species Act Reform (AEI Press, 2011).
His articles have appeared in publications ranging from the Harvard Environmental Law Review and Yale Journal on Regulation to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post. He has testified before Congress a dozen times, and his work has been cited in the U.S. Supreme Court. A 2024 study identified Professor Adler as the seventh most cited legal academic in administrative and environmental law from 2019 to 2023.
Professor Adler is a contributing editor to Civitas Outlook and a regular contributor to the popular legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy. A regular commentator on constitutional and regulatory issues, he has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, ranging from the PBS Newshour and National Public Radio to the Fox News Channel and Entertainment Tonight.
Professor Adler is a senior fellow at the Property & Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana. In 2018, Professor Adler was elected to membership in the American Law Institute and helped co-found the organization Checks and Balances. In 2024, Professor Adler was appointed a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States.
Professor Adler clerked for the Honorable David B. Sentelle on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Partner, Sidley Austin LLP
ROGER MARTELLA co-leads the Environmental practice group at Sidley Austin LLP. He rejoined Sidley Austin LLP after serving as the General Counsel of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, concluding 10 years of litigating and handling complex environmental and natural resource matters at the Department of Justice and EPA. In 2015, Roger was recognized by Who’s Who Legal as the environmental lawyer of the year globally.
Roger’s practice focuses on three primary areas. First, Roger advises companies on developing strategic approaches to achieve their goals in light of rapidly developing demands to addressclimate change, promote sustainability and utilize clean energy. Second, Roger handles a broad range of environmental and natural resource litigation and mediation. Third, Roger advises multinational companies on compliance with environmental laws in the United States, China, the European Union and other nations.
Roger counsels approximately 50 of the world’s leading conventional and renewable energy, industrial, transportation, agricultural, forestry, and technology companies on bet-the-company environmental issues, regulatory matters, and litigation including transitioning to an era of legal controls addressing greenhouse gas emissions, increasingly stringent pollutant controls, alternative and clean energy, hydraulic fracturing, and sustainability both in the United States and abroad.
Roger employs a strategic, forward-looking approach to solving emerging law and policy issues across the world that have the potential to create both opportunities and risks for domestic and multinational energy and manufacturing companies and industries. Roger’s approach is to build a collaborative and coalition-building framework that seeks the strongest possible results through up front coordination with government, industry, and NGO stakeholders, leveraging strong honest broker relations with government officials and understanding of government approach to realize resolutions that have led to extraordinary favorable resolutions offering significant regulatory relief to industries and pennies-on-the-dollar enforcement settlements for companies.
Roger was unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate as EPA General Counsel. In that role, Roger served as EPA’s chief legal advisor supervising an office of 350 lawyers and staff in Washington and 10 regional offices. In particular, Roger led the team responsible for developing for the first time under the Clean Air Act the federal government’s climate change legal framework and options in response to the landmark Supreme Court decision Massachusetts v. EPA, which held greenhouse gases to be air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
Andrew P. Morriss is Dean and Anthony G. Buzbee Dean's Endowed Chairholder at Texas A&M School of Law and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Center on Culture and Civil Society at the Independent Institute. He is also a Research Fellow at the Center for Labor and Employment Law at New York University; Senior Fellow at the Property & Environment Research Center; Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University; and a regular Visiting Professor at Universidad Francisco Marroquín, in Guatemala. Prior to coming to the University of Illinois, he served as Galen J. Roush Professor of Business Law and Regulation at Case Western Reserve University.
He received his A.B. degree from Princeton University, his J.D. and a masters degree in public affairs from the University of Texas at Austin, and his Ph.D. (economics) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After law school he clerked for U.S. District Judge Barefoot Sanders in the Northern District of Texas and worked for two years at Texas Rural Legal Aid in Hereford and Plainview, Texas.
Professor Morriss is the author or coauthor of more than forty book chapters and scholarly articles, and he is the co-editor of Cross-Border Human Resources, Labor and Employment Issues: Proceedings of the New York University 54th Annual Conference on Labor (with Samuel Estreicher); Property Stories (with Gerald Korngold); and The Common Law and the Environment (with Roger Meiners). He is the author of the book, Regulation by Litigation (with Bruce Yandle and Andrew Dorchak), and he also regularly writes for The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and Books & Culture: A Christian Review.
Professor Morriss was recently named one of the Reporters for the Restatement of Employment Law by the American Law Institute (ALI), Senior Fellow for the Institute for Energy Research, and a Reporter for the Restatement of Employment Law by the American Law Institute.
A.B. Chettle Chair in Civil Procedure, Georgetown University Law Center
Professor Vladeck teaches civil procedure, federal courts, a practicum on privacy and technology (taught jointly with MIT), and directs the Civil Litigation Clinic, a student clinic that handles trial court litigation focused on public-interest cases. He also serves as Faculty Director of the Law Center’s Center on Privacy and Technology.
From 2002 to 2009, Professor Vladeck served as Director of the Civil Rights section of Georgetown Law’s Institute for Public Representation, a student clinic that handles complex trial court and appellate litigation focused on civil rights and other public-interest litigation, while also teaching civil procedure and federal courts. From 2009 to 2012, Professor Vladeck took leave from Georgetown to serve as the Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
At the FTC, he supervised the Bureau’s 450 lawyers, investigators, paralegals and support staff in carrying out the Bureau’s work to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive or fraudulent practices. Before joining the Law Center faculty full-time in 2002, Professor Vladeck spent over 25 years with Public Citizen Litigation Group, a national public interest law firm, serving the last ten years as the Group’s director. He has briefed and argued a number of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and more than sixty cases before federal courts of appeal and state courts of law resort.
He is a Senior Fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Law, Science and Technology, and an elected member of the American Law Institute. He also serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and on the boards of the National Consumers Law Center and the Center for Democracy and Technology. Professor Vladeck frequently testifies before Congress and writes on administrative law, First Amendment, consumer protection, privacy, and access to justice issues.
Chairman, Department of Economics, George Mason University
Professor of Law and Economics, Fordham University School of Law
Professor of Corporate & Antitrust Law, Fordham University School of Law
Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Whitebox Advisors
Professor Emeritus, The George Washington University Law School
Art Wilmarth is a Professor Emeritus of Law at George Washington University Law School (GW Law). He was a member of GW Law’s full-time faculty from 1986 to 2020. Prior to joining the faculty, he was a partner in Jones Day’s Washington, DC office. He served as Executive Director of GW Law’s Center for Law, Economics & Finance from 2011 to 2014.
Professor Wilmarth is the author of Taming the Megabanks: Why We Need a New Glass-Steagall Act (Oxford University Press, 2020), and co-editor of The Panic of 2008: Causes, Consequences, and Implications for Reform (Edward Elgar, 2010). He has published more than 50 law review articles and book chapters in the fields of financial regulation and American constitutional history.
In 2005, the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers (ACCFSL) awarded Professor Wilmarth its annual prize for the best law review article published in the field of consumer financial services law. He has testified before committees of the U.S. Congress, the California legislature, and the U.K. House of Lords on financial regulatory issues. In 2010, he served as a consultant to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the body established by Congress to investigate the causes of the global financial crisis of 2007-09. He is a Fellow of ACCFSL and a member of the international advisory board of the Journal of Banking Regulation (Springer). He received his B.A. degree from Yale University and his J.D. degree from Harvard University.
Showcase Panel III: Regulation of Financial Institutions
Paul S. Atkins, Stephanie R. Breslow, Edith H. Jones, Paul G. Mahoney, Annette L. Nazareth, Dean Reuter
2009 National Lawyers Convention
Quite independent of questions concerning wealth distribution and bailouts, there is the question of whither...
Internet Sales Tax - Podcast
Grover Norquist, Kristin E. Hickman, R. Bruce Johnson
Administrative Law & Regulation Practice Group
In a 1992 case, Quill v. North Dakota, that dealt with a catalog mail-order company, the...
A Conversation on Proposed Systemic Risk Regulation
Peter J. Wallison, Wayne A. Abernathy, John L. Douglas
Financial Services and E-Commerce Practice Group
On March 26, 2009, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner outlined the administration’s plan to regulate the...
The Financial Crisis: Failure of Capitalism or Failure of Government Policy?
Liz MacDonald, Richard Posner, Peter J. Wallison
New York City Lawyers Chapter
The New York City Lawyers Chapter held this event on April 27, 2009. Please note that...
Panel II: Reprivatizing Credit Risk: Where Do We Go From Here?
David Berenbaum, Ronald A. Cass, Jeb Hensarling, Alex J. Pollock, John Weicher
The Financial Services Bailout
After discussing the extent to which credit risk has been nationalized directly or indirectly through...
Panel I: How Did We Get into the Mess We Are in Today?
Wayne A. Abernathy, Timothy Canova, James Carr, Bert Ely, Craig L. Hymowitz
The Financial Services Bailout
Presentation by Bert Ely of a paper titled: "Bad Rules Produce Bad Outcomes: Underlying Public Policy Causes...
Debate: The Founders' Intent, Constitutional Provisions, and Limits on Spending Power and Delegation
Wayne A. Abernathy, John C. Eastman, Louis Michael Seidman
The Financial Services Bailout
Article I of the Constitution provides that the legislative powers granted by the Constitution are...
Regulation by Litigation: Boon or Bane?
Jonathan H. Adler, Andrew Dorchak, Roger Martella, Andrew P. Morriss, David C. Vladeck, Bruce Yandle
Center for Business Law & Regulation at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, Administrative Law Practice Group, and Litigation Practice Group
Federal regulators, state attorneys general and plaintiffs attorneys increasingly rely upon litigation to impose regulatory...
To Stimulate, or Not to Stimulate: The Proper Government Response to an Economic Crisis
Reuvain Borchardt, Donald J. Boudreaux, John Pfaff, Richard Squire
Fordham Student Chapter
The Fordham Student Chapter hosted this debate at Fordham University School of Law on February...
Panel: Lessons of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Andrew J. Redleaf, Thomas Smith, Alan White, Lauren Willis, Arthur E. Wilmarth
11th Annual Faculty Conference
Mr. Andrew Redleaf, Whitebox LLC Prof. Thomas A. Smith, University of San Diego School of...