James Madison Distinguished Professor of Law and Class of 1941 Research Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Professor John C. Harrison is the James Madison Distinguished Professor of Law and Class of 1941 Research Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. He joined the faculty at University of Virginia in 1993 as an associate professor of law after a distinguished career with the U.S. Department of Justice. His teaching subjects include constitutional history, federal courts, remedies, corporations, civil procedure, legislation and property. In 2008 he was on leave from the Law School to serve as counselor on international law in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State.
A 1977 graduate of the University of Virginia, Harrison earned his law degree in 1980 at Yale, where he served as editor of the Yale Law Journal and editor and articles editor of the Yale Studies in World Public Order. He was an associate at Patton Boggs & Blow in Washington, D.C., and clerked for Judge Robert Bork on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He worked with the Department of Justice from 1983-93, serving in numerous capacities, including deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel (1990-93).
Rothgerber Professor of Constitutional Law, Colorado Law
Robert Nagel joined the faculty of CU Law School in 1975, leaving a position as a deputy attorney general in Pennsylvania. Since that time, he has focused on constitutional law and theory. For an audience of legal scholars, Professor Nagel has written prolifically, including four books and over 50 law review articles. However, he has also contributed to the popular debate on constitutional issues, including free speech, hate codes, and federalism, by addressing his ideas to the general citizenry in articles and opinion pieces in publications such as The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, First Things, and Washington Monthly. Much of his work has focused on the relationship between the judiciary (and its interpretation of the Constitution) and the wider context of American political culture. His two earlier books on this topic, Constitutional Cultures: The Mentality and Consequences of Judicial Review and Judicial Power and American Character: Censoring Ourselves in an Anxious Age, were widely read and reviewed. He has recently completed The Implosion of American Federalism, a book on the cultural and constitutional ramifications of political centralization. Professor Nagel has testified before several congressional committees. He was formerly the director of the Law School's Byron R. White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law. In 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Inez Milholland Professor of Civil Liberties, New York University School of Law
Burt Neuborne is the Inez Milholland Professor of Civil Liberties and founding Legal Director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. For 45 years, he has been one of the nation's foremost civil liberties lawyers, serving as National Legal Director of the ACLU from 1981-86, Special Counsel to the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund from 1990-1996, and as a member of the New York City Human Rights Commission from 1988-1992. He has argued numerous Supreme Court cases, and has litigated literally hundreds of important constitutional cases in the state and federal courts. He challenged the constitutionality of the Vietnam War, pioneered the flag burning cases, worked on the Pentagon Papers case, worked with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she headed the ACLU Women's Rights Project, anchored the ACLU's legal program during the Reagan years, and defended the Legal Services program against unconstitutional attacks. He currently directs the legal program of the Brennan Center, especially its efforts to reinforce American democracy and secure campaign finance reform. The Brennan Center was established in 1994 to honor Justice William Brennan, Jr.’s monumental contribution to American Law.
At the same time, Professor Neuborne has forged a national reputation as a constitutional scholar and teacher. In 1990, he was the recipient of the University-wide Distinguished Teacher Award at New York University for his work in teaching Civil Procedure, Evidence, Federal Courts and Constitutional Law. He is the author of three books and over 20 law review articles on diverse areas of constitutional law and procedure. Among his best known scholarly works is the two-volume Political and Civil Rights in the United States, which he co-authored with NYU colleagues Norman Dorsen and Sylvia Law and the Deputy Solicitor General of the United States, Paul Bender. His 1992 lectures on American law at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona have been translated and published in Spanish. In 2001, in recognition of his scholarship and his work in the courts, Professor Neuborne was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 1996, Professor Neuborne appeared as Jerry Falwell's lawyer in Milos Forman's The People v. Larry Flynt.
For the past 14 years, Professor Neuborne has served as a principal counsel in a series of lawsuits seeking to recover property unjustly taken from Holocaust victims by Swiss banks and German corporations during the Nazi era. The litigation has succeeded in assembling more than $8.5 billion for distribution to Holocaust victims and their families throughout the world. Professor Neuborne was appointed by the Court to oversee the $1.25 Swiss bank settlement, and was appointed by the United States to serve on the Board of Trustees of the German Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future,” established to distribute the $5.2 billion settlement in the German slave labor litigation.
Professor Neuborne is married to Helen Redleaf Neuborne.
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.
Partner, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP
Steven Ross has extensive public- and private-sector experience in representing corporations, institutions, boards and individuals in all manner of investigations, including congressional, criminal and regulatory proceedings and related civil litigation. He concentrates on congressional investigations, internal investigations, governmental ethics, federal election law, white collar criminal defense and constitutional issues.
From 1983 to 1993, Steven served as the General Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives, advising and representing its members, leadership, committees and employees from both political parties. He has also counseled the leadership and relevant committees on numerous congressional investigations.
In private practice, Steven guides clients through complex congressional inquiries and related litigation. He represents clients in investigations conducted by various federal executive branch departments, commissions and agencies, including the U.S. departments of Justice, Education, Health and Human Services, Defense and the Interior, as well as the Federal Election Commission and the Food and Drug Administration.
Steven has significant litigation experience, ranging from trials before U.S. district courts to arguments before the Supreme Court and numerous federal courts of appeals. He was actively involved in defending the constitutionality of multiple federal statutes, including the Independent Counsel Act, the Competition in Contracting Act and the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act.
Over the course of his career, Steven has litigated seminal cases regarding the scope of Congress’ oversight and investigations power, both on behalf of Congress and as counsel to private parties implicated by such inquiries. He has taught constitutional law as an adjunct professor at George Mason University Law School and served as a guest lecturer on the topic of congressional investigations at a number of law schools, including NYU, Fordham and the Georgetown University Law Center.
Managing Partner, Cramer Multhauf LLP
Attorney Matthew Fernholz focuses his practice on commercial litigation, trust and fiduciary disputes, business torts, trade secrets, non-compete agreements, defamation, and appellate work. In addition, he has developed one of the preeminent political and election law practices in the State of Wisconsin, and has handled several high-profile matters, from representing candidates for statewide office, successfully challenging the Governor’s emergency powers, arguing before the Wisconsin Elections Commission, and representing the Speaker of the Assembly.
Matthew frequently and successfully tries cases to verdict, and believes a lawyer unwilling to try a case should not take on a client in a litigation matter. In addition to this trial work, he has handled dozens of appeals, and countless dispositive motions.
His work has also been published in law review journals and newspapers alike.
Former Justice, Wisconsin Supreme Court
Justice Daniel Kelly was appointed to the Supreme Court by Gov. Scott Walker in 2016 to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice David T. Prosser, Jr.
A native of Santa Barbara, California, Kelly grew up in Arvada, Colorado. He came to Waukesha, Wisconsin to study at Carroll College (now Carroll University), where he earned a bachelor's degree in Political Science and Spanish in 1986. He earned his law degree from Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach, Virginia in 1991.
Before joining the Court, Kelly had 19 years' experience as a private practice attorney in Wisconsin and represented clients in cases before the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. Kelly spent most of his private practice career at one of the largest and oldest law firms in Wisconsin. Subsequently, he served as vice president and general counsel for a philanthropic foundation, and then practiced law at a firm he owned and founded in Waukesha.
Early in his legal career, Kelly was a law clerk and then staff attorney for the Office of Special Masters of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, from 1992 to 1996. He worked as a law clerk for the late Wisconsin Court of Appeals Judge Ralph Adam Fine from 1991 to 1992.
Kelly is a member of the board of advisors and past president of the Milwaukee Lawyer's Chapter of the Federalist Society. He serves on the Carroll University President's Advisory Council and is a former member of the Wisconsin Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Kelly is married and has five children. He lives in North Prairie, Wisconsin.
Managing Partner, Cramer Multhauf LLP
Attorney Matthew Fernholz focuses his practice on commercial litigation, trust and fiduciary disputes, business torts, trade secrets, non-compete agreements, defamation, and appellate work. In addition, he has developed one of the preeminent political and election law practices in the State of Wisconsin, and has handled several high-profile matters, from representing candidates for statewide office, successfully challenging the Governor’s emergency powers, arguing before the Wisconsin Elections Commission, and representing the Speaker of the Assembly.
Matthew frequently and successfully tries cases to verdict, and believes a lawyer unwilling to try a case should not take on a client in a litigation matter. In addition to this trial work, he has handled dozens of appeals, and countless dispositive motions.
His work has also been published in law review journals and newspapers alike.
Former Justice, Wisconsin Supreme Court
Justice Daniel Kelly was appointed to the Supreme Court by Gov. Scott Walker in 2016 to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice David T. Prosser, Jr.
A native of Santa Barbara, California, Kelly grew up in Arvada, Colorado. He came to Waukesha, Wisconsin to study at Carroll College (now Carroll University), where he earned a bachelor's degree in Political Science and Spanish in 1986. He earned his law degree from Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach, Virginia in 1991.
Before joining the Court, Kelly had 19 years' experience as a private practice attorney in Wisconsin and represented clients in cases before the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. Kelly spent most of his private practice career at one of the largest and oldest law firms in Wisconsin. Subsequently, he served as vice president and general counsel for a philanthropic foundation, and then practiced law at a firm he owned and founded in Waukesha.
Early in his legal career, Kelly was a law clerk and then staff attorney for the Office of Special Masters of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, from 1992 to 1996. He worked as a law clerk for the late Wisconsin Court of Appeals Judge Ralph Adam Fine from 1991 to 1992.
Kelly is a member of the board of advisors and past president of the Milwaukee Lawyer's Chapter of the Federalist Society. He serves on the Carroll University President's Advisory Council and is a former member of the Wisconsin Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Kelly is married and has five children. He lives in North Prairie, Wisconsin.
Director, Independent Women's Law Center, Independent Women's
Jennifer C. Braceras, a member of the Federalist Society Board of Visitors, is the director of Independent Women’s Law Center and a former member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Ms. Braceras is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor of the Law Review. After law school, she clerked for two federal judges and practiced labor and employment law with the Boston law firm Ropes & Gray.
A long time political columnist and editor, Ms. Braceras's writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Hill, and National Review Online. She co-hosts At the Bar, a bimonthly virtual happy hour discussion about issues at the intersection of law, politics, and culture.
McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence; Director, James Madison Program, Princeton University
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has several times been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. He has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the President’s Council on Bioethics. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. He was a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore, he holds the degrees of J.D. and M.T.S. from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University, in addition to twenty-one honorary doctorates. He is a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Bradley Prize, the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute, and Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. His books include Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality and In Defense of Natural Law (both published by Oxford University Press), as well as The Clash of Orthodoxies and Conscience and Its Enemies (both published by ISI Books).
Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Harvard University
Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and holds the title of Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He has also taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth College, and the University of Paris. Cornel West graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics -- Democracy Matters and Race Matters -- which recently celebrated the 25th Anniversary of its debut with a new edition. His memoir Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, and Black Prophetic Fire have also received much critical acclaim. Dr. West is a frequent guest on the Bill Maher Show, Colbert Report, CNN, C-Span and Democracy Now.
He made his film debut in the Matrix – and was the commentator (with Ken Wilbur) on the official trilogy released in 2004. He also has appeared in over 25 documentaries and films including Examined Life, Call & Response, Sidewalk and Stand.
Last, he has made three spoken word albums including Never Forget, collaborating with Prince, Jill Scott, Andre 3000, Talib Kweli, KRS-One and the late Gerald Levert. His spoken word interludes were featured on Terence Blanchard’s Choices (which won the Grand Prix in France for the best Jazz Album of the year of 2009), The Cornel West Theory’s Second Rome, Raheem DeVaughn’s Grammy-nominated Love & War: Masterpeace, and most recently on Bootsy Collins’ The Funk Capital of the World. In short, Cornel West has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice.
He currently co-hosts a podcast – “The Tight Rope” with Professor Tricia Rose.
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.
Director, Independent Women's Law Center, Independent Women's
Jennifer C. Braceras, a member of the Federalist Society Board of Visitors, is the director of Independent Women’s Law Center and a former member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Ms. Braceras is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor of the Law Review. After law school, she clerked for two federal judges and practiced labor and employment law with the Boston law firm Ropes & Gray.
A long time political columnist and editor, Ms. Braceras's writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Hill, and National Review Online. She co-hosts At the Bar, a bimonthly virtual happy hour discussion about issues at the intersection of law, politics, and culture.
McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence; Director, James Madison Program, Princeton University
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has several times been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. He has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the President’s Council on Bioethics. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. He was a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore, he holds the degrees of J.D. and M.T.S. from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University, in addition to twenty-one honorary doctorates. He is a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Bradley Prize, the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute, and Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. His books include Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality and In Defense of Natural Law (both published by Oxford University Press), as well as The Clash of Orthodoxies and Conscience and Its Enemies (both published by ISI Books).
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.
Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Harvard University
Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and holds the title of Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He has also taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth College, and the University of Paris. Cornel West graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics -- Democracy Matters and Race Matters -- which recently celebrated the 25th Anniversary of its debut with a new edition. His memoir Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, and Black Prophetic Fire have also received much critical acclaim. Dr. West is a frequent guest on the Bill Maher Show, Colbert Report, CNN, C-Span and Democracy Now.
He made his film debut in the Matrix – and was the commentator (with Ken Wilbur) on the official trilogy released in 2004. He also has appeared in over 25 documentaries and films including Examined Life, Call & Response, Sidewalk and Stand.
Last, he has made three spoken word albums including Never Forget, collaborating with Prince, Jill Scott, Andre 3000, Talib Kweli, KRS-One and the late Gerald Levert. His spoken word interludes were featured on Terence Blanchard’s Choices (which won the Grand Prix in France for the best Jazz Album of the year of 2009), The Cornel West Theory’s Second Rome, Raheem DeVaughn’s Grammy-nominated Love & War: Masterpeace, and most recently on Bootsy Collins’ The Funk Capital of the World. In short, Cornel West has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice.
He currently co-hosts a podcast – “The Tight Rope” with Professor Tricia Rose.
Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of International Law, Yale Law School
Lea Brilmayer is the Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of International Law at Yale Law School. In addition to teaching Contracts to first-year students, she also teaches Conflict of Laws and International Courts and Tribunals, as well as seminars on the laws of war and on African current affairs. Her degrees include a B.A. in mathematics and a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as an LL.M. from Columbia Law School. Brilmayer has taught at a number of different law schools as either a professor or visiting professor, including the University of Texas, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Columbia Law School, Harvard Law School, and the New York University School of Law (where she led a weekly seminar on International Jurisprudence.) She is a member of the Texas and Supreme Court bars. She has given numerous endowed lectures at other American law schools and has also taught twice at the summer session of the Hague Academy of International Law.
During her first decade of teaching, her writing interests mainly concerned conflict of laws (in particular, personal jurisdiction and choice of law); federal jurisdiction; and jurisprudence. Her conflict of laws writings have included one theoretical book on the subject and a leading casebook (in the more recent editions, co-authored with Jack Goldsmith). Together with a group of Yale student contributors, she published An Introduction to Jurisdiction in the American Federal System. Her writings on the conflict of laws have resulted in her being asked on a number of occasions to testify before Congressional committees, most recently on the Full Faith and Credit implications of same sex marriage. More recently, her interests have gradually turned to international law and international relations, and she is frequently cited for her academic writings about nationalism and the international legal status of secessionist movements. Her research in international jurisprudence has also led to two books, Justifying International Acts and American Hegemony: Political Morality in a One-Superpower World.
In addition to her academic interests, Brilmayer carries on an active life in interstate and international adjudication. In addition to contributing to amicus briefs, she has served as counsel of record before the United States Supreme Court and has been an expert consultant on many lower and intermediate appellate court cases. For the last decade she has served as lead counsel in several international public (state-to-state) arbitrations dealing with island sovereignty, maritime delimitation, land boundaries, and mass claims for violations of the laws of war.
Founding Partner, Cooper & Kirk PLLC
Charles J. Cooper is a founding member and the chairman of Cooper & Kirk, PLLC, “one of the Nation’s leading litigation boutiques” (Above The Law 2017). The National Law Journal recently wrote that Mr. Cooper’s “brilliant legal career has so far spanned five decades and thrust Cooper into the spotlight in some of the most historic moments of the country’s modern history.” He has argued nine cases before the United States Supreme Court and scores of appeals before each of the 13 federal courts of appeals and several state supreme courts. He has been lead trial counsel in numerous complex, weeks-long trials in federal courts throughout the country. Named by the National Law Journal as one of the 10 best litigators in Washington D.C., Mr. Cooper’s work has been reported in numerous press accounts, and he has been called a “powerhouse attorney” (Fortune 2015), “a hard-nosed litigator” (Washington Post 2017), and “one of the country’s most in-demand civil litigators and a Washington legal institution unto himself” (The American Spectator 2014).
After graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1977, where he ranked first in his class and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Alabama Law Review, Mr. Cooper began his career as a law clerk to Judge Paul Roney on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and to Justice William H. Rehnquist in 1978–79. He then practiced law in Atlanta for two years before joining the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of, among other things, appellate matters. In 1985 President Reagan appointed him to the position of Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, which is the office responsible for providing legal opinions and advice to the White House, the Attorney General, and Executive Branch departments and agencies on issues covering the full spectrum of federal constitutional, statutory, and regulatory law.
In 1988 he returned to private practice as a litigation partner in the Washington, D.C. office of McGuireWoods. From 1990 until the founding of Cooper & Kirk in 1996, he was a partner at Shaw Pittman (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman), where he headed the firm’s Constitutional and Government Litigation Group.
Mr. Cooper has represented a wide range of public and private clients in highly complex constitutional, civil rights, antitrust, healthcare, banking, intellectual property, elections, campaign finance, administrative, commercial, and government contract cases. He has led trial teams in cases that have won judgments and settlements valued in the billions of dollars and that have established ground-breaking constitutional precedents.
Much of Mr. Cooper’s practice has involved representing high-profile clients in nationally prominent matters, including: the State of Florida in a First Amendment suit brought by the Disney Company concerning its autonomous regulatory authority over its Disney World property; the Commonwealth of Virginia in a suit seeking to enjoin the removal of noncitizens from its voter rolls; 38 members of the Duke Lacrosse team falsely accused of rape by officials of Duke University and the City of Durham; Harper Lee in a copyright dispute with the heirs of Gregory Peck; high-ranking former government officials such as former Attorneys General John Ashcroft, Jeff Sessions, and William Barr, and Ambassador John Bolton; several Governors and United States Senators; over 100 Members of Congress; and many state, territorial, and local government bodies and officials. He has also represented and advised government officials and public figures in connection with sensitive private issues that needed to be, and were, resolved discreetly without becoming matters of public record.
In 1998 Chief Justice Rehnquist appointed Mr. Cooper to the Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Judicial Conference of the United States, where he served for three terms. He also served as a Public Member, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, of the National Commission on Judicial Discipline and Removal. He is a member of numerous professional associations, including the American Law Institute (since 1993) and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers (since 1996). He is also an active member of the Federalist Society and the Republican National Lawyers Association, which in 2010 named him Republican Lawyer of the Year and in 2016 honored him with its Edwin Meese III Award.
Mr. Cooper has published scores of articles and spoken extensively on constitutional and legal policy topics. He has appeared before congressional committees on 26 occasions, testifying as an expert on a wide variety of legal issues, including the Chevron doctrine of judicial deference to administrative agencies, the diversity of citizenship jurisdiction of federal courts, statehood bills for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, and the impeachment of President Clinton.
U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit
Frank H. Easterbrook is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a Senior Lecturer at the Law School of the University of Chicago. He was Chief Judge from 2006–2013. Before joining the court in 1985, he was the Lee andBrena Freeman Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, where he taught and wrote in antitrust, securities, corporate law, jurisprudence, and criminal procedure. He has published The Economic Structure of Corporate Law (with Daniel R. Fischel) and about 100 scholarly articles. He served as Co-Editor of the Journal of Law and Economics from 1982 to 1991 and as a member of the Judicial Conference’s Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure from 1991 to 1997. Before joining the faculty of the Law School in 1979, Judge Easterbrook was Deputy Solicitor General of the United States. He holds degrees from Swarthmore College (B.A. with high honors, 1970) and the University of Chicago (J.D. cum laude, 1973), and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute, the Mont Pelerin Society, Phi Beta Kappa, and the Order of the Coif.
Senior Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
Patrick Errol Higginbotham is a federal judge on senior status with the United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. He joined the court in 1982 after being nominated by President Ronald Reagan.
Contributing Writer, Vanity Fair
Michael Kinsley is a Contributing Writer for Vanity Fair, where his column appears monthly. Over a long career in the media, he has been Managing Editor of the Washington Monthly, Editor of the New Republic, and Editorial and Opinion Editor of the Los Angeles Times. He was the Founding Editor of Slate, one of the first on-line magazines. For over six years Kinsley was the liberal host of Crossfire, a CNN show where he sparred with Pat Buchanan five days a week. He played a similar role for many years with William F. Buckley on PBS’s Firing Line. He has written for The New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, and other publications.
U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Stephen Roy Reinhardt is a federal appeals judge with the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. He joined the Court in 1980 after being nominated by President Jimmy Carter.
Born in New York City, New York, Reinhardt graduated from Pomona College with his Bachelor's degree in 1951 and later received a Bachelors of Laws degree, LL.B, from Yale Law School in 1954. Reinhardt served in the U.S. Air Force from 1954 to 1956 before becoming a law clerk for the Honorable Luther Youngdahl in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia until 1957. Reinhardt was a private practice attorney in the State of California from 1957 to 1980. Reinhardt was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit by President Jimmy Carter on November 30, 1979, to a new seat created by 92 Stat. 1629, which was approved by Congress. Reinhardt was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on September 11, 1980 and received commission on September 11, 1980.
Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of International Law, Yale Law School
Lea Brilmayer is the Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of International Law at Yale Law School. In addition to teaching Contracts to first-year students, she also teaches Conflict of Laws and International Courts and Tribunals, as well as seminars on the laws of war and on African current affairs. Her degrees include a B.A. in mathematics and a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as an LL.M. from Columbia Law School. Brilmayer has taught at a number of different law schools as either a professor or visiting professor, including the University of Texas, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Columbia Law School, Harvard Law School, and the New York University School of Law (where she led a weekly seminar on International Jurisprudence.) She is a member of the Texas and Supreme Court bars. She has given numerous endowed lectures at other American law schools and has also taught twice at the summer session of the Hague Academy of International Law.
During her first decade of teaching, her writing interests mainly concerned conflict of laws (in particular, personal jurisdiction and choice of law); federal jurisdiction; and jurisprudence. Her conflict of laws writings have included one theoretical book on the subject and a leading casebook (in the more recent editions, co-authored with Jack Goldsmith). Together with a group of Yale student contributors, she published An Introduction to Jurisdiction in the American Federal System. Her writings on the conflict of laws have resulted in her being asked on a number of occasions to testify before Congressional committees, most recently on the Full Faith and Credit implications of same sex marriage. More recently, her interests have gradually turned to international law and international relations, and she is frequently cited for her academic writings about nationalism and the international legal status of secessionist movements. Her research in international jurisprudence has also led to two books, Justifying International Acts and American Hegemony: Political Morality in a One-Superpower World.
In addition to her academic interests, Brilmayer carries on an active life in interstate and international adjudication. In addition to contributing to amicus briefs, she has served as counsel of record before the United States Supreme Court and has been an expert consultant on many lower and intermediate appellate court cases. For the last decade she has served as lead counsel in several international public (state-to-state) arbitrations dealing with island sovereignty, maritime delimitation, land boundaries, and mass claims for violations of the laws of war.
Founding Partner, Cooper & Kirk PLLC
Charles J. Cooper is a founding member and the chairman of Cooper & Kirk, PLLC, “one of the Nation’s leading litigation boutiques” (Above The Law 2017). The National Law Journal recently wrote that Mr. Cooper’s “brilliant legal career has so far spanned five decades and thrust Cooper into the spotlight in some of the most historic moments of the country’s modern history.” He has argued nine cases before the United States Supreme Court and scores of appeals before each of the 13 federal courts of appeals and several state supreme courts. He has been lead trial counsel in numerous complex, weeks-long trials in federal courts throughout the country. Named by the National Law Journal as one of the 10 best litigators in Washington D.C., Mr. Cooper’s work has been reported in numerous press accounts, and he has been called a “powerhouse attorney” (Fortune 2015), “a hard-nosed litigator” (Washington Post 2017), and “one of the country’s most in-demand civil litigators and a Washington legal institution unto himself” (The American Spectator 2014).
After graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1977, where he ranked first in his class and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Alabama Law Review, Mr. Cooper began his career as a law clerk to Judge Paul Roney on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and to Justice William H. Rehnquist in 1978–79. He then practiced law in Atlanta for two years before joining the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of, among other things, appellate matters. In 1985 President Reagan appointed him to the position of Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, which is the office responsible for providing legal opinions and advice to the White House, the Attorney General, and Executive Branch departments and agencies on issues covering the full spectrum of federal constitutional, statutory, and regulatory law.
In 1988 he returned to private practice as a litigation partner in the Washington, D.C. office of McGuireWoods. From 1990 until the founding of Cooper & Kirk in 1996, he was a partner at Shaw Pittman (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman), where he headed the firm’s Constitutional and Government Litigation Group.
Mr. Cooper has represented a wide range of public and private clients in highly complex constitutional, civil rights, antitrust, healthcare, banking, intellectual property, elections, campaign finance, administrative, commercial, and government contract cases. He has led trial teams in cases that have won judgments and settlements valued in the billions of dollars and that have established ground-breaking constitutional precedents.
Much of Mr. Cooper’s practice has involved representing high-profile clients in nationally prominent matters, including: the State of Florida in a First Amendment suit brought by the Disney Company concerning its autonomous regulatory authority over its Disney World property; the Commonwealth of Virginia in a suit seeking to enjoin the removal of noncitizens from its voter rolls; 38 members of the Duke Lacrosse team falsely accused of rape by officials of Duke University and the City of Durham; Harper Lee in a copyright dispute with the heirs of Gregory Peck; high-ranking former government officials such as former Attorneys General John Ashcroft, Jeff Sessions, and William Barr, and Ambassador John Bolton; several Governors and United States Senators; over 100 Members of Congress; and many state, territorial, and local government bodies and officials. He has also represented and advised government officials and public figures in connection with sensitive private issues that needed to be, and were, resolved discreetly without becoming matters of public record.
In 1998 Chief Justice Rehnquist appointed Mr. Cooper to the Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Judicial Conference of the United States, where he served for three terms. He also served as a Public Member, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, of the National Commission on Judicial Discipline and Removal. He is a member of numerous professional associations, including the American Law Institute (since 1993) and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers (since 1996). He is also an active member of the Federalist Society and the Republican National Lawyers Association, which in 2010 named him Republican Lawyer of the Year and in 2016 honored him with its Edwin Meese III Award.
Mr. Cooper has published scores of articles and spoken extensively on constitutional and legal policy topics. He has appeared before congressional committees on 26 occasions, testifying as an expert on a wide variety of legal issues, including the Chevron doctrine of judicial deference to administrative agencies, the diversity of citizenship jurisdiction of federal courts, statehood bills for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, and the impeachment of President Clinton.
U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit
Frank H. Easterbrook is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a Senior Lecturer at the Law School of the University of Chicago. He was Chief Judge from 2006–2013. Before joining the court in 1985, he was the Lee andBrena Freeman Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, where he taught and wrote in antitrust, securities, corporate law, jurisprudence, and criminal procedure. He has published The Economic Structure of Corporate Law (with Daniel R. Fischel) and about 100 scholarly articles. He served as Co-Editor of the Journal of Law and Economics from 1982 to 1991 and as a member of the Judicial Conference’s Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure from 1991 to 1997. Before joining the faculty of the Law School in 1979, Judge Easterbrook was Deputy Solicitor General of the United States. He holds degrees from Swarthmore College (B.A. with high honors, 1970) and the University of Chicago (J.D. cum laude, 1973), and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute, the Mont Pelerin Society, Phi Beta Kappa, and the Order of the Coif.
Senior Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
Patrick Errol Higginbotham is a federal judge on senior status with the United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. He joined the court in 1982 after being nominated by President Ronald Reagan.
Contributing Writer, Vanity Fair
Michael Kinsley is a Contributing Writer for Vanity Fair, where his column appears monthly. Over a long career in the media, he has been Managing Editor of the Washington Monthly, Editor of the New Republic, and Editorial and Opinion Editor of the Los Angeles Times. He was the Founding Editor of Slate, one of the first on-line magazines. For over six years Kinsley was the liberal host of Crossfire, a CNN show where he sparred with Pat Buchanan five days a week. He played a similar role for many years with William F. Buckley on PBS’s Firing Line. He has written for The New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, and other publications.
U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Stephen Roy Reinhardt is a federal appeals judge with the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. He joined the Court in 1980 after being nominated by President Jimmy Carter.
Born in New York City, New York, Reinhardt graduated from Pomona College with his Bachelor's degree in 1951 and later received a Bachelors of Laws degree, LL.B, from Yale Law School in 1954. Reinhardt served in the U.S. Air Force from 1954 to 1956 before becoming a law clerk for the Honorable Luther Youngdahl in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia until 1957. Reinhardt was a private practice attorney in the State of California from 1957 to 1980. Reinhardt was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit by President Jimmy Carter on November 30, 1979, to a new seat created by 92 Stat. 1629, which was approved by Congress. Reinhardt was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on September 11, 1980 and received commission on September 11, 1980.
Nathaniel L. Nathanson Professor of Law Emeritus, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
A scholar in the field of constitutional law, Robert Bennett has been a member of the faculty of the Northwestern University School of Law since 1969, serving as the school’s dean from 1985 to 1995. Since 2002 he has been the Nathaniel L. Nathanson Professor of Law at Northwestern. With some regularity Professor Bennett teaches a seminar in the Law of American Democracy and courses in contracts, legislation, constitutional law, and constitutional theory. Professor Bennett has also taught as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, the University of Virginia School of Law, the University of Southern California Law Center, Brooklyn Law School, and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University.
Professor Bennett is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and served as the Foundation’s president from 1992 to 1994. He has been a member of the American Law Institute since 1979. He was also a co-founder of the Chicago Council of Lawyers and served as its president. Professor Bennett is the author of numerous books and articles. His two most recent books are Talking It Through: Puzzles of American Democracy, published by Cornell University Press in 2002 and Taming The Electoral College, published by Stanford University Press in 2006. At the present time he is at work on a (co-authored) book about constitutional interpretation for Cornell University Press, tentatively titled Originalism and Living Constitutionalism. Professor Bennett received his BA, summa cum laude, in 1962 from Harvard University and his LLB, cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1965. At Harvard College he was elected to phi beta kappa and at Harvard Law School he was a member of the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review. Professor Bennett received a Knox Memorial Fellowship from Harvard University for study at the London School of Economics in 1965-66, and the following year he served as legal assistant to Commissioner Nicholas Johnson of the Federal Communications Commission. He was Reginald Heber Smith Fellow at the Office of Economic Opportunity, assigned to the Chicago Legal Aid Bureau in 1967-68, and he practiced law as an associate at the Chicago law firm of Mayer, Brown & Platt in 1968-69. Professor Bennett and his wife, Harriet Trop, live in Chicago and they have one daughter, Ariana Trop Bennett, who does as well.
Charles Warren Senior Fellow in American Legal History, Harvard Law School
Raoul Berger (January 4, 1901 – September 23, 2000) was an American attorney and professor at The University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University School of Law. While at Harvard, he was the Charles Warren Senior Fellow in American Legal History.
Senior Judge, United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit
Circuit Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1986. After receiving his B.S. from Cornell University in 1970, and his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 1973, he clerked on the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Thurgood Marshall on the United States Supreme Court. Thereafter, Judge Ginsburg was a professor at the Harvard Law School, the Deputy Assistant and then Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, as well as the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget. Concurrent with his service as a federal judge, Judge Ginsburg has taught at the University of Chicago Law School and the New York University School of Law. Judge Ginsburg is currently a Professor of Law at the George Mason University and a visiting professor at University College London, Faculty of Laws.
Judge Ginsburg is the Chairman of the International Advisory Board of the Global Antitrust Institute at the Law and Economics Center of the George Mason University School of Law. He also serves on the Advisory Boards of: Competition Policy International; the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy; the Journal of Competition Law and Economics; the Journal of Law, Economics & Policy; the Supreme Court Economic Review; the University of Chicago Law Review; the New York University Journal of Law and Liberty; and, at University College London, both the Centre for Law, Economics and Society and the Jevons Institute for Competition Law and Economics.
In 2020, Judge Ginsburg was the 11th recipient of the John Sherman Award, presented by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice in recognition of the awardee’s Lifetime Contributions to Antitrust Law and Policy.
In 2014, Judge Ginsburg received the Lifetime Achievement Award given annually by the Global Competition Review.
He is the author or co-author of several books and more than 100 articles on competition and regulation, including, most recently, Growing Convergence: The Limited Role of Antitrust in Standard Essential Patent Disputes, in CPI Antitrust Chronicle, Summer 2021, Vol. 1, No. 2.
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.
Charles R. Walgreen, Jr. Chair in Law and Co-Director, Program in Law and Philosophy, University of Illinois College of Law
One of the country’s most prominent authorities on the intersection of law and philosophy, and widely regarded as the country’s leading theoretician of the criminal law, Professor Moore joined the faculty in 2002 as the Charles R. Walgreen, Jr. Chair, the first and only university-wide chair for the University of Illinois’ three campuses. He is jointly appointed as professor of law in the College of Law and as a professor with the Center for Advanced Studies, an honor bestowed on faculty on the basis of their outstanding scholarship and among the highest forms of campus recognition. Professor Moore was just the second UI College of Law faculty member to have held such an appointment.
Before coming to Illinois, Professor Moore served as the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law and as co-founder and co-director of the Institute for Law and Philosophy at the University of San Diego. From 1989-2000, he was the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he co-founded and directed the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Law and Philosophy.
Over the course of his career, he also has been a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Southern California (where he held the Robert Kingsley Chair), and the University of Kansas. In addition, he has been the William Minor Lile Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, the Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor at the Yale Law School, The Mason Ladd Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa Schools of Law and of Medicine, as well as a visiting professor at Stanford University, Northwestern University, Tel Aviv University in Israel, di Tella University in Buenos Aires, and the Universität Erlangen in Germany.
He has held a number of fellowships and visiting scholar positions, including two in the Law and Humanities Program of Harvard University, five at the Australian National University’s Research School of Social Sciences in Canberra, Australia, and one each at the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California at Irvine, the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, the Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroscience and Society, and the Yale Law School.
Over an academic career spanning more than 50 years Moore has published more than 140 books, articles, editorials, and other pieces of scholarship, documented recently in a festschrift published in his honor, K. Ferzan and S. Morse, eds., Legal, Moral, and Metaphysical Truth: The Philosophy of Michael S. Moore (Oxford University Press, 2016). He is the author of Placing Blame: A General Theory of the Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 1997), widely regarded as the leading modern statement of the retributivist theory of the criminal law. In an earlier book, Act and Crime: The Philosophy of Action and its Implications for Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 1993), Moore provided a unified theory of action that underlies English and American criminal jurisprudence. In a later book, Causation and Responsibility: An Essay in Law, Morals, and Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2009), Moore explored the nature of causation and its relation to both moral and legal responsibility. Earlier in his career, he authored Law and Psychiatry: Rethinking the Relationship (Cambridge University Press, 1984), which explored the tension that often exists between legal and psychiatric theories. His latest book, Mechanical Brains and Responsible Choices, still forthcoming, will return to these same issues, this time as they are raised by contemporary neuroscience rather than by dynamic psychiatry.
Professor Moore has presented hundreds of lectures and papers around the world in law, jurisprudence, political theory, legal philosophy, political science, economics, philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience, including most recently endowed, named lectures at Duke, Dartmouth, Columbia, Tel Aviv, Pennsylvania universities, as well as the annual Public Philosophy Lecture and the annual Center for Advanced Studies Lecture at the University of Illinois. He is on the board of editors of numerous journals in law and in philosophy and for a decade served as editor-in-chief of the journal, Law and Philosophy.
He regularly rotates his law teaching between first-year courses of criminal law, torts, contracts, property, and constitutional law, and upper-year courses in jurisprudence and legal philosophy. During his 13 years on the Philosophy Department faculty at Illinois he taught undergraduate courses in the philosophy of law and political philosophy and graduate seminars in neuroscience, ethics, the theory of action, and the metaphysics of causation.
Nathaniel L. Nathanson Professor of Law Emeritus, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
A scholar in the field of constitutional law, Robert Bennett has been a member of the faculty of the Northwestern University School of Law since 1969, serving as the school’s dean from 1985 to 1995. Since 2002 he has been the Nathaniel L. Nathanson Professor of Law at Northwestern. With some regularity Professor Bennett teaches a seminar in the Law of American Democracy and courses in contracts, legislation, constitutional law, and constitutional theory. Professor Bennett has also taught as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, the University of Virginia School of Law, the University of Southern California Law Center, Brooklyn Law School, and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University.
Professor Bennett is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and served as the Foundation’s president from 1992 to 1994. He has been a member of the American Law Institute since 1979. He was also a co-founder of the Chicago Council of Lawyers and served as its president. Professor Bennett is the author of numerous books and articles. His two most recent books are Talking It Through: Puzzles of American Democracy, published by Cornell University Press in 2002 and Taming The Electoral College, published by Stanford University Press in 2006. At the present time he is at work on a (co-authored) book about constitutional interpretation for Cornell University Press, tentatively titled Originalism and Living Constitutionalism. Professor Bennett received his BA, summa cum laude, in 1962 from Harvard University and his LLB, cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1965. At Harvard College he was elected to phi beta kappa and at Harvard Law School he was a member of the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review. Professor Bennett received a Knox Memorial Fellowship from Harvard University for study at the London School of Economics in 1965-66, and the following year he served as legal assistant to Commissioner Nicholas Johnson of the Federal Communications Commission. He was Reginald Heber Smith Fellow at the Office of Economic Opportunity, assigned to the Chicago Legal Aid Bureau in 1967-68, and he practiced law as an associate at the Chicago law firm of Mayer, Brown & Platt in 1968-69. Professor Bennett and his wife, Harriet Trop, live in Chicago and they have one daughter, Ariana Trop Bennett, who does as well.
Charles Warren Senior Fellow in American Legal History, Harvard Law School
Raoul Berger (January 4, 1901 – September 23, 2000) was an American attorney and professor at The University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University School of Law. While at Harvard, he was the Charles Warren Senior Fellow in American Legal History.
Senior Judge, United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit
Circuit Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1986. After receiving his B.S. from Cornell University in 1970, and his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 1973, he clerked on the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Thurgood Marshall on the United States Supreme Court. Thereafter, Judge Ginsburg was a professor at the Harvard Law School, the Deputy Assistant and then Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, as well as the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget. Concurrent with his service as a federal judge, Judge Ginsburg has taught at the University of Chicago Law School and the New York University School of Law. Judge Ginsburg is currently a Professor of Law at the George Mason University and a visiting professor at University College London, Faculty of Laws.
Judge Ginsburg is the Chairman of the International Advisory Board of the Global Antitrust Institute at the Law and Economics Center of the George Mason University School of Law. He also serves on the Advisory Boards of: Competition Policy International; the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy; the Journal of Competition Law and Economics; the Journal of Law, Economics & Policy; the Supreme Court Economic Review; the University of Chicago Law Review; the New York University Journal of Law and Liberty; and, at University College London, both the Centre for Law, Economics and Society and the Jevons Institute for Competition Law and Economics.
In 2020, Judge Ginsburg was the 11th recipient of the John Sherman Award, presented by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice in recognition of the awardee’s Lifetime Contributions to Antitrust Law and Policy.
In 2014, Judge Ginsburg received the Lifetime Achievement Award given annually by the Global Competition Review.
He is the author or co-author of several books and more than 100 articles on competition and regulation, including, most recently, Growing Convergence: The Limited Role of Antitrust in Standard Essential Patent Disputes, in CPI Antitrust Chronicle, Summer 2021, Vol. 1, No. 2.
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.
Charles R. Walgreen, Jr. Chair in Law and Co-Director, Program in Law and Philosophy, University of Illinois College of Law
One of the country’s most prominent authorities on the intersection of law and philosophy, and widely regarded as the country’s leading theoretician of the criminal law, Professor Moore joined the faculty in 2002 as the Charles R. Walgreen, Jr. Chair, the first and only university-wide chair for the University of Illinois’ three campuses. He is jointly appointed as professor of law in the College of Law and as a professor with the Center for Advanced Studies, an honor bestowed on faculty on the basis of their outstanding scholarship and among the highest forms of campus recognition. Professor Moore was just the second UI College of Law faculty member to have held such an appointment.
Before coming to Illinois, Professor Moore served as the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law and as co-founder and co-director of the Institute for Law and Philosophy at the University of San Diego. From 1989-2000, he was the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he co-founded and directed the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Law and Philosophy.
Over the course of his career, he also has been a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Southern California (where he held the Robert Kingsley Chair), and the University of Kansas. In addition, he has been the William Minor Lile Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, the Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor at the Yale Law School, The Mason Ladd Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa Schools of Law and of Medicine, as well as a visiting professor at Stanford University, Northwestern University, Tel Aviv University in Israel, di Tella University in Buenos Aires, and the Universität Erlangen in Germany.
He has held a number of fellowships and visiting scholar positions, including two in the Law and Humanities Program of Harvard University, five at the Australian National University’s Research School of Social Sciences in Canberra, Australia, and one each at the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California at Irvine, the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, the Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroscience and Society, and the Yale Law School.
Over an academic career spanning more than 50 years Moore has published more than 140 books, articles, editorials, and other pieces of scholarship, documented recently in a festschrift published in his honor, K. Ferzan and S. Morse, eds., Legal, Moral, and Metaphysical Truth: The Philosophy of Michael S. Moore (Oxford University Press, 2016). He is the author of Placing Blame: A General Theory of the Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 1997), widely regarded as the leading modern statement of the retributivist theory of the criminal law. In an earlier book, Act and Crime: The Philosophy of Action and its Implications for Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 1993), Moore provided a unified theory of action that underlies English and American criminal jurisprudence. In a later book, Causation and Responsibility: An Essay in Law, Morals, and Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2009), Moore explored the nature of causation and its relation to both moral and legal responsibility. Earlier in his career, he authored Law and Psychiatry: Rethinking the Relationship (Cambridge University Press, 1984), which explored the tension that often exists between legal and psychiatric theories. His latest book, Mechanical Brains and Responsible Choices, still forthcoming, will return to these same issues, this time as they are raised by contemporary neuroscience rather than by dynamic psychiatry.
Professor Moore has presented hundreds of lectures and papers around the world in law, jurisprudence, political theory, legal philosophy, political science, economics, philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience, including most recently endowed, named lectures at Duke, Dartmouth, Columbia, Tel Aviv, Pennsylvania universities, as well as the annual Public Philosophy Lecture and the annual Center for Advanced Studies Lecture at the University of Illinois. He is on the board of editors of numerous journals in law and in philosophy and for a decade served as editor-in-chief of the journal, Law and Philosophy.
He regularly rotates his law teaching between first-year courses of criminal law, torts, contracts, property, and constitutional law, and upper-year courses in jurisprudence and legal philosophy. During his 13 years on the Philosophy Department faculty at Illinois he taught undergraduate courses in the philosophy of law and political philosophy and graduate seminars in neuroscience, ethics, the theory of action, and the metaphysics of causation.
Ashe Family Chair Professor of Law, Georgia State University College of Law
Eric J. Segall graduated from Emory University, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, and from Vanderbilt Law School, where he was the research editor for the Law Review and member of Order of the Coif. He clerked for the Chief Judge Charles Moye Jr. for the Northern District of Georgia, and Albert J. Henderson of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. After his clerkships, Segall worked for Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and the U.S. Department of Justice, before joining the Georgia State faculty in 1991.
Segall teaches federal courts and constitutional law I and II. He is the author of the books Originalism as Faith and Supreme Myths: Why the Supreme Court is not a Court and its Justices are not Judges. His articles on constitutional law have appeared in, among others, the Harvard Law Review Forum, the Stanford Law Review On Line, the UCLA Law Review, the George Washington Law Review, the Washington University Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, the Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy, and Constitutional Commentary among many others.
Segall’s op-eds and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, The Atlantic, SLATE, Vox, Salon, and the Daily Beast, among others. He has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and France 24 and all four of Atlanta’s local television stations. He has also appeared on numerous local and national radio shows.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Lawrence VanDyke serves as a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Prior to that appointment in January 2020, he served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the United States Department of Justice. Before that, he served consecutively as the Solicitor General of two western states – Nevada and Montana. At the beginning of his legal career, he worked as an attorney in the Appellate and Constitutional Issues practice group at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, LLP.
Judge VanDyke received his law degree magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor on the Harvard Law Review. He has engineering and theology undergraduate degrees and a masters degree in engineering management. He served as a law clerk to the Honorable Janice Rogers Brown of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Judge VanDyke and his wife Cheryl live in Reno, Nevada, and they have three children.
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.
Panel IV: The Role of the Legislative and Executive Branches in Interpreting the Constitution [Archive Collection]
John C. Harrison, Robert F. Nagel, Burt Neuborne, Daniel Polsby, Steven R. Ross
1987 National Student Symposium
On April 3-5, 1987, the Federalist Society's Chicago Student Chapter hosted the sixth annual National...
An Interview with Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly
Matthew M. Fernholz, Daniel Kelly
Milwaukee Lawyers Chapter
On November 17, 2020, the Milwaukee Lawyers Chapter hosted an online interview with former Wisconsin...
An Interview with Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly
Matthew M. Fernholz, Daniel Kelly
Milwaukee Lawyers Chapter
On November 17, 2020, the Milwaukee Lawyers Chapter hosted an online interview with former Wisconsin...
Showcase Discussion: A Discussion with Professors Robert George and Cornel West on Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Thought, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the Cancel Culture
Jennifer C. Braceras, Robert P. George, Cornel West, Dean Reuter
2020 National Lawyers Convention
On November 12, 2020, The Federalist Society hosted an online showcase discussion for the 2020...
Showcase Discussion: A Discussion with Professors Robert George and Cornel West on Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Thought, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the Cancel Culture
Jennifer C. Braceras, Robert P. George, Dean Reuter, Cornel West
2020 National Lawyers Convention
On November 12, 2020, The Federalist Society hosted an online showcase discussion for the 2020...
Panel V: The Conflict Between Text and Precedent in Constitutional Adjudication [Archive Collection]
Lea Brilmayer, Charles J. Cooper, Frank H. Easterbrook, Patrick E. Higginbotham, Michael Kinsley, Stephen Reinhardt
1987 National Student Symposium
On April 3-5, 1987, the Federalist Society's Chicago Student Chapter hosted the sixth annual National...
Panel V: The Conflict Between Text and Precedent in Constitutional Adjudication [Archive Collection]
Lea Brilmayer, Charles J. Cooper, Frank H. Easterbrook, Patrick E. Higginbotham, Michael Kinsley, Stephen Reinhardt
1987 National Student Symposium
On April 3-5, 1987, the Federalist Society's Chicago Student Chapter hosted the sixth annual National...
Panel III: Originalist Theories of Constitutional Interpretation [Archive Collection]
Robert William Bennett, Raoul Berger, Douglas H. Ginsburg, Michael W. McConnell, Michael S. Moore
1987 National Student Symposium
On April 3-5, 1987, the Federalist Society's Chicago Student Chapter hosted the sixth annual National...
Panel III: Originalist Theories of Constitutional Interpretation [Archive Collection]
Robert William Bennett, Raoul Berger, Douglas H. Ginsburg, Michael W. McConnell, Michael S. Moore
1987 National Student Symposium
On April 3-5, 1987, the Federalist Society's Chicago Student Chapter hosted the sixth annual National...
Feddie Night Frights: Originalism: Trick or Treat?
Eric J. Segall, Lawrence VanDyke, Ilan Wurman
University of Texas Student Chapter
The Federalist Society's Student Division &University of Texas Student Chapter Present Feddie Night Frights:Night of...