Shareholder, Greenberg Traurig LLP
Troy A. Eid focuses his litigation, mediation and transactional practice on government enforcement, investigations and compliance, environmental law, energy and natural resource development, and Federal Indian law and Native American and Alaska Native tribal law. Troy is a trusted advocate and mediator in the Rocky Mountain West and in federal, state and tribal trial and appellate courtrooms across the country.
Chancellor Professor, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School of Law
Peltz-Steele received his law degree from Duke University and a bachelor’s in journalism and Spanish from Washington & Lee University. Peltz-Steele has won awards in teaching, research, and public service. He practiced commercial law in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and taught law for more than thirteen years before coming to UMass Law in 2011.
Peltz-Steele is author, co-author, or co-editor of qualitative and quantitative research in law and mass communication in journals and books, of treatises in law and development and access to information, and of textbooks in tort law and freedom of information. He is especially active in international media law and policy, having presented papers on five continents and having published in foreign journals and multinational collaborations. His current research focuses on comparative transparency in the context of development and in the private sector. Peltz-Steele serves in various roles in public service organizations, including the legal education committee of the American Bar Association, International Law Section.
Executive Director, Committee for Justice
Ashley Baker serves as Executive Director at the Committee for Justice. Her focus areas include the Supreme Court, regulatory policy, antitrust, and judicial nominations. Her writing has appeared in Fox News, USA Today, The Boston Globe, The Hill, RealClearPolitics, The American Spectator, and elsewhere. Ashley is also the founder of the recently-formed Alliance on Antitrust coalition. She has testified before the United States Senate on the topic of antitrust law.
Ashley is an active member of the Federalist Society, where she serves as a member of the Regulatory Transparency Project's Antitrust & Consumer Protection and Cyber & Privacy working groups. As a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association, she has served as a speaker on the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary.
As an expert on the judicial nominations process, Ashley worked closely on the efforts to confirm Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Much of Ashley’s work is at the intersection of the courts, regulation, and technology. Ashley also engages in policy analysis and outreach on legislation and regulations related to these issues by writing op-eds, letters to Congress for committee hearings, and regulatory comments.
Executive Director, State and Local Legal Center
Lisa Soronen is the Executive Director of the SLLC. Prior to joining the SLLC, Lisa worked for the National School Boards Association, the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, and clerked for the Wisconsin Court of Appeals. She earned her J.D. at the University of Wisconsin Law School and is a graduate of Central Michigan University.
Former UCLA & NBA Athlete
Ed O'Bannon led the UCLA men's basketball team to the 1995 NCAA Basketball Championship. He received the NCAA Tournament's Most Outstanding Player Award and won numerous other awards, including the John Wooden Award, which recognizes the best college basketball player in the country. O'Bannon was the ninth player selected in the 1995 NBA Draft and enjoyed a 10-year professional basketball career. After retiring from the game, O'Bannon entered the car dealership industry. In 2009, O'Bannon filed a federal lawsuit against the NCAA and Electronic Arts. In a landmark decision, which was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals, O'Bannon defeated the NCAA. O'Bannon received no compensation from the case. O'Bannon, who is from Los Angeles, now resides in Henderson, Nevada with his wife, Rosa. They have three children.
Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs; Director of the Sports and Entertainment Law Institute, University of New Hampshire School of Law
Michael McCann is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at UNH Law. Dean McCann is responsible for overseeing the law school’s program of legal education. His specific duties include day-to-day management of UNH Law’s degree programs with an emphasis on implementation and analysis of strategic initiatives to achieve institutional excellence. Dean McCann also supervises senior staff offices, including the registrar and career services, and he manages budgets, contracts and international programing.
Dean McCann is the Founding Director of the UNH Law Sports and Entertainment Law Institute (SELI). SELI offers hands-on training and experiential opportunities in this cutting-edge area of law. Dean McCann has held several other leadership posts at the University including Chair of the UNH Law Faculty Appointments Committee and Co-Chair of the UNH Law Dean Search and Selection Committee. Graduating students in UNH Law’s Class of 2015 selected McCann to deliver the faculty portion of their commencement address.
Dean McCann is one of the nation’s leading experts in sports law. He is Sports Illustrated’s Legal Analyst, an Investigative Writer for Sports Illustrated and the on-air Legal Analyst for NBA TV. McCann has authored more than 700 legal columns and articles for SI and is a key member of SI’s investigative team. He has covered the Boston Marathon bombings, Deflategate, the murder trials of Aaron Hernandez, sexual misconduct allegations against players, owners and team executives, the USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal, the ouster of Donald Sterling from the NBA Colin Kaepernick’s collusion grievance against the NFL, the FBI’s investigation into college basketball corruption, amateurism litigation against the NCAA, concussion class actions, the legality of sports betting and numerous other legal controversies.
McCann was the first member of the media to interview Lance Armstrong after Armstrong’s interview with Oprah Winfrey. He interviewed Armstrong at his home in Austin, Texas and authored "My Dance With Lance" (Sports Illustrated, March 11, 2013 issue, pages 14-15).
As a journalist, McCann has also broken several national news stories. Those stories include that relevant FBI wiretaps did not implicate University of Arizona basketball coach Sean Miller in the college hoops scandal, that attorneys for Colin Kaepernick deposed New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, that University of Arkansas football coach Bobby Petrino hired his mistress over 150 more qualified candidates, that Donald Sterling informed the NBA of his refusal to comply with the NBA’s sanction and that Sterling hired a legal team with a threat to sue the NBA, and that the Los Angeles Angels were set to trade troubled outfielder Josh Hamilton.
McCann is also a best-selling author and an accomplished scholar. McCann and former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon co-authored “Court Justice: The Inside Story of My Battle Against the NCAA” (Diversion Books, 2018). The book — which was named by The Christian Science Monitor as the No. 1 Sports Book in Spring 2018 and has been a best-selling book in several Amazon categories — tells the story of O’Bannon’s life in basketball and his historic court case against the NCAA. McCann is also the Editor and co-author of "The Oxford Handbook of American Sports Law" (Oxford University Press, 2017). The book is intended for law students, graduate students, college students and attorneys interested in the study of American sports law. In addition, McCann has authored more than 20 law review articles, with placements in the Yale Law Journal, Wisconsin Law Review, and Boston College Law Review, among other prominent law reviews. One notable law review article is “American Needle v. NFL: An Opportunity to Reshape Sports Law", 119 YALE L.J. 726 (2010).
Professor - Sport Management, Drexel University LeBow College of Business
Ellen J. Staurowsky, Ed.D., is a full professor in the Department of Sport Management at Drexel University. She is a fellow of both the North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM) and the AAHPERD Research Consortium.
Dr. Staurowsky is internationally recognized as an expert on social justice issues in sport which include gender equity and Title IX, pay equity and equal employment opportunity, college athletes’ rights and the exploitation of college athletes, the faculty role in reforming college sport, representation of women in sport media, and the misappropriation of American Indian imagery in sport. She is co-author of the book, College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA Amateur Myth (Praeger Press) and editor and author of Women and Sport: A Continuing Journey from Liberation to Celebration (Human Kinetics Publishers).
In addition to publications in scholarly journals such as the* Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Sociology of Sport Journal, Quest, Journal of Sport Management, the International Journal of Sport Sociology, the Marquette Sports Law Review, the Journal of Legal Aspects of Sport, the International Journal of Sport History, and Sport Management Review her critiques and analyses on a variety of issues have appeared in *The Chronicle of Higher Education, Huffington Post, Street & Smith’s SportsBusiness Journal, The NCAA News, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Athletic Management Magazine, and News From Indian Country. She was a columnist with the College Sport Business News, Women in Coaching Blog, and co-founder and editor of the LBGT Issues in Sport: Theory to Practice Blog. She currently serves as a contributing/senior writer with Sports Litigation Alert.
She has served as a research consultant to the National College Players Association, co-authoring several reports addressing issues regarding college football and basketball player value, including The $6 Billion Heist: Robbing College Athletes Under the Guise of Amateurism, TV Money Windfall in Big Time College Sports: $784 Million Reasons for Reform, The Price of Poverty: A Comparison of Big-Time College Athletes Fair Market Value, Their Current Compensation, and the U.S. Federal Poverty Line, and An Examination of the Financial Shortfall for Athletes on Full Scholarship at NCAA Division I Institutions – 2009-2010.
As a researcher and advocate on behalf of women in sport, she has served as the lead author on the Women’s Sports Foundation’s comprehensive and expansive research report entitled* Her Life Depends on It: Sport and Physical Activity in the Lives of American Girls and Wome*n (second and third editions). She also co-authored WSF’s report on women in the college sport workplace entitled* Beyond X’s and O’s: Gender Bias and Coaches of Women’s Teams*.
As a teacher and researcher, she has received numerous honors including the Women’s Sports Foundation Researcher of the Year award, the National Association for Girls and Women in Sport’s President’s Award, the University of South Carolina College Sport Research Institute’s Lifetime Research Achievement Award, and the Laughlin Education Award from Ursinus College for her contributions to education nationally.
Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Professor Yankah hold degrees from the University of Michigan, Columbia Law School and Oxford University. His work focuses on questions of criminal theory and punishment and political theory and particularly, questions political obligation and its interaction with justifications of punishment. His work has appeared in law review articles and peer reviewed legal theory journals and books including NOMOS, Ratio Juris, Law and Philosophy, Criminal Law and Philosophy and the Illinois Law Review. He has been a visiting fellow at the Israeli Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS), a Visiting Professor of Law at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya and a Distinguished Visiting Faculty Member at the University of Toronto School of Law.
He has been recognized numerous times by his students for his dedication to teaching; most recently he was awarded the Cardozo Alumni of the Year Award by Cardozo BALLSA, becoming the first non-Cardozo graduate or faculty member to be recognized. His interests have also led him to develop expertise in voting rights and election law and he serves as the co-chair of the New York Democratic Lawyers Council, the voting rights arm of the New York Democratic party and the coordinating arm of the DNC believed to be the largest voting rights group in the country. He sits on the Board of the Innocence Project and was awarded as an Advocate of Justice (2017) and has served on the Board of the American Constitution Society (NY Chapter). He maintains a public presence writing for publications spanning The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Huffington Post, among others, and has been a regular commentator on criminal law issues on television and radio including MSNBC, BBC, BBC International, PBS and NPR.
Donald Phillip Rothschild Research Professor, George Washington University Law School
Renée Lettow Lerner is Donald Phillip Rothschild Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School.
Professor Lerner works in the fields of U.S. and English legal history, civil and criminal procedure, and comparative law. She advises judges, lawyers, and government officials from the United States and countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia about the differences between adversarial and nonadversarial legal systems.
She writes extensively about the history of American juries. Her work includes not only scholarly articles, but also online publications intended for a broader audience of legal professionals and the public. In many different settings, she has debated the role of juries with other academics and with lawyers. She has a book forthcoming with Oxford University Press in the Very Short Introduction Series entitled “The Jury.” She is also working on a book about the American civil jury, from the colonial period to the present.
She is the author, with John Langbein and Bruce Smith, of the book History of the Common Law: The Development of Anglo-American Legal Institutions (2009).
Her recent writings include a book review of Amalia D. Kessler’s Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877, 67 J. Legal Ed. 888 (2018); “How the Creation of Appellate Courts in England and the United States Limited Judicial Comment on Evidence to the Jury,” 40 Journal of the Legal Profession 215 (2016); “The Troublesome Inheritance of Americans in Magna Carta and Trial by Jury,” in Magna Carta and its Modern Legacy 77-98 (Robert Hazell and James Melton eds., Cambridge University Press 2015); and “The Failure of Originalism in Preserving Constitutional Rights to Civil Jury Trial,” 22 William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal 811 (2014).
Professor Lerner received an A.B. summa cum laude in history from Princeton University. She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where she studied English legal history. At Yale Law School, she was Articles Editor of the Yale Law Journal. She served as a law clerk to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court and to Judge Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. From 2003 to 2005, she served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Senior Fellow, Ave Maria School of Law and Host of the Four Boxes Diner Second Amendment Channel
Mark W. Smith is Visiting Fellow in Pharmaceutical Public Policy and Law in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford; Presidential Scholar and a Senior Fellow in Law and Public Policy at The King’s College; and Distinguished Scholar and Senior Fellow of Law and Public Policy at the Ave Maria School of Law.
He is a constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner YouTube channel—which provides scholarly and historical analyses of the Second Amendment. Mark is also a New York Times bestselling author.
Donald Phillip Rothschild Research Professor, George Washington University Law School
Renée Lettow Lerner is Donald Phillip Rothschild Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School.
Professor Lerner works in the fields of U.S. and English legal history, civil and criminal procedure, and comparative law. She advises judges, lawyers, and government officials from the United States and countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia about the differences between adversarial and nonadversarial legal systems.
She writes extensively about the history of American juries. Her work includes not only scholarly articles, but also online publications intended for a broader audience of legal professionals and the public. In many different settings, she has debated the role of juries with other academics and with lawyers. She has a book forthcoming with Oxford University Press in the Very Short Introduction Series entitled “The Jury.” She is also working on a book about the American civil jury, from the colonial period to the present.
She is the author, with John Langbein and Bruce Smith, of the book History of the Common Law: The Development of Anglo-American Legal Institutions (2009).
Her recent writings include a book review of Amalia D. Kessler’s Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877, 67 J. Legal Ed. 888 (2018); “How the Creation of Appellate Courts in England and the United States Limited Judicial Comment on Evidence to the Jury,” 40 Journal of the Legal Profession 215 (2016); “The Troublesome Inheritance of Americans in Magna Carta and Trial by Jury,” in Magna Carta and its Modern Legacy 77-98 (Robert Hazell and James Melton eds., Cambridge University Press 2015); and “The Failure of Originalism in Preserving Constitutional Rights to Civil Jury Trial,” 22 William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal 811 (2014).
Professor Lerner received an A.B. summa cum laude in history from Princeton University. She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where she studied English legal history. At Yale Law School, she was Articles Editor of the Yale Law Journal. She served as a law clerk to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court and to Judge Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. From 2003 to 2005, she served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Senior Fellow, Ave Maria School of Law and Host of the Four Boxes Diner Second Amendment Channel
Mark W. Smith is Visiting Fellow in Pharmaceutical Public Policy and Law in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford; Presidential Scholar and a Senior Fellow in Law and Public Policy at The King’s College; and Distinguished Scholar and Senior Fellow of Law and Public Policy at the Ave Maria School of Law.
He is a constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner YouTube channel—which provides scholarly and historical analyses of the Second Amendment. Mark is also a New York Times bestselling author.
Carpenter v. Murphy - Post-Argument SCOTUScast
Troy A. Eid
SCOTUScast featuring Troy Eid
On November 27, 2018, the Supreme Court heard argument in Carpenter v. Murphy, a case...
Topics
Kicked Off Campus: Religious Discrimination in the Supreme Court
In recent years, the Supreme Court has been generally friendly to free speech and religious...
Topics
A Most Unusual Brief From the Solicitor General: Threading the Needle on Auer Deference
Last week, the Solicitor General filed the United States’ eagerly anticipated response brief in Kisor...
Thacker v. Tennessee Valley Authority - Post-Argument SCOTUScast
Richard J. Peltz-Steele
SCOTUScast featuring Richard Peltz-Steele
On January 14, 2019, the Supreme Court heard argument in Thacker v. Tennessee Valley Authority,...
Justice Gorsuch, Carpenter, & the Fourth Amendment [POLICYbrief]
Ashley Baker
Short video featuring Ashley Baker
Though Justice Neil Gorsuch filed one of the four dissenting opinions in Carpenter v. United...
Topics
The Supreme Court and the Maryland Peace Cross
The Supreme Court on Wednesday hears oral argument in American Legion v. American Humanist Association,...
Nieves v. Bartlett -- Post-Argument
Lisa Soronen
SCOTUScast featuring Lisa Soronen
On November 26, 2018, the Supreme Court heard argument in Nieves v. Bartlett, a case...
O'Bannon v. NCAA: Intellectual Property, Antitrust, & College Sports [POLICYbrief]
Ed O'Bannon, Michael A. McCann, Ellen J. Staurowsky, Ekow N. Yankah
Short video
When former college athlete Ed O’Bannon discovered that his name, image, and likeness were being...
Lunch and Keynote Address by Renée Lerner
Renée Lettow Lerner, Mark W. Smith
The Second Amendment In The New Supreme Court
On January 15, 2019, the Federalist Society's Civil Rights and Criminal Law & Procedure Practice...
Lunch and Keynote Address by Renée Lerner
Renée Lettow Lerner, Mark W. Smith
The Second Amendment In The New Supreme Court
On January 15, 2019, the Federalist Society's Civil Rights and Criminal Law & Procedure Practice...