Senior Attorney, Institute for Justice
Sam Gedge is a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice. He joined IJ in June 2015 and litigates cases to promote economic liberty, protect political speech, and secure individuals’ rights to private property.
In 2017, Sam was named IJ’s second Elfie Gallun Fellow for Freedom and the Constitution. The fellowship comes with an emphasis on publishing written materials and speaking to students and others about the vital role the U.S. Constitution plays in protecting our most precious freedoms.
In his time at IJ, Sam has launched cases battling civil forfeiture and overzealous licensing boards, which generated widespread coverage and conversation in media outlets from Wired and The Atlantic to London’s Daily Mail.
Before joining IJ, Sam was an attorney at Wiley Rein LLP, in Washington, D.C., where he focused on litigation and election law. He is a former law clerk to Judge Raymond W. Gruender of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
Sam received his law degree cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2010.
Attorney, Institute for Justice
John Wrench is a Constitutional Law Fellow at the Institute for Justice.
John grew up outside of Ithaca, New York, and received his law degree from the Case Western Reserve University School of Law in 2019. During law school, he served as editor in chief of the Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law and was a member of the Federalist Society. John interned in his law school’s First Amendment Litigation Clinic and was a judicial extern to the Honorable Paul E. Davison in the Southern District of New York. John graduated from Pace University in 2015 with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Religious Studies.
Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Austin E. Owen Research Scholar & Professor of Law, The University of Richmond School of Law
Dean Kristen Jakobsen Osenga teaches and writes in the areas of patent law, antitrust, and legislation and regulation. Some of her recent scholarship focuses on standard development organizations, patent eligible subject matter, patent licensing firms, litigation and remedies for patent infringement, and patent law reform. She has written numerous law review articles on these and other topics, as well as book chapters and op eds on various aspects of patent law. Additionally, she has spoken on these issues at many academic conferences and bar events. Dean Osenga is Chief Policy Counselor for the Inventors Defense Alliance, as well as an active member of the Federal Circuit Bar Association and the American Intellectual Property Law Association.
Dean Osenga received a B.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Iowa, an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Southern Illinois University – Carbondale, and a J.D. from the University of Illinois College of Law, where she graduated magna cum laude. After law school, she practiced at the law firm of Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett, & Dunner LLP, (now Finnegan) where she did patent prosecution and litigation. She then clerked for the Judge Richard Linn of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. After clerking, she entered academia, teaching first at Chicago-Kent College of Law and then at the University of Richmond, where she has been since 2006. She has also been a Visiting Professor at Emory University School of Law and at William & Mary School of Law.
Professorial Lecturer in Law, George Washington University Law School
Theodore C. (Ted) Hirt was an attorney in the Department of Justice's Civil Division from August 1979 to March 2016. He was in its Federal Programs Branch from 1979 to 2008 (trial attorney, senior trial counsel, assistant director), and then in its Office of Immigration Litigation from 2008 to 2016 (trial attorney and senior litigation counsel). Among his responsibilities (September 2001 to March 2016) was being an advisor to the Assistant Attorneys General for the Civil Division, who serve ex officio on the Civil Rules Advisory Committee. Mr. Hirt’s areas of specialization include First Amendment issues, internet and telecommunications law, and electronic discovery. From 1976 to 1979, he was an associate at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Kampelman. From 1975 to 1976 he was an attorney in the Prehearing Division of the Michigan Court of Appeals.
Senior Special Counsel, Securities & Exchange Commission
J.B. Tarter serves as the Senior Special Counsel for the Cybersecurity Program Office at the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission. He has over a decade of government service, having previously held senior appointments in the legal offices of the U.S. Department of Energy, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Prior to his government service he was an appellate attorney with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, where he represented parties before the U.S. Supreme Court and numerous federal Courts of Appeals. J.B. clerked for then-Chief Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia Circuit. He has been profiled by Forbes magazine, taught courses on Executive Power in Wartime for the State Bar of Texas, and presented on ethics and professionalism at The Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School. A long-time member of the Federalist Society, he is a graduate of the College of Southern Idaho, Emory University, and Harvard Law School.
University Professor of Law and Religion and Director of the Eleanor H. McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy, Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law
Michael P. Moreland was appointed University Professor of Law and Religion and Director of the Eleanor H. McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy at Villanova University in 2017. Professor Moreland joined the Villanova faculty in 2006 and served as Vice Dean from 2012 to 2015. His research is primarily in the areas of torts, law and religion, constitutional law, and Catholic social thought, and he regularly teaches Torts, First Amendment, seminars in law and religion, and undergraduate courses in ethics.
Professor Moreland is the co-editor of Christianity and Private Law (Routledge, 2021), and his most recent publications include: “The Authority of Tradition: John Henry Newman and Legal Theory” in Christianity and the Making of Irish Law (Routledge, 2025); “Christianity and Torts” in The Oxford Handbook on Christianity and Law, (Oxford University Press, 2023); “Germaneness and Religious Liberty” in the Notre Dame Law Review (2023); “Contingency and Contestation in Christianity and Liberalism” in the Notre Dame Law Review (2023); “Friendship as the Primary Purpose of Law” in The American Journal of Jurisprudence 279 (2022); and “The Moral of Torts” (with Jeffrey Pojanowski) in Christianity and Private Law (Routledge, 2021).
Professor Moreland was a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame and the Mary Ann Remick Senior Visiting Fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture from 2015 to 2017. He was the Forbes Visiting Fellow at Princeton University in the James Madison Program during academic year 2010-11. He has served as the project leader for grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation. He serves as the Chair of the Federalist Society’s Religious Liberties Practice Group Executive Committee and the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California.
Professor Moreland received his BA in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, his MA and PhD in theological ethics from Boston College, and his JD from the University of Michigan Law School. Following law school, Professor Moreland clerked for the Honorable Paul J. Kelly Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and was an associate at Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington, DC, where he represented clients in First Amendment, professional liability, and products liability matters. Before coming to Villanova, he served as Associate Director for Domestic Policy at the White House under President George W. Bush, where he worked on a range of legal policy issues, including criminal justice, immigration, civil rights, and liability reform.
Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
Professor Friedman is one of the country’s leading authorities on constitutional law and the federal courts. He is a prolific scholar, working at the intersections of law, politics and history. Friedman teaches a wide variety of courses including Constitutional Law, Federal Courts, and Criminal Procedure. He writes extensively about judicial review, constitutional law and theory, federal jurisdiction and judicial behavior. His scholarship appears regularly in the nation’s top law and peer-edited reviews. He is the author of widely-recognized The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2009), which examines the history of the relationship between popular opinion and the Supreme Court, from 1776 to the present. Along with his co-author Stephen Burbank, Friedman co-edited and contributed to Judicial Independence at the Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Approach, which questions common assumptions about the nature of judicial independence and how it can be protected. The book has been cited and relied upon countless times by scholars and policymakers alike. Professor Friedman is a frequent contributor to the nation's leading journals, both on-line and print. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, The Los Angeles Times, Politico andThe New Republic, among others.
Professor Friedman is a frequent speaker at events of all sorts. Given the interdisciplinary nature of his work, Professor Friedman regularly appears at conferences in law, political science and history. He is a founder and co-convener of the “roughly biennial” Constitutional Theory Conference. He organizes many multi-disciplinary conferences, including one on Modeling Law, and another – done under the auspices of the American Constitution Society – on Reconstruction: America’s Second Founding. He presents papers regularly at home and abroad. He has been a visiting scholar and lecturer at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, the Groupe d’Etudes et de Recherches sur law Justice Constitutionnelle Aix-en-Provence, Sciences-Po in Aix-en-Provence, and Hong Kong University.
Professor Friedman regularly serves as a litigator or litigation consultant in a variety of matters in the federal and state courts. He has represented a wide range of clients, both public and private. Notably, he represents both civil liberties claimants and state and local governments. He has been active in the areas of reproductive rights, the jurisdictional allocation of cases between the federal and state courts, and the proper scope of the federal government’s commerce power. He has filed a number of amicus briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court.
Actively engaged in a range of important service activities, at NYU Professor Friedman created the Academic Careers Program and founded and is now co-director of the Furman Academic Program. Both programs are dedicated to preparing young scholars for academic careers. In the past he was extensively involved with the American Judicature Society, was President of the Tennessee Civil Liberties Union, served on the Board of the State and Local Legal Center, and on the steering committee of New York University’s Institute for Law and Society. He recently completed a term as Vice Dean of New York University School of Law.
Professor Friedman graduated from the University of Chicago and received his law degree magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center. He clerked for the Honorable Phyllis A. Kravitch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit and also worked as a litigation associate at Davis, Polk & Wardwell in Washington D.C. He was a professor at Vanderbilt Law School before joining the NYU faculty in 2000. In 1995 he won the Clarence Darrow Award from the ACLU of Tennessee for his work in defense of civil liberties.
J.D., Georgetown University Law Center, 1982
B.A., University of Chicago, 1978
Partner, Schaerr | Jaffe LLP
Erik Jaffe has been involved in appeals on a broad range of legal issues, including First Amendment challenges to campaign finance reform, Commerce Clause challenges to Health Care Reform and other federal legislation, Equal Protection Clause challenges to affirmative action in education, First Amendment challenges to school vouchers, Fifth Amendment challenges to takings of property, Second Amendment challenges to restrictions on gun ownership, and a wide variety of cases involving patents, copyrights, ERISA, securities fraud, federal preemption, environmental regulation, and other state and federal constitutional and statutory matters. He has represented businesses and non-profit groups, Judges, Senators, former government officials, Nobel Prize winners, and a broad cross-section of private individuals. Mr. Jaffe has been involved in over 120 Supreme Court matters, including filing over 30 cert. petitions, representing half-a-dozen parties on the merits, and filing over 70 amicus briefs at both the cert. and merits stages.
A 1990 graduate of the Columbia University School of Law, Mr. Jaffe was a law clerk to Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1990 to 1991. Following that clerkship he spent five years in litigation practice with the Washington, D.C. law firm of Williams & Connolly. In the summer of 1996 he left Williams & Connolly to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. At the end of that clerkship he started his own practice, and he was a sole practitioner from 1997 to 2018. He joined the firm of Schaerr | Jaffe LLP in 2018.
Former Mildred Van Voorhis Jones Chair in Law, University of Illinois College of Law
The University of Illinois College of Law community mourns the loss of Professor Larry E. Ribstein, the Mildred Van Voorhis Jones Chair, Associate Dean for Research, and Co-Director of the Illinois Business Law and Policy Program, who passed away on December 24, 2011 in Fairfax, Virginia.
A member of the Illinois law faculty since 2002, Ribstein was a prodigious and pioneering scholar across a vast range of subjects, including partnerships and limited liability companies, corporate and securities law, choice of law, financial regulation, white-collar crime, legal ethics, and the legal profession. Among his over 170 publications, he was the author of The Rise of the Uncorporation (Oxford University Press, 2010),The Law Market (Oxford University Press, 2009) (with Erin A. O’Hara), The Sarbanes-Oxley Debate (American Enterprise Institute Press, 2006) (with Henry N. Butler), The Constitution and the Corporation (American Enterprise Institute Press, 1995) (with Butler), leading treatises (including Ribstein & Keatinge on Limited Liability Corporations and Bromberg & Ribstein on Partnerships), and two casebooks (Business Associations (4th ed. 2003, Lexis/Nexis) (with Peter V. Letsou) andUnincorporated Business Entities (4th ed. 2009, Lexis/Nexis) (with Jeffrey M. Lipshaw)). His latest book, The Rise of the Uncorporation, which examines the emergence and significance of non-corporate forms of business organization, was recently described in the Michigan Law Review as a “fascinating” study that “takes the traditional law and economics story of the corporation and turns it on its head.” A prominent commentator on law and business, Ribstein was the founder of Ideoblog (www.ideoblog.org) and the leading contributor to Truth on the Market (www.truthonthemarket.com), which was recently ranked by the ABA Journal as one of the 100 top law blogs.
Professor Ribstein taught a variety of courses at the College of Law, including business organizations, unincorporated business entities, and market regulation. He also taught an innovative colloquium on corporate law that brought together students and leading scholars to discuss current issues in the field.
“Larry was a scholar of incandescent intellect, breathtaking range, and unflagging energy,” said Dean Bruce Smith. “He cared passionately about his students and about transforming legal education to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. He invested selflessly in the professional development of junior faculty members – whether at Illinois or at other institutions. He cared deeply about the College of Law and contributed incalculably to it through his ideas, his engagement, and his counsel. And he cherished his family with a love that was boundless. Larry was a towering figure and an incomparable person, and he will be dearly missed.”
After earning his B.A. from The Johns Hopkins University and his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, Ribstein practiced for three years as an associate at McDermott, Will & Emery in Chicago. He began his teaching career at Mercer University Law School (1975-87), later serving on the faculty at George Mason University School of Law (1987-2002), including as George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law (1993-2002). He also held visiting professorships at New York University Law School, the University of Texas School of Law, Washington University School of Law, and St. Louis University School of Law. He served the legal-academic community in a variety of capacities, including on the Executive Committee of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Section on Securities Regulation, as chair of the AALS Section on Agency, Partnership and LLCs, and as editor and co-editor of The Supreme Court Economic Review.
Professor of Law, Florida International University College of Law
Howard M. Wasserman joined the College of Law in 2003. He graduated magna cum laude from the Northwestern University School of Law, where he was an associate articles editor of the Law Review and was named to the Order of the Coif. Following law school, he clerked for Chief Judge James T. Giles of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and Judge Jane R. Roth of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He also has been a visiting professor at Saint Louis University School of Law and Florida State University College of Law. Professor Wasserman teaches civil procedure, evidence, federal courts, civil rights, and First Amendment; his scholarship focuses on the freedom of speech and on the role of procedure and jurisdiction in public-law and civil-rights litigation. He blogs at PrawfsBlawg and at Sports-Law Blog and is the Section Editor for the Courts Law Section of JOTWELL. Professor Wasserman is a loyal Chicago Cubs fan.
Member, Caplin & Drysdale
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