Senior Counsel, Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP
Floyd Abrams is Senior Counsel in Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP's litigation practice group.
Floyd has a national trial and appellate practice and extensive experience in high-visibility matters, often involving First Amendment, securities litigation, intellectual property, public policy and regulatory issues. He has argued frequently in the Supreme Court in cases raising issues as diverse as the scope of the First Amendment, the interpretation of ERISA, the nature of broadcast regulation, the impact of copyright law and the continuing viability of the Miranda rule. Most recently, Floyd prevailed in his argument before the Supreme Court on behalf of Senator Mitch McConnell as amicus curiae, defending the rights of corporations and unions to speak publicly about politics and elections in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Floyd's clients have included The McGraw-Hill Companies in a large number of litigations around the country involving claims against its subsidiary, Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC, The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case and others, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Time Magazine, Business Week, The Nation, Reader's Digest, Hearst, AIG, and others in trials, appeals and investigations.
Floyd has represented Standard & Poor’s in litigations about its ratings; he defended the Brooklyn Museum of Art in its legal battles with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; he represented two of the nation’s largest insurers in litigation under Section 17200 in California and he has frequently testified before congressional committees and prepared clients to do so. In 1998, he represented CNN in investigating and issuing a report on its broadcast accusing the United States of using nerve gas on a military mission in Laos in 1970, and again in 1999 in seeking to persuade the United States Senate to permit the public to view its deliberations as it determined whether or not to convict President Clinton of alleged high crimes and misdemeanors. He represented Nina Totenberg and National Public Radio in the 1992 "leak" investigation conducted by the United States Senate arising out of the confirmation hearing of Justice Clarence Thomas and, in 2004 and 2005, Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper in their efforts to avoid revealing their confidential sources.
In 2006, Floyd was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, an independent research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems advanced by its 4,600 elected members, who are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business and public affairs from around the world. In 2015, Floyd was honored by Yale Law School with its prestigious Award of Merit. Also in 2015, Floyd received the Walter Cronkite Freedom of Information Award presented by the Connecticut Foundation for Open Government. In 2011, Floyd was awarded the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism's Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1998, Floyd was the recipient of the William J. Brennan, Jr. Award for outstanding contribution to public discourse; the Learned Hand Award of the American Jewish Committee; and the Thurgood Marshall Award of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. In November, 1999, he received the William J. Brennan, Jr. award of the Libel Defense Resource Center. Floyd was awarded, in 1997, the Milton S. Gould Award for outstanding appellate advocacy by the Office of the Appellate Defender in New York. Previously he had been awarded the Ross Essay Prize of the American Bar Association for his study of the Ninth Amendment of the United States Constitution. He has also received awards from, among others, the American Jewish Congress, Catholic University, the New York and Philadelphia Chapters of the Society of Professional Journalists, Sigma Delta Chi, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and the National Broadcast Editorial Association.
In November, 2011, Yale Law School announced the formation of The Floyd Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression, whose mission is to promote free speech, scholarship and law reform on emerging questions concerning traditional and new media. Developed in cooperation with Floyd, the Institute includes a clinic for Yale Law students to engage in litigation, draft model legislation, and advise lawmakers and policy makers on issues of media freedom and informational access.
The American Bar Association awarded Floyd its Certificate of Merit for his article published in The New York Times Magazine entitled "The New Effort to Control Information," which was described by the ABA as a "noteworthy contribution to public understanding of the American system of law and justice."
Described by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as "the most significant First Amendment lawyer of our age," Floyd is top-ranked by Chambers USA. He is listed in Who’s Who Legal, Who’s Who in American Law, and has been awarded with Lifetime Achievement Awards by The New York Law Journal and The American Lawyer (2013).
Floyd, who served as chairman of Mayor Edward Koch's Committee on Appointments, New York City, served as the Chairman of the New York State Zenger Commemoration Planning Committee. Previously, he served as the Chairman of the Communications Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, as well as Chairman of the Committee on Freedom of Speech and of the Press of the Individual Rights Section of the American Bar Association and of the Committee on Freedom of Expression of the Litigation Section of the American Bar Association.
He has appeared frequently on television on Nightline, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Charlie Rose and other programs and has published articles and reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Yale Law Journal, The Harvard Law Review, and elsewhere.
Floyd served on the Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee of the U.S. Department of Defense in 2003-4 and as the Chair of the New York State Commission on Public Access to Court Records in 2004.
For fifteen years, Floyd was the William J. Brennan, Jr. Visiting Professor of First Amendment Law at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. He has, as well, been a Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School and Columbia Law School and he is author of Friend of the Court: On the Front Lines with the First Amendment, published by Yale University Press (2013) and Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment, published by Viking Press (2005).
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.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Judge O’Scannlain was appointed United States Circuit Judge for the Ninth Circuit by President Reagan on September 26, 1986. He received a J.D. degree in 1963 from Harvard Law School and a B.A. in 1957 from St. John’s University. He also earned the LL.M. (Judicial Process) degree at University of Virginia Law School in 1992. He was awarded the LL.D. (honoris causa) degree by the University of Notre Dame in 2002, the LL.D. (honoris causa) degree by Lewis & Clark College in 2003 and the LL.D. (honoris causa) degree by the University of Portland in 2011.
As a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Judge O’Scannlain has participated in over 6,000 federal cases and has written hundreds of published opinions on a broad range of subjects including constitutional law, international law, securities law, administrative law, and criminal law. He hears appeals in San Francisco (court headquarters), as well as in Los Angeles (Pasadena), Portland, Seattle, Anchorage and Honolulu. The late Chief Justice Rehnquist appointed Judge O'Scannlain to the Federal Judicial Center's Advisory Committee on Appellate Judge Education. In 2009, Chief Justice Roberts appointed Judge O’Scannlain to the International Judicial Relations Committee of the U.S. Judicial Conference and subsequently appointed him Chairman in 2010.
President George W. Bush appointed Judge O’Scannlain to the Board of Trustees of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation in 2004. Pope Benedict XVI conferred the Order of Saint Gregory the Great on Judge and Mrs. O’Scannlain in 2007.
Judge O’Scannlain’s professional interests also include judicial administration and reform, and continuing legal education. Judge O’Scannlain is former Chair of the Judicial Division of the American Bar Association and has previously chaired the ABA’s Appellate Judges Conference, its Committee on Appellate Practice, and its 9th Appellate Practice Institute. He has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on several occasions, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, and the Commission on Structural Alternatives for the Federal Courts of Appeals on the subject of court reorganization. In addition to serving as a faculty member at numerous federal appellate practice seminars for judges and attorneys, including New York University Law School’s Institute for Judicial Administration, Judge O’Scannlain is an Adjunct Professor at Lewis & Clark Law School where he teaches a seminar on the Supreme Court. He has served as a Moot Court Judge at distinguished law schools across the United States including Harvard, Yale Stanford, Boalt Hall (Berkeley Law), Virginia, Cornell, Notre Dame, Fordham, Alabama, University of Southern California, King Hall (U.C. Davis) and Loyola Marymount University and in China at Xiamen and Renmin Universities.
Between graduation from Harvard and investiture as a federal judge, Judge O’Scannlain was primarily engaged in private law practice. Between 1969 and 1974, he was consecutively the Deputy Attorney General of Oregon, the Public Utility Commissioner of Oregon, and Director of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. He retired from the U.S. Army Reserve in 1978 as a Major after 23 years Reserve and National Guard service, including four years as an enlisted man.
A first generation Irish-American son of immigrant parents from Sligo and Derry, Judge O’Scannlain is married to the former Maura Nolan and has eight children: Sean, Jane, Brendan, Kevin, Megan, Christopher, Anne, and Kate, and nineteen grandchildren. His chambers are in the Pioneer Courthouse in Portland, Oregon.
Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
B.A., Yale; J.D., University of Chicago. Lee Liberman Otis is the Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President at the Federalist Society. She also serves as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference (ACUS), and as the co-chair of the National Constitution Center's Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board. She previously was a special assistant and an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, General Counsel of the Department of Energy, an associate in the appellate section of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, an associate counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and a law clerk to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. She also served as an assistant professor of law at George Mason, where she taught legislation, federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, civil procedure, and appellate advocacy. Ms. Otis has been an important member of the Federalist Society team since the organization’s beginnings. Together with David McIntosh, she led the effort to start what became the Chicago chapter of the Society. She also helped organize the Society’s first conference at Yale, its second conference at Chicago, and its first Lawyers Division chapter in Washington DC, as well as the effort to incorporate the Society, recruit its permanent staff, and obtain its early funding. She was a Founding Director of the Federalist Society.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit
David Stras became a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit on January 31, 2018. Before serving on the Eighth Circuit, Judge Stras was an Associate Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, a position he occupied from July 1, 2010 until his appointment to the Eighth Circuit.
Prior to becoming a judge, Stras was a member of the faculty of the University of Minnesota Law School from 2004 through 2010. He taught and wrote in the areas of federal courts and jurisdiction, constitutional law, criminal law, and law and politics.
Judge Stras received his Bachelor of Arts degree, with highest distinction, in 1995 and his Master of Business Administration in 1999, both from the University of Kansas. He also received his law degree from the University of Kansas School of Law in 1999, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Criminal Procedure Edition of the Kansas Law Review.
Following law school, Stras clerked for The Honorable Melvin Brunetti of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then for The Honorable J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
From 2001 to 2002, he practiced white-collar criminal and appellate litigation with the Washington, D.C., office of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood. Following his year in practice, he clerked for The Honorable Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court of the United States.
John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita, New York Law School; Former President, American Civil Liberties Union
Nadine Strossen, New York Law School Professor Emerita and Senior Fellow at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), was national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. An internationally acclaimed free speech scholar and advocate, who regularly addresses diverse audiences and provides media commentary around the world, Strossen is also the Host and Project Consultant for Free To Speak, a 3-hour documentary film series distributed on public television in 2023. Her books about free speech include: Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know® (Oxford University Press 2023); HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press 2018); and Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (Scribner 1995), which was republished with a new Preface in 2024 as part of the NYU Classics Series. Her many honors and awards include the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Judy Blume Lifetime Achievement Award for Free Speech. She serves on the Advisory Boards of several organizations that do free speech work, including: ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), Heterodox Academy, National Coalition Against Censorship, and the University of Austin.
Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA School of Law
Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), as well as the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA School of Law. He recently retired from teaching at UCLA, after 30 years there, and is now focusing on research.
Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (8th ed. 2023), and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed. 2016), as well as over 100 academic law journal articles, mostly on First Amendment law. He is a member of The American Law Institute; the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Free Speech Law; and the creator and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a leading legal blog founded in 2002 (hosted at the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017 and now at Reason Magazine).
Distinguished Senior Fellow and Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Edward Whelan is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and holds EPPC’s Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies. He is the longest-serving President in EPPC’s history, having held that position from March 2004 through January 2021.
Mr. Whelan directs EPPC’s program on The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture. His areas of expertise include constitutional law and the judicial confirmation process. As a contributor to National Review Online’s Bench Memos blog, he has been a leading commentator on nominations to the Supreme Court and the lower courts and on issues of constitutional law. He has written essays and op-eds for leading newspapers—including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post—opinion journals, and academic symposia and law reviews. The National Law Journal has named Mr. Whelan among its “Champions and Visionaries” in the practice of law in D.C.
Mr. Whelan is co-editor of three volumes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s work: Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived (Crown Forum, 2017), a New York Times bestselling collection of speeches by Justice Scalia; On Faith: Lessons from an American Believer (Crown Forum, 2019), a collection of Justice Scalia’s writings on faith and religion; and The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law (Crown Forum, 2020), a collection of Justice Scalia’s views on legal issues.
Mr. Whelan, a lawyer and a former law clerk to Justice Scalia, has served in positions of responsibility in all three branches of the federal government. From just before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, until joining EPPC in 2004, Mr. Whelan was the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. In that capacity, he advised the White House Counsel’s Office, the Attorney General and other senior DOJ officials, and departments and agencies throughout the executive branch on difficult and sensitive legal questions. Mr. Whelan previously served on Capitol Hill as General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In addition to clerking for Justice Scalia, he was a law clerk to Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
In 1981 Mr. Whelan graduated with honors from Harvard College and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He received his J.D. magna cum laude in 1985 from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Board of Editors of the Harvard Law Review.
For more on Mr. Whelan’s background, see this interview.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Judge Carlos Bea serves as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He received his Bachelor's Degree from Stanford University in 1956 and his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1958. Judge Bea was born in San Sebastian, Spain, and immigrated with his family to Cuba in 1939. In 1952, he represented Cuba on the Cuban National basketball team in the Helsinki Olympics. Judge Bea became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1958. He engaged in private practice in San Francisco, principally in the area of civil trials (jury and non-jury), from 1959-75 at Dunne, Phelps & Mills and from 1975-90 at Carlos Bea, A Law Corporation. He taught courses in civil litigation advocacy at Hastings College of Law and Stanford Law School. From 1990 to 2003, Judge Bea served as a judge of the San Francisco Superior Court. He was nominated by President George W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and was confirmed in 2003.
Judge Bea and his wife Louise reside in San Francisco, where they raised their four sons, Sebastian, Alexander, Nicholas, and Dominic.
Garwood Visiting Professor and Visiting Fellow, James Madison Pr, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law
David F. Forte is Professor of Law at Cleveland State University, where he was the inaugural holder of the Charles R. Emrick, Jr.- Calfee Halter & Griswold Endowed Chair. This fall, Professor Forte will be the Garwood Visiting Professor at Princeton University in the Department of Politics, and Visiting Fellow at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He holds degrees from Harvard College, Manchester University, England, the University of Toronto and Columbia University.
During the Reagan administration, Professor Forte served as chief counsel to the United States delegation to the United Nations and alternate delegate to the Security Council. He has authored a number of briefs before the United States Supreme Court, and has frequently testified before the United States Congress and consulted with the Department of State on human rights and international affairs issues. His advice was specifically sought on the approval of the Genocide Convention, on world-wide religious persecution, and Islamic extremism. He has appeared and spoken frequently on radio and television, both nationally and internationally. In 2002, the Department of State sponsored a speaking tour for Professor Forte in Amman, Jordan, and he was also a featured speaker to the Meeting of Peoples in Rimini, Italy, a meeting which gathers over 500,000 people from all over Europe. He has also been called to testify before the state legislatures of Ohio, Kansas, and Idaho as well as the New York City Council. He has assisted in drafting a number of pieces of legislation for the Ohio General Assembly dealing with abortion, international trade, and federalism. He has sat as acting judge on the municipal court of Lakewood Ohio and was chairman of Professional Ethics Committee of the Cleveland Bar Association. He has received a number of awards for his public service, including the Cleveland Bar Association’s President’s Award, the Cleveland State University Award for Distinguished Service, the Cleveland State University Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Alumni Award for Faculty Excellence. He served as Consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Family under Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. In 2003, Dr. Forte was a Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the University of Trento and returned there in 2004 as a Visiting Professor. For the academic year, 2008-2009, Professor Forte was Senior Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion and the Constitution in at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. He was the Robert E. Henderson Constitution Day Lecturer at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, and he has given over 300 invited addresses and papers at more than 100 academic institutions. His work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Professor Forte was a Bradley Scholar at the Heritage Foundation, and Visiting Scholar at the Liberty Fund. He has been President of the Ohio Association of Scholars, was on the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia Society, and is also adjunct Scholar at the Ashbrook Center. He has been appointed to the Ohio State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He has also been a Civil War re-enactor and a Merit Badge Counselor for the Boy Scouts.
He writes and speaks nationally on topics such as constitutional law, religious liberty, Islamic law, the rights of families, and international affairs. He served as book review editor for the American Journal of Jurisprudence and has edited a volume entitled, Natural Law and Contemporary Public Policy, published by Georgetown University Press. His book, Islamic Law Studies: Classical and Contemporary Applications, has been published by Austin & Winfield. He is Senior Editor of The Heritage Guide to the Constitution (2006), 2d edition (2014), published by Regnery & Co, a clause by clause analysis of the Constitution of the United States.
His teaching competencies include Constitutional Law, the First Amendment, Islamic Law, Jurisprudence, Natural Law, International Law, International Human Rights, the Presidency, and Constitutional History.
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.
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.
Dahr Jamail, Randall Hage Jamail and Robert Lee Jamail Regents C, University of Texas School of Law
Professor Rabban served as counsel to the American Association of University Professors for several years before joining the Texas faculty in 1983. He served as General Counsel of the AAUP from 1998 to 2006 and Chair of its Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2006 to 2012. His teaching and research focus on labor law, higher education and the law, and American legal history. He is best known for his path-breaking work on free speech in American history. He is the author of Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870-1920 (Cambridge,1997), which received the Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for "the best book in intellectual history published in 1997." His many articles have appeared in Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review and elsewhere. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. in 1994-95, and has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. His most recent book is Law's History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History.
John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita, New York Law School; Former President, American Civil Liberties Union
Nadine Strossen, New York Law School Professor Emerita and Senior Fellow at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), was national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. An internationally acclaimed free speech scholar and advocate, who regularly addresses diverse audiences and provides media commentary around the world, Strossen is also the Host and Project Consultant for Free To Speak, a 3-hour documentary film series distributed on public television in 2023. Her books about free speech include: Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know® (Oxford University Press 2023); HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press 2018); and Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (Scribner 1995), which was republished with a new Preface in 2024 as part of the NYU Classics Series. Her many honors and awards include the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Judy Blume Lifetime Achievement Award for Free Speech. She serves on the Advisory Boards of several organizations that do free speech work, including: ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), Heterodox Academy, National Coalition Against Censorship, and the University of Austin.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Judge Carlos Bea serves as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He received his Bachelor's Degree from Stanford University in 1956 and his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1958. Judge Bea was born in San Sebastian, Spain, and immigrated with his family to Cuba in 1939. In 1952, he represented Cuba on the Cuban National basketball team in the Helsinki Olympics. Judge Bea became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1958. He engaged in private practice in San Francisco, principally in the area of civil trials (jury and non-jury), from 1959-75 at Dunne, Phelps & Mills and from 1975-90 at Carlos Bea, A Law Corporation. He taught courses in civil litigation advocacy at Hastings College of Law and Stanford Law School. From 1990 to 2003, Judge Bea served as a judge of the San Francisco Superior Court. He was nominated by President George W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and was confirmed in 2003.
Judge Bea and his wife Louise reside in San Francisco, where they raised their four sons, Sebastian, Alexander, Nicholas, and Dominic.
Garwood Visiting Professor and Visiting Fellow, James Madison Pr, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law
David F. Forte is Professor of Law at Cleveland State University, where he was the inaugural holder of the Charles R. Emrick, Jr.- Calfee Halter & Griswold Endowed Chair. This fall, Professor Forte will be the Garwood Visiting Professor at Princeton University in the Department of Politics, and Visiting Fellow at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He holds degrees from Harvard College, Manchester University, England, the University of Toronto and Columbia University.
During the Reagan administration, Professor Forte served as chief counsel to the United States delegation to the United Nations and alternate delegate to the Security Council. He has authored a number of briefs before the United States Supreme Court, and has frequently testified before the United States Congress and consulted with the Department of State on human rights and international affairs issues. His advice was specifically sought on the approval of the Genocide Convention, on world-wide religious persecution, and Islamic extremism. He has appeared and spoken frequently on radio and television, both nationally and internationally. In 2002, the Department of State sponsored a speaking tour for Professor Forte in Amman, Jordan, and he was also a featured speaker to the Meeting of Peoples in Rimini, Italy, a meeting which gathers over 500,000 people from all over Europe. He has also been called to testify before the state legislatures of Ohio, Kansas, and Idaho as well as the New York City Council. He has assisted in drafting a number of pieces of legislation for the Ohio General Assembly dealing with abortion, international trade, and federalism. He has sat as acting judge on the municipal court of Lakewood Ohio and was chairman of Professional Ethics Committee of the Cleveland Bar Association. He has received a number of awards for his public service, including the Cleveland Bar Association’s President’s Award, the Cleveland State University Award for Distinguished Service, the Cleveland State University Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Alumni Award for Faculty Excellence. He served as Consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Family under Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. In 2003, Dr. Forte was a Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the University of Trento and returned there in 2004 as a Visiting Professor. For the academic year, 2008-2009, Professor Forte was Senior Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion and the Constitution in at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. He was the Robert E. Henderson Constitution Day Lecturer at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, and he has given over 300 invited addresses and papers at more than 100 academic institutions. His work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Professor Forte was a Bradley Scholar at the Heritage Foundation, and Visiting Scholar at the Liberty Fund. He has been President of the Ohio Association of Scholars, was on the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia Society, and is also adjunct Scholar at the Ashbrook Center. He has been appointed to the Ohio State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He has also been a Civil War re-enactor and a Merit Badge Counselor for the Boy Scouts.
He writes and speaks nationally on topics such as constitutional law, religious liberty, Islamic law, the rights of families, and international affairs. He served as book review editor for the American Journal of Jurisprudence and has edited a volume entitled, Natural Law and Contemporary Public Policy, published by Georgetown University Press. His book, Islamic Law Studies: Classical and Contemporary Applications, has been published by Austin & Winfield. He is Senior Editor of The Heritage Guide to the Constitution (2006), 2d edition (2014), published by Regnery & Co, a clause by clause analysis of the Constitution of the United States.
His teaching competencies include Constitutional Law, the First Amendment, Islamic Law, Jurisprudence, Natural Law, International Law, International Human Rights, the Presidency, and Constitutional History.
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.
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.
Dahr Jamail, Randall Hage Jamail and Robert Lee Jamail Regents C, University of Texas School of Law
Professor Rabban served as counsel to the American Association of University Professors for several years before joining the Texas faculty in 1983. He served as General Counsel of the AAUP from 1998 to 2006 and Chair of its Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2006 to 2012. His teaching and research focus on labor law, higher education and the law, and American legal history. He is best known for his path-breaking work on free speech in American history. He is the author of Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870-1920 (Cambridge,1997), which received the Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for "the best book in intellectual history published in 1997." His many articles have appeared in Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review and elsewhere. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. in 1994-95, and has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. His most recent book is Law's History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History.
John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita, New York Law School; Former President, American Civil Liberties Union
Nadine Strossen, New York Law School Professor Emerita and Senior Fellow at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), was national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. An internationally acclaimed free speech scholar and advocate, who regularly addresses diverse audiences and provides media commentary around the world, Strossen is also the Host and Project Consultant for Free To Speak, a 3-hour documentary film series distributed on public television in 2023. Her books about free speech include: Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know® (Oxford University Press 2023); HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press 2018); and Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (Scribner 1995), which was republished with a new Preface in 2024 as part of the NYU Classics Series. Her many honors and awards include the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Judy Blume Lifetime Achievement Award for Free Speech. She serves on the Advisory Boards of several organizations that do free speech work, including: ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), Heterodox Academy, National Coalition Against Censorship, and the University of Austin.
U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit
David Barron was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in May 2014. He graduated from Harvard College in 1989 and Harvard Law School in 1994. From 1989 to 1991, he worked as a newspaper reporter. After graduating from law school, he clerked for Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, from 1994 to 1995, and for Justice John Paul Stevens of the United States Supreme Court, from 1995 to 1996. He then worked as an attorney advisor for the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice, from 1996 to 1999. In 1999, Barron became an Assistant Professor at Harvard Law School. He became a full Professor at Harvard Law School in 2004, where he worked until he rejoined the Justice Department as Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, from 2009 to 2010. He then returned to the Harvard Law School faculty in 2010, where he was named the S. William Green Professor of Public Law in 2011, and worked until his appointment to the federal bench in 2014. Currently, Barron is the Honorable S. William Green Visiting Professor of Public Law at Harvard Law School. Barron has published articles in the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. His book, Waging War, won the 2017 William E. Colby Award.
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.
Of Counsel, Foley Hoag LLP
Former Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is of counsel in Foley Hoag's Litigation Department. She focuses her practice on government and internal investigations, litigation, and data privacy and security. Martha has substantial experience in civil and criminal litigation in all state and federal courts including the U.S. Supreme Court. She has performed extensive grand jury work and defended federal grand juries and has considerable experience conducting complex investigations.
As the first female Attorney General of Massachusetts, Martha has been a national leader in addressing the economic crisis by holding banks accountable and keeping residents in their homes; protected civil rights as the first Attorney General to successfully challenge the Defense of Marriage Act; investigated fraud and corruption; championed major initiatives to address health care and energy costs; and recovered hundreds of millions of dollars back for the taxpayers of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She served as Attorney General from 2007-2015.
Senior Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School
Nancy Gertner is a former U.S. federal judge who built her career around standing up for women’s rights, civil liberties and justice for all. Gertner was appointed to the federal bench of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts by President Bill Clinton in 1994. She retired from the bench in 2011 to teach at Harvard Law School.
Named one of “The Most Influential Lawyers of the Past 25 Years” by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, Gertner has written and spoken throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. She has published widely on sentencing, discrimination, and forensic evidence; women’s rights; and the jury system. Her autobiography, “In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate,” was published in 2011.
She is a graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University, and holds a M.A in Political Science and J.D. from Yale University. She has received numerous awards, including the Margaret Brent Award from the ABA commission on the status of Women, Massachusetts Bar Association’s Hennessey Award for judicial excellence in 2011; the Morton A. Brody Distinguished Judicial Service Award from Colby College in 2010; the National Association of Women Lawyers’ highest honor, the Arabella Babb Mansfield Award, in 2011,The Women's Bar Association's highest award, The Lelia Robinson Award, in 2012, and, in 2008, the Thurgood Marshall Award from the American Bar Association, Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities, which recognized her contributions to advancing human rights and civil liberties. The Marshall award has been given to one other woman, Justice Ruth Ginsburg.
In November 2014, she gave the Pope and John lecture at Northwestern University. In October 2014, she was a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy; In September she gave the keynote address at the 18th Anniversary Celebration of the Jewish Women’s archive (September 14, 2014).
Gertner is presently working on her second book, Incomplete Sentences, concerning the men who she sentenced over her 17 year career as a federal judge. In addition to writing about them, highlighting the unfairness and disproportionality of their sentences, she is assisting in clemency petitions where appropriate.
Drawing on her wide ranging experience in practice and as a judge, Gertner also consults and litigates in civil right cases (she is of counsel to Neufeld, Scheck & Brustin, a civil rights firm in New York City), white collar criminal case (she is of counsel to Fick and Marx, a white collar criminal defense firm in Boston), as well as in employment discrimination and false claims cases.
Drawing on her judicial experience, Gertner engages in mediation and arbitration with Resolutions, LLC. (with Eric Green) and the Southeast Regional Mediation, Arbitration and Compliance Association (with Bill Nettles and Paul Zwier).
U.S. District Court Judge, District of Massachusetts
Nathaniel M. Gorton is a federal judge for the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He joined the court in 1992 after being nominated by President George H.W. Bush. At the time of appointment, he was a private practice in Massachusetts.
Of Counsel, K&L Gates LLP
Mr. Greco is a commercial litigator, arbitrator, mediator and appellate lawyer with more than 40 years of experience in resolving complex business and other disputes throughout the United States and internationally, and in strategically advising business entities and individuals regarding internal and governmental investigations. Mr. Greco is former President of the American Bar Association.
He has represented a wide range of business clients in high stakes commercial litigation and arbitrations, and has served as litigator, arbitrator and mediator in disputes involving for example, national and international financial institutions, national accounting firms, bio-technology firms, architects, engineers, insurers, insureds, professional sports and athletes, intellectual property firms, consulting firms, contractors, real estate developers, national airlines, and corporations and key executives in governmental and internal investigations.
Op-Ed Columnist, The Boston Globe
Jeff Jacoby, who has been a columnist for The Boston Globe since 1994, is a conservative writer with a national reputation.
A native of Cleveland, Jeff has degrees from George Washington University and from Boston University Law School. Before entering journalism, he (briefly) practiced law at the prominent firm of Baker & Hostetler, worked on several political campaigns in Massachusetts, and was an assistant to Dr. John Silber, the president of Boston University. In 1999, Jeff became the first recipient of the Breindel Prize, a major award for excellence in opinion journalism. In 2014, he was included in the “Forward 50,” a list of the most influential American Jews.
Partner, McCarter & English, LLP
Daniel Kelly brings over thirty years of experience to the firm’s government contracts group. His practice combines both counseling and acting as an advocate on behalf of clients doing business in the government marketplace. Dan has knowledge of the government contracting process both on a federal and state level, and the specific laws, regulations, contract clauses and dispute resolution mechanisms in this specialized area. He provides advice and guidance to clients who are in the government supply chain, either as prime contractors, subcontractors or vendors. He reviews government solicitations with clients, prepares proposals, and negotiates teaming arrangements and subcontracts with other suppliers. He helps clients build and enhance their compliance programs. He assists clients in protecting their intellectual property and proprietary information concerning their businesses when doing business with the government. He advocates for clients who wrongfully were passed over for a contract award. He prepares claims arising under government contracts as a result of change orders, delays, and terminations for default or convenience. Dan’s practice extends to a broad spectrum of industries and federal and state authorities for whom they supply research, products and services, including emerging and established biomedical, intelligence, pharma, security, and textile R&D, manufacturing and production houses working under prime and subcontracts, SBIRs, CRADAs, OTAs, and grants for DoD and civilian agencies; Medicare and Medicaid audit and investigation service providers; commercial software developers who modify their software for military applications; professional services providers; and raw materials and component suppliers to large military prime contractors.
Dan is the author of the August 2018 edition Thomson Reuters’ Briefing Papers, which provides a comprehensive review of patent rights under “Other Transaction Agreements” (OTAs) with DoD and NASA. Heavily promoted by Congress, and only partially understood by industry, OTAs are quickly becoming DoD’s and NASA’s contractual vehicle of choice to lure commercial companies to sell the Government their latest and greatest technologies. However, OTAs are not governed by standard government contracts laws and regulations, meaning there are significant changes to the common provisions of ownership and license rights incident to government contracts and grants. The Briefing Paper should be required reading before entities enter into an OTA as a vehicle for developing new technologies for NASA and DoD to ensure their company’s intellectual property efforts are properly protected
In the matters, AdvanceMed Corporation, B-415360,B-415360.2,B-415360.3 (Dec 19, 2017), and AdvanceMed Corporation, B-414373.3 (Jan 10, 2018) Dan and the Government Contracts team at McCarter successfully defended its client Health Integrity, LLC (now Qlarant) against protests launched at the Government Accountability Office challenging awards by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for Medicare and Medicaid audit and program integrity services.
Dan serves on the Board of Directors for NCMA Boston (National Contract Management Association) and NDIA New England (National Defense Industrial Association), and is a frequent speaker at NCMA and NDIA events.
Dan serves as an adjunct member of the faculty at Suffolk University Law School where he has taught Government Contracts.
Dan receives Mentor of the Year Award in recognition of his contributions and support to NCMA Boston Chapter’s 2017-2018 Program Year.
U.S. District Court Judge, District of Massachusetts
Nominated by William J. Clinton on April 4, 1995, to a new seat created by 104 Stat. 5089; Confirmed by the Senate on May 25, 1995, and received commission on May 26, 1995.
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.
Executive Director, ACLU of Massachusetts
Carol Rose is executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts. A lawyer and journalist, Carol has spent her career advocating for human rights and civil liberties both in the United States and abroad, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Japan, Sri Lanka, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Northern Ireland, and Vietnam. Prior to assuming her position at the helm of the ACLU of Massachusetts in January 2003, she worked as an attorney at the Boston law firm of Hill & Barlow, where she specialized in First Amendment and media law, intellectual property, civil rights, and international human rights law. She clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Patti Saris. She holds degrees from Stanford University, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School.
U.S. District Court Judge, District of Massachusetts
Douglas Preston Woodlock is a federal judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He joined the court in 1986 after being nominated by President Ronald Reagan. At the time of appointment, Woodlock served as Chairman of the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services.
U.S. District Court Judge, District of Massachusetts
Rya Weickert Zobel is a federal judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. She joined the court in 1979 after being nominated by President Jimmy Carter. At the time of her appointment, Zobel was a private practice attorney inMassachusetts.
U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit
David Barron was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in May 2014. He graduated from Harvard College in 1989 and Harvard Law School in 1994. From 1989 to 1991, he worked as a newspaper reporter. After graduating from law school, he clerked for Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, from 1994 to 1995, and for Justice John Paul Stevens of the United States Supreme Court, from 1995 to 1996. He then worked as an attorney advisor for the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice, from 1996 to 1999. In 1999, Barron became an Assistant Professor at Harvard Law School. He became a full Professor at Harvard Law School in 2004, where he worked until he rejoined the Justice Department as Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, from 2009 to 2010. He then returned to the Harvard Law School faculty in 2010, where he was named the S. William Green Professor of Public Law in 2011, and worked until his appointment to the federal bench in 2014. Currently, Barron is the Honorable S. William Green Visiting Professor of Public Law at Harvard Law School. Barron has published articles in the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. His book, Waging War, won the 2017 William E. Colby Award.
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.
Of Counsel, Foley Hoag LLP
Former Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is of counsel in Foley Hoag's Litigation Department. She focuses her practice on government and internal investigations, litigation, and data privacy and security. Martha has substantial experience in civil and criminal litigation in all state and federal courts including the U.S. Supreme Court. She has performed extensive grand jury work and defended federal grand juries and has considerable experience conducting complex investigations.
As the first female Attorney General of Massachusetts, Martha has been a national leader in addressing the economic crisis by holding banks accountable and keeping residents in their homes; protected civil rights as the first Attorney General to successfully challenge the Defense of Marriage Act; investigated fraud and corruption; championed major initiatives to address health care and energy costs; and recovered hundreds of millions of dollars back for the taxpayers of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She served as Attorney General from 2007-2015.
Senior Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School
Nancy Gertner is a former U.S. federal judge who built her career around standing up for women’s rights, civil liberties and justice for all. Gertner was appointed to the federal bench of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts by President Bill Clinton in 1994. She retired from the bench in 2011 to teach at Harvard Law School.
Named one of “The Most Influential Lawyers of the Past 25 Years” by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, Gertner has written and spoken throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. She has published widely on sentencing, discrimination, and forensic evidence; women’s rights; and the jury system. Her autobiography, “In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate,” was published in 2011.
She is a graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University, and holds a M.A in Political Science and J.D. from Yale University. She has received numerous awards, including the Margaret Brent Award from the ABA commission on the status of Women, Massachusetts Bar Association’s Hennessey Award for judicial excellence in 2011; the Morton A. Brody Distinguished Judicial Service Award from Colby College in 2010; the National Association of Women Lawyers’ highest honor, the Arabella Babb Mansfield Award, in 2011,The Women's Bar Association's highest award, The Lelia Robinson Award, in 2012, and, in 2008, the Thurgood Marshall Award from the American Bar Association, Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities, which recognized her contributions to advancing human rights and civil liberties. The Marshall award has been given to one other woman, Justice Ruth Ginsburg.
In November 2014, she gave the Pope and John lecture at Northwestern University. In October 2014, she was a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy; In September she gave the keynote address at the 18th Anniversary Celebration of the Jewish Women’s archive (September 14, 2014).
Gertner is presently working on her second book, Incomplete Sentences, concerning the men who she sentenced over her 17 year career as a federal judge. In addition to writing about them, highlighting the unfairness and disproportionality of their sentences, she is assisting in clemency petitions where appropriate.
Drawing on her wide ranging experience in practice and as a judge, Gertner also consults and litigates in civil right cases (she is of counsel to Neufeld, Scheck & Brustin, a civil rights firm in New York City), white collar criminal case (she is of counsel to Fick and Marx, a white collar criminal defense firm in Boston), as well as in employment discrimination and false claims cases.
Drawing on her judicial experience, Gertner engages in mediation and arbitration with Resolutions, LLC. (with Eric Green) and the Southeast Regional Mediation, Arbitration and Compliance Association (with Bill Nettles and Paul Zwier).
U.S. District Court Judge, District of Massachusetts
Nathaniel M. Gorton is a federal judge for the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He joined the court in 1992 after being nominated by President George H.W. Bush. At the time of appointment, he was a private practice in Massachusetts.
Of Counsel, K&L Gates LLP
Mr. Greco is a commercial litigator, arbitrator, mediator and appellate lawyer with more than 40 years of experience in resolving complex business and other disputes throughout the United States and internationally, and in strategically advising business entities and individuals regarding internal and governmental investigations. Mr. Greco is former President of the American Bar Association.
He has represented a wide range of business clients in high stakes commercial litigation and arbitrations, and has served as litigator, arbitrator and mediator in disputes involving for example, national and international financial institutions, national accounting firms, bio-technology firms, architects, engineers, insurers, insureds, professional sports and athletes, intellectual property firms, consulting firms, contractors, real estate developers, national airlines, and corporations and key executives in governmental and internal investigations.
Op-Ed Columnist, The Boston Globe
Jeff Jacoby, who has been a columnist for The Boston Globe since 1994, is a conservative writer with a national reputation.
A native of Cleveland, Jeff has degrees from George Washington University and from Boston University Law School. Before entering journalism, he (briefly) practiced law at the prominent firm of Baker & Hostetler, worked on several political campaigns in Massachusetts, and was an assistant to Dr. John Silber, the president of Boston University. In 1999, Jeff became the first recipient of the Breindel Prize, a major award for excellence in opinion journalism. In 2014, he was included in the “Forward 50,” a list of the most influential American Jews.
Partner, McCarter & English, LLP
Daniel Kelly brings over thirty years of experience to the firm’s government contracts group. His practice combines both counseling and acting as an advocate on behalf of clients doing business in the government marketplace. Dan has knowledge of the government contracting process both on a federal and state level, and the specific laws, regulations, contract clauses and dispute resolution mechanisms in this specialized area. He provides advice and guidance to clients who are in the government supply chain, either as prime contractors, subcontractors or vendors. He reviews government solicitations with clients, prepares proposals, and negotiates teaming arrangements and subcontracts with other suppliers. He helps clients build and enhance their compliance programs. He assists clients in protecting their intellectual property and proprietary information concerning their businesses when doing business with the government. He advocates for clients who wrongfully were passed over for a contract award. He prepares claims arising under government contracts as a result of change orders, delays, and terminations for default or convenience. Dan’s practice extends to a broad spectrum of industries and federal and state authorities for whom they supply research, products and services, including emerging and established biomedical, intelligence, pharma, security, and textile R&D, manufacturing and production houses working under prime and subcontracts, SBIRs, CRADAs, OTAs, and grants for DoD and civilian agencies; Medicare and Medicaid audit and investigation service providers; commercial software developers who modify their software for military applications; professional services providers; and raw materials and component suppliers to large military prime contractors.
Dan is the author of the August 2018 edition Thomson Reuters’ Briefing Papers, which provides a comprehensive review of patent rights under “Other Transaction Agreements” (OTAs) with DoD and NASA. Heavily promoted by Congress, and only partially understood by industry, OTAs are quickly becoming DoD’s and NASA’s contractual vehicle of choice to lure commercial companies to sell the Government their latest and greatest technologies. However, OTAs are not governed by standard government contracts laws and regulations, meaning there are significant changes to the common provisions of ownership and license rights incident to government contracts and grants. The Briefing Paper should be required reading before entities enter into an OTA as a vehicle for developing new technologies for NASA and DoD to ensure their company’s intellectual property efforts are properly protected
In the matters, AdvanceMed Corporation, B-415360,B-415360.2,B-415360.3 (Dec 19, 2017), and AdvanceMed Corporation, B-414373.3 (Jan 10, 2018) Dan and the Government Contracts team at McCarter successfully defended its client Health Integrity, LLC (now Qlarant) against protests launched at the Government Accountability Office challenging awards by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for Medicare and Medicaid audit and program integrity services.
Dan serves on the Board of Directors for NCMA Boston (National Contract Management Association) and NDIA New England (National Defense Industrial Association), and is a frequent speaker at NCMA and NDIA events.
Dan serves as an adjunct member of the faculty at Suffolk University Law School where he has taught Government Contracts.
Dan receives Mentor of the Year Award in recognition of his contributions and support to NCMA Boston Chapter’s 2017-2018 Program Year.
U.S. District Court Judge, District of Massachusetts
Nominated by William J. Clinton on April 4, 1995, to a new seat created by 104 Stat. 5089; Confirmed by the Senate on May 25, 1995, and received commission on May 26, 1995.
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.
Executive Director, ACLU of Massachusetts
Carol Rose is executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts. A lawyer and journalist, Carol has spent her career advocating for human rights and civil liberties both in the United States and abroad, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Japan, Sri Lanka, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Northern Ireland, and Vietnam. Prior to assuming her position at the helm of the ACLU of Massachusetts in January 2003, she worked as an attorney at the Boston law firm of Hill & Barlow, where she specialized in First Amendment and media law, intellectual property, civil rights, and international human rights law. She clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Patti Saris. She holds degrees from Stanford University, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School.
U.S. District Court Judge, District of Massachusetts
Douglas Preston Woodlock is a federal judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He joined the court in 1986 after being nominated by President Ronald Reagan. At the time of appointment, Woodlock served as Chairman of the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services.
U.S. District Court Judge, District of Massachusetts
Rya Weickert Zobel is a federal judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. She joined the court in 1979 after being nominated by President Jimmy Carter. At the time of her appointment, Zobel was a private practice attorney inMassachusetts.
Senior Counsel, Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP
Floyd Abrams is Senior Counsel in Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP's litigation practice group.
Floyd has a national trial and appellate practice and extensive experience in high-visibility matters, often involving First Amendment, securities litigation, intellectual property, public policy and regulatory issues. He has argued frequently in the Supreme Court in cases raising issues as diverse as the scope of the First Amendment, the interpretation of ERISA, the nature of broadcast regulation, the impact of copyright law and the continuing viability of the Miranda rule. Most recently, Floyd prevailed in his argument before the Supreme Court on behalf of Senator Mitch McConnell as amicus curiae, defending the rights of corporations and unions to speak publicly about politics and elections in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Floyd's clients have included The McGraw-Hill Companies in a large number of litigations around the country involving claims against its subsidiary, Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC, The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case and others, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Time Magazine, Business Week, The Nation, Reader's Digest, Hearst, AIG, and others in trials, appeals and investigations.
Floyd has represented Standard & Poor’s in litigations about its ratings; he defended the Brooklyn Museum of Art in its legal battles with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; he represented two of the nation’s largest insurers in litigation under Section 17200 in California and he has frequently testified before congressional committees and prepared clients to do so. In 1998, he represented CNN in investigating and issuing a report on its broadcast accusing the United States of using nerve gas on a military mission in Laos in 1970, and again in 1999 in seeking to persuade the United States Senate to permit the public to view its deliberations as it determined whether or not to convict President Clinton of alleged high crimes and misdemeanors. He represented Nina Totenberg and National Public Radio in the 1992 "leak" investigation conducted by the United States Senate arising out of the confirmation hearing of Justice Clarence Thomas and, in 2004 and 2005, Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper in their efforts to avoid revealing their confidential sources.
In 2006, Floyd was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, an independent research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems advanced by its 4,600 elected members, who are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business and public affairs from around the world. In 2015, Floyd was honored by Yale Law School with its prestigious Award of Merit. Also in 2015, Floyd received the Walter Cronkite Freedom of Information Award presented by the Connecticut Foundation for Open Government. In 2011, Floyd was awarded the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism's Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1998, Floyd was the recipient of the William J. Brennan, Jr. Award for outstanding contribution to public discourse; the Learned Hand Award of the American Jewish Committee; and the Thurgood Marshall Award of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. In November, 1999, he received the William J. Brennan, Jr. award of the Libel Defense Resource Center. Floyd was awarded, in 1997, the Milton S. Gould Award for outstanding appellate advocacy by the Office of the Appellate Defender in New York. Previously he had been awarded the Ross Essay Prize of the American Bar Association for his study of the Ninth Amendment of the United States Constitution. He has also received awards from, among others, the American Jewish Congress, Catholic University, the New York and Philadelphia Chapters of the Society of Professional Journalists, Sigma Delta Chi, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and the National Broadcast Editorial Association.
In November, 2011, Yale Law School announced the formation of The Floyd Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression, whose mission is to promote free speech, scholarship and law reform on emerging questions concerning traditional and new media. Developed in cooperation with Floyd, the Institute includes a clinic for Yale Law students to engage in litigation, draft model legislation, and advise lawmakers and policy makers on issues of media freedom and informational access.
The American Bar Association awarded Floyd its Certificate of Merit for his article published in The New York Times Magazine entitled "The New Effort to Control Information," which was described by the ABA as a "noteworthy contribution to public understanding of the American system of law and justice."
Described by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as "the most significant First Amendment lawyer of our age," Floyd is top-ranked by Chambers USA. He is listed in Who’s Who Legal, Who’s Who in American Law, and has been awarded with Lifetime Achievement Awards by The New York Law Journal and The American Lawyer (2013).
Floyd, who served as chairman of Mayor Edward Koch's Committee on Appointments, New York City, served as the Chairman of the New York State Zenger Commemoration Planning Committee. Previously, he served as the Chairman of the Communications Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, as well as Chairman of the Committee on Freedom of Speech and of the Press of the Individual Rights Section of the American Bar Association and of the Committee on Freedom of Expression of the Litigation Section of the American Bar Association.
He has appeared frequently on television on Nightline, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Charlie Rose and other programs and has published articles and reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Yale Law Journal, The Harvard Law Review, and elsewhere.
Floyd served on the Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee of the U.S. Department of Defense in 2003-4 and as the Chair of the New York State Commission on Public Access to Court Records in 2004.
For fifteen years, Floyd was the William J. Brennan, Jr. Visiting Professor of First Amendment Law at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. He has, as well, been a Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School and Columbia Law School and he is author of Friend of the Court: On the Front Lines with the First Amendment, published by Yale University Press (2013) and Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment, published by Viking Press (2005).
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.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Judge O’Scannlain was appointed United States Circuit Judge for the Ninth Circuit by President Reagan on September 26, 1986. He received a J.D. degree in 1963 from Harvard Law School and a B.A. in 1957 from St. John’s University. He also earned the LL.M. (Judicial Process) degree at University of Virginia Law School in 1992. He was awarded the LL.D. (honoris causa) degree by the University of Notre Dame in 2002, the LL.D. (honoris causa) degree by Lewis & Clark College in 2003 and the LL.D. (honoris causa) degree by the University of Portland in 2011.
As a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Judge O’Scannlain has participated in over 6,000 federal cases and has written hundreds of published opinions on a broad range of subjects including constitutional law, international law, securities law, administrative law, and criminal law. He hears appeals in San Francisco (court headquarters), as well as in Los Angeles (Pasadena), Portland, Seattle, Anchorage and Honolulu. The late Chief Justice Rehnquist appointed Judge O'Scannlain to the Federal Judicial Center's Advisory Committee on Appellate Judge Education. In 2009, Chief Justice Roberts appointed Judge O’Scannlain to the International Judicial Relations Committee of the U.S. Judicial Conference and subsequently appointed him Chairman in 2010.
President George W. Bush appointed Judge O’Scannlain to the Board of Trustees of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation in 2004. Pope Benedict XVI conferred the Order of Saint Gregory the Great on Judge and Mrs. O’Scannlain in 2007.
Judge O’Scannlain’s professional interests also include judicial administration and reform, and continuing legal education. Judge O’Scannlain is former Chair of the Judicial Division of the American Bar Association and has previously chaired the ABA’s Appellate Judges Conference, its Committee on Appellate Practice, and its 9th Appellate Practice Institute. He has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on several occasions, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, and the Commission on Structural Alternatives for the Federal Courts of Appeals on the subject of court reorganization. In addition to serving as a faculty member at numerous federal appellate practice seminars for judges and attorneys, including New York University Law School’s Institute for Judicial Administration, Judge O’Scannlain is an Adjunct Professor at Lewis & Clark Law School where he teaches a seminar on the Supreme Court. He has served as a Moot Court Judge at distinguished law schools across the United States including Harvard, Yale Stanford, Boalt Hall (Berkeley Law), Virginia, Cornell, Notre Dame, Fordham, Alabama, University of Southern California, King Hall (U.C. Davis) and Loyola Marymount University and in China at Xiamen and Renmin Universities.
Between graduation from Harvard and investiture as a federal judge, Judge O’Scannlain was primarily engaged in private law practice. Between 1969 and 1974, he was consecutively the Deputy Attorney General of Oregon, the Public Utility Commissioner of Oregon, and Director of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. He retired from the U.S. Army Reserve in 1978 as a Major after 23 years Reserve and National Guard service, including four years as an enlisted man.
A first generation Irish-American son of immigrant parents from Sligo and Derry, Judge O’Scannlain is married to the former Maura Nolan and has eight children: Sean, Jane, Brendan, Kevin, Megan, Christopher, Anne, and Kate, and nineteen grandchildren. His chambers are in the Pioneer Courthouse in Portland, Oregon.
Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
B.A., Yale; J.D., University of Chicago. Lee Liberman Otis is the Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President at the Federalist Society. She also serves as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference (ACUS), and as the co-chair of the National Constitution Center's Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board. She previously was a special assistant and an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, General Counsel of the Department of Energy, an associate in the appellate section of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, an associate counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and a law clerk to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. She also served as an assistant professor of law at George Mason, where she taught legislation, federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, civil procedure, and appellate advocacy. Ms. Otis has been an important member of the Federalist Society team since the organization’s beginnings. Together with David McIntosh, she led the effort to start what became the Chicago chapter of the Society. She also helped organize the Society’s first conference at Yale, its second conference at Chicago, and its first Lawyers Division chapter in Washington DC, as well as the effort to incorporate the Society, recruit its permanent staff, and obtain its early funding. She was a Founding Director of the Federalist Society.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit
David Stras became a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit on January 31, 2018. Before serving on the Eighth Circuit, Judge Stras was an Associate Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, a position he occupied from July 1, 2010 until his appointment to the Eighth Circuit.
Prior to becoming a judge, Stras was a member of the faculty of the University of Minnesota Law School from 2004 through 2010. He taught and wrote in the areas of federal courts and jurisdiction, constitutional law, criminal law, and law and politics.
Judge Stras received his Bachelor of Arts degree, with highest distinction, in 1995 and his Master of Business Administration in 1999, both from the University of Kansas. He also received his law degree from the University of Kansas School of Law in 1999, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Criminal Procedure Edition of the Kansas Law Review.
Following law school, Stras clerked for The Honorable Melvin Brunetti of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then for The Honorable J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
From 2001 to 2002, he practiced white-collar criminal and appellate litigation with the Washington, D.C., office of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood. Following his year in practice, he clerked for The Honorable Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court of the United States.
John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita, New York Law School; Former President, American Civil Liberties Union
Nadine Strossen, New York Law School Professor Emerita and Senior Fellow at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), was national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. An internationally acclaimed free speech scholar and advocate, who regularly addresses diverse audiences and provides media commentary around the world, Strossen is also the Host and Project Consultant for Free To Speak, a 3-hour documentary film series distributed on public television in 2023. Her books about free speech include: Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know® (Oxford University Press 2023); HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press 2018); and Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (Scribner 1995), which was republished with a new Preface in 2024 as part of the NYU Classics Series. Her many honors and awards include the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Judy Blume Lifetime Achievement Award for Free Speech. She serves on the Advisory Boards of several organizations that do free speech work, including: ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), Heterodox Academy, National Coalition Against Censorship, and the University of Austin.
Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA School of Law
Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), as well as the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA School of Law. He recently retired from teaching at UCLA, after 30 years there, and is now focusing on research.
Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (8th ed. 2023), and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed. 2016), as well as over 100 academic law journal articles, mostly on First Amendment law. He is a member of The American Law Institute; the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Free Speech Law; and the creator and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a leading legal blog founded in 2002 (hosted at the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017 and now at Reason Magazine).
Distinguished Senior Fellow and Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Edward Whelan is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and holds EPPC’s Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies. He is the longest-serving President in EPPC’s history, having held that position from March 2004 through January 2021.
Mr. Whelan directs EPPC’s program on The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture. His areas of expertise include constitutional law and the judicial confirmation process. As a contributor to National Review Online’s Bench Memos blog, he has been a leading commentator on nominations to the Supreme Court and the lower courts and on issues of constitutional law. He has written essays and op-eds for leading newspapers—including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post—opinion journals, and academic symposia and law reviews. The National Law Journal has named Mr. Whelan among its “Champions and Visionaries” in the practice of law in D.C.
Mr. Whelan is co-editor of three volumes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s work: Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived (Crown Forum, 2017), a New York Times bestselling collection of speeches by Justice Scalia; On Faith: Lessons from an American Believer (Crown Forum, 2019), a collection of Justice Scalia’s writings on faith and religion; and The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law (Crown Forum, 2020), a collection of Justice Scalia’s views on legal issues.
Mr. Whelan, a lawyer and a former law clerk to Justice Scalia, has served in positions of responsibility in all three branches of the federal government. From just before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, until joining EPPC in 2004, Mr. Whelan was the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. In that capacity, he advised the White House Counsel’s Office, the Attorney General and other senior DOJ officials, and departments and agencies throughout the executive branch on difficult and sensitive legal questions. Mr. Whelan previously served on Capitol Hill as General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In addition to clerking for Justice Scalia, he was a law clerk to Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
In 1981 Mr. Whelan graduated with honors from Harvard College and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He received his J.D. magna cum laude in 1985 from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Board of Editors of the Harvard Law Review.
For more on Mr. Whelan’s background, see this interview.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Judge Carlos Bea serves as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He received his Bachelor's Degree from Stanford University in 1956 and his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1958. Judge Bea was born in San Sebastian, Spain, and immigrated with his family to Cuba in 1939. In 1952, he represented Cuba on the Cuban National basketball team in the Helsinki Olympics. Judge Bea became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1958. He engaged in private practice in San Francisco, principally in the area of civil trials (jury and non-jury), from 1959-75 at Dunne, Phelps & Mills and from 1975-90 at Carlos Bea, A Law Corporation. He taught courses in civil litigation advocacy at Hastings College of Law and Stanford Law School. From 1990 to 2003, Judge Bea served as a judge of the San Francisco Superior Court. He was nominated by President George W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and was confirmed in 2003.
Judge Bea and his wife Louise reside in San Francisco, where they raised their four sons, Sebastian, Alexander, Nicholas, and Dominic.
Garwood Visiting Professor and Visiting Fellow, James Madison Pr, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law
David F. Forte is Professor of Law at Cleveland State University, where he was the inaugural holder of the Charles R. Emrick, Jr.- Calfee Halter & Griswold Endowed Chair. This fall, Professor Forte will be the Garwood Visiting Professor at Princeton University in the Department of Politics, and Visiting Fellow at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He holds degrees from Harvard College, Manchester University, England, the University of Toronto and Columbia University.
During the Reagan administration, Professor Forte served as chief counsel to the United States delegation to the United Nations and alternate delegate to the Security Council. He has authored a number of briefs before the United States Supreme Court, and has frequently testified before the United States Congress and consulted with the Department of State on human rights and international affairs issues. His advice was specifically sought on the approval of the Genocide Convention, on world-wide religious persecution, and Islamic extremism. He has appeared and spoken frequently on radio and television, both nationally and internationally. In 2002, the Department of State sponsored a speaking tour for Professor Forte in Amman, Jordan, and he was also a featured speaker to the Meeting of Peoples in Rimini, Italy, a meeting which gathers over 500,000 people from all over Europe. He has also been called to testify before the state legislatures of Ohio, Kansas, and Idaho as well as the New York City Council. He has assisted in drafting a number of pieces of legislation for the Ohio General Assembly dealing with abortion, international trade, and federalism. He has sat as acting judge on the municipal court of Lakewood Ohio and was chairman of Professional Ethics Committee of the Cleveland Bar Association. He has received a number of awards for his public service, including the Cleveland Bar Association’s President’s Award, the Cleveland State University Award for Distinguished Service, the Cleveland State University Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Alumni Award for Faculty Excellence. He served as Consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Family under Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. In 2003, Dr. Forte was a Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the University of Trento and returned there in 2004 as a Visiting Professor. For the academic year, 2008-2009, Professor Forte was Senior Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion and the Constitution in at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. He was the Robert E. Henderson Constitution Day Lecturer at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, and he has given over 300 invited addresses and papers at more than 100 academic institutions. His work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Professor Forte was a Bradley Scholar at the Heritage Foundation, and Visiting Scholar at the Liberty Fund. He has been President of the Ohio Association of Scholars, was on the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia Society, and is also adjunct Scholar at the Ashbrook Center. He has been appointed to the Ohio State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He has also been a Civil War re-enactor and a Merit Badge Counselor for the Boy Scouts.
He writes and speaks nationally on topics such as constitutional law, religious liberty, Islamic law, the rights of families, and international affairs. He served as book review editor for the American Journal of Jurisprudence and has edited a volume entitled, Natural Law and Contemporary Public Policy, published by Georgetown University Press. His book, Islamic Law Studies: Classical and Contemporary Applications, has been published by Austin & Winfield. He is Senior Editor of The Heritage Guide to the Constitution (2006), 2d edition (2014), published by Regnery & Co, a clause by clause analysis of the Constitution of the United States.
His teaching competencies include Constitutional Law, the First Amendment, Islamic Law, Jurisprudence, Natural Law, International Law, International Human Rights, the Presidency, and Constitutional History.
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.
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.
Dahr Jamail, Randall Hage Jamail and Robert Lee Jamail Regents C, University of Texas School of Law
Professor Rabban served as counsel to the American Association of University Professors for several years before joining the Texas faculty in 1983. He served as General Counsel of the AAUP from 1998 to 2006 and Chair of its Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2006 to 2012. His teaching and research focus on labor law, higher education and the law, and American legal history. He is best known for his path-breaking work on free speech in American history. He is the author of Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870-1920 (Cambridge,1997), which received the Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for "the best book in intellectual history published in 1997." His many articles have appeared in Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review and elsewhere. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. in 1994-95, and has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. His most recent book is Law's History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History.
John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita, New York Law School; Former President, American Civil Liberties Union
Nadine Strossen, New York Law School Professor Emerita and Senior Fellow at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), was national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. An internationally acclaimed free speech scholar and advocate, who regularly addresses diverse audiences and provides media commentary around the world, Strossen is also the Host and Project Consultant for Free To Speak, a 3-hour documentary film series distributed on public television in 2023. Her books about free speech include: Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know® (Oxford University Press 2023); HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press 2018); and Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (Scribner 1995), which was republished with a new Preface in 2024 as part of the NYU Classics Series. Her many honors and awards include the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Judy Blume Lifetime Achievement Award for Free Speech. She serves on the Advisory Boards of several organizations that do free speech work, including: ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), Heterodox Academy, National Coalition Against Censorship, and the University of Austin.
Senior Legal Fellow, Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law, Advancing American Freedom
U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit
David Barron was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in May 2014. He graduated from Harvard College in 1989 and Harvard Law School in 1994. From 1989 to 1991, he worked as a newspaper reporter. After graduating from law school, he clerked for Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, from 1994 to 1995, and for Justice John Paul Stevens of the United States Supreme Court, from 1995 to 1996. He then worked as an attorney advisor for the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice, from 1996 to 1999. In 1999, Barron became an Assistant Professor at Harvard Law School. He became a full Professor at Harvard Law School in 2004, where he worked until he rejoined the Justice Department as Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, from 2009 to 2010. He then returned to the Harvard Law School faculty in 2010, where he was named the S. William Green Professor of Public Law in 2011, and worked until his appointment to the federal bench in 2014. Currently, Barron is the Honorable S. William Green Visiting Professor of Public Law at Harvard Law School. Barron has published articles in the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. His book, Waging War, won the 2017 William E. Colby Award.
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.
Of Counsel, Foley Hoag LLP
Former Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is of counsel in Foley Hoag's Litigation Department. She focuses her practice on government and internal investigations, litigation, and data privacy and security. Martha has substantial experience in civil and criminal litigation in all state and federal courts including the U.S. Supreme Court. She has performed extensive grand jury work and defended federal grand juries and has considerable experience conducting complex investigations.
As the first female Attorney General of Massachusetts, Martha has been a national leader in addressing the economic crisis by holding banks accountable and keeping residents in their homes; protected civil rights as the first Attorney General to successfully challenge the Defense of Marriage Act; investigated fraud and corruption; championed major initiatives to address health care and energy costs; and recovered hundreds of millions of dollars back for the taxpayers of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She served as Attorney General from 2007-2015.
Senior Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School
Nancy Gertner is a former U.S. federal judge who built her career around standing up for women’s rights, civil liberties and justice for all. Gertner was appointed to the federal bench of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts by President Bill Clinton in 1994. She retired from the bench in 2011 to teach at Harvard Law School.
Named one of “The Most Influential Lawyers of the Past 25 Years” by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, Gertner has written and spoken throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. She has published widely on sentencing, discrimination, and forensic evidence; women’s rights; and the jury system. Her autobiography, “In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate,” was published in 2011.
She is a graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University, and holds a M.A in Political Science and J.D. from Yale University. She has received numerous awards, including the Margaret Brent Award from the ABA commission on the status of Women, Massachusetts Bar Association’s Hennessey Award for judicial excellence in 2011; the Morton A. Brody Distinguished Judicial Service Award from Colby College in 2010; the National Association of Women Lawyers’ highest honor, the Arabella Babb Mansfield Award, in 2011,The Women's Bar Association's highest award, The Lelia Robinson Award, in 2012, and, in 2008, the Thurgood Marshall Award from the American Bar Association, Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities, which recognized her contributions to advancing human rights and civil liberties. The Marshall award has been given to one other woman, Justice Ruth Ginsburg.
In November 2014, she gave the Pope and John lecture at Northwestern University. In October 2014, she was a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy; In September she gave the keynote address at the 18th Anniversary Celebration of the Jewish Women’s archive (September 14, 2014).
Gertner is presently working on her second book, Incomplete Sentences, concerning the men who she sentenced over her 17 year career as a federal judge. In addition to writing about them, highlighting the unfairness and disproportionality of their sentences, she is assisting in clemency petitions where appropriate.
Drawing on her wide ranging experience in practice and as a judge, Gertner also consults and litigates in civil right cases (she is of counsel to Neufeld, Scheck & Brustin, a civil rights firm in New York City), white collar criminal case (she is of counsel to Fick and Marx, a white collar criminal defense firm in Boston), as well as in employment discrimination and false claims cases.
Drawing on her judicial experience, Gertner engages in mediation and arbitration with Resolutions, LLC. (with Eric Green) and the Southeast Regional Mediation, Arbitration and Compliance Association (with Bill Nettles and Paul Zwier).
U.S. District Court Judge, District of Massachusetts
Nathaniel M. Gorton is a federal judge for the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He joined the court in 1992 after being nominated by President George H.W. Bush. At the time of appointment, he was a private practice in Massachusetts.
Of Counsel, K&L Gates LLP
Mr. Greco is a commercial litigator, arbitrator, mediator and appellate lawyer with more than 40 years of experience in resolving complex business and other disputes throughout the United States and internationally, and in strategically advising business entities and individuals regarding internal and governmental investigations. Mr. Greco is former President of the American Bar Association.
He has represented a wide range of business clients in high stakes commercial litigation and arbitrations, and has served as litigator, arbitrator and mediator in disputes involving for example, national and international financial institutions, national accounting firms, bio-technology firms, architects, engineers, insurers, insureds, professional sports and athletes, intellectual property firms, consulting firms, contractors, real estate developers, national airlines, and corporations and key executives in governmental and internal investigations.
Op-Ed Columnist, The Boston Globe
Jeff Jacoby, who has been a columnist for The Boston Globe since 1994, is a conservative writer with a national reputation.
A native of Cleveland, Jeff has degrees from George Washington University and from Boston University Law School. Before entering journalism, he (briefly) practiced law at the prominent firm of Baker & Hostetler, worked on several political campaigns in Massachusetts, and was an assistant to Dr. John Silber, the president of Boston University. In 1999, Jeff became the first recipient of the Breindel Prize, a major award for excellence in opinion journalism. In 2014, he was included in the “Forward 50,” a list of the most influential American Jews.
Partner, McCarter & English, LLP
Daniel Kelly brings over thirty years of experience to the firm’s government contracts group. His practice combines both counseling and acting as an advocate on behalf of clients doing business in the government marketplace. Dan has knowledge of the government contracting process both on a federal and state level, and the specific laws, regulations, contract clauses and dispute resolution mechanisms in this specialized area. He provides advice and guidance to clients who are in the government supply chain, either as prime contractors, subcontractors or vendors. He reviews government solicitations with clients, prepares proposals, and negotiates teaming arrangements and subcontracts with other suppliers. He helps clients build and enhance their compliance programs. He assists clients in protecting their intellectual property and proprietary information concerning their businesses when doing business with the government. He advocates for clients who wrongfully were passed over for a contract award. He prepares claims arising under government contracts as a result of change orders, delays, and terminations for default or convenience. Dan’s practice extends to a broad spectrum of industries and federal and state authorities for whom they supply research, products and services, including emerging and established biomedical, intelligence, pharma, security, and textile R&D, manufacturing and production houses working under prime and subcontracts, SBIRs, CRADAs, OTAs, and grants for DoD and civilian agencies; Medicare and Medicaid audit and investigation service providers; commercial software developers who modify their software for military applications; professional services providers; and raw materials and component suppliers to large military prime contractors.
Dan is the author of the August 2018 edition Thomson Reuters’ Briefing Papers, which provides a comprehensive review of patent rights under “Other Transaction Agreements” (OTAs) with DoD and NASA. Heavily promoted by Congress, and only partially understood by industry, OTAs are quickly becoming DoD’s and NASA’s contractual vehicle of choice to lure commercial companies to sell the Government their latest and greatest technologies. However, OTAs are not governed by standard government contracts laws and regulations, meaning there are significant changes to the common provisions of ownership and license rights incident to government contracts and grants. The Briefing Paper should be required reading before entities enter into an OTA as a vehicle for developing new technologies for NASA and DoD to ensure their company’s intellectual property efforts are properly protected
In the matters, AdvanceMed Corporation, B-415360,B-415360.2,B-415360.3 (Dec 19, 2017), and AdvanceMed Corporation, B-414373.3 (Jan 10, 2018) Dan and the Government Contracts team at McCarter successfully defended its client Health Integrity, LLC (now Qlarant) against protests launched at the Government Accountability Office challenging awards by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for Medicare and Medicaid audit and program integrity services.
Dan serves on the Board of Directors for NCMA Boston (National Contract Management Association) and NDIA New England (National Defense Industrial Association), and is a frequent speaker at NCMA and NDIA events.
Dan serves as an adjunct member of the faculty at Suffolk University Law School where he has taught Government Contracts.
Dan receives Mentor of the Year Award in recognition of his contributions and support to NCMA Boston Chapter’s 2017-2018 Program Year.
U.S. District Court Judge, District of Massachusetts
Nominated by William J. Clinton on April 4, 1995, to a new seat created by 104 Stat. 5089; Confirmed by the Senate on May 25, 1995, and received commission on May 26, 1995.
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.
Executive Director, ACLU of Massachusetts
Carol Rose is executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts. A lawyer and journalist, Carol has spent her career advocating for human rights and civil liberties both in the United States and abroad, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Japan, Sri Lanka, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Northern Ireland, and Vietnam. Prior to assuming her position at the helm of the ACLU of Massachusetts in January 2003, she worked as an attorney at the Boston law firm of Hill & Barlow, where she specialized in First Amendment and media law, intellectual property, civil rights, and international human rights law. She clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Patti Saris. She holds degrees from Stanford University, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School.
U.S. District Court Judge, District of Massachusetts
Douglas Preston Woodlock is a federal judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He joined the court in 1986 after being nominated by President Ronald Reagan. At the time of appointment, Woodlock served as Chairman of the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services.
U.S. District Court Judge, District of Massachusetts
Rya Weickert Zobel is a federal judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. She joined the court in 1979 after being nominated by President Jimmy Carter. At the time of her appointment, Zobel was a private practice attorney inMassachusetts.
Showcase Panel IV: ROUNDTABLE: Areas of Constitutional Doctrine Transformed
Floyd Abrams, Michael W. McConnell, Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain, Lee Liberman Otis, David R. Stras, Nadine Strossen, Eugene Volokh, Edward Whelan
The final Showcase panel examines Justice Scalia's transformation of five very important areas of Supreme...
Showcase Panel IV: ROUNDTABLE: Areas of Constitutional Doctrine Transformed
2016 National Lawyers Convention
Washington, DCFree Speech & Election Law: Originalism and the First Amendment
Carlos T. Bea, David F. Forte, Erik S. Jaffe, Michael W. McConnell, David Rabban, Nadine Strossen
Has Originalism played a significant role in the Supreme Court's free speech jurisprudence? One scholar...
Free Speech & Election Law: Originalism and the First Amendment
Carlos T. Bea, David F. Forte, Erik S. Jaffe, Michael W. McConnell, David Rabban, Nadine Strossen
Has Originalism played a significant role in the Supreme Court's free speech jurisprudence? One scholar...
Free Speech & Election Law: Originalism and the First Amendment
2016 National Lawyers Convention
Washington, DCGovernor McAuliffe's Felon Voting Initiative: Important Policy Change or Executive Overreach?
Shakespeare & the Law: Julius Caesar
David Barron, Jennifer C. Braceras, Martha Coakley, David French, Nancy Gertner, Nathaniel M. Gorton, Michael Greco, Jeff Jacoby, Daniel J. Kelly, George O'Toole, Dean Reuter, Carol Rose, F Saylor, Douglas P. Woodlock, Rya W. Zobel
Julius Caesar is Shakespeare’s classic depiction of the abuse of power, political assassination and intrigue –...
Shakespeare & the Law: Julius Caesar
David Barron, Jennifer C. Braceras, Martha Coakley, David French, Nancy Gertner, Nathaniel M. Gorton, Michael Greco, Jeff Jacoby, Daniel J. Kelly, George O'Toole, Dean Reuter, Carol Rose, F Saylor, Douglas P. Woodlock, Rya W. Zobel
Julius Caesar is Shakespeare’s classic depiction of the abuse of power, political assassination and intrigue –...
Shakespeare & the Law: Julius Caesar
Boston Lawyers Chapter
Boston, MATopics
(Temporary?) Reprieve for Students at California Religious Colleges
Students at California’s religious colleges have dodged a very large caliber bullet . . ....