Founder and Principal, Johnson-IP Strategy & Consulting
Philip S. Johnson is Founder and Principal of Johnson-IP Strategy & Consulting. He previously served as Senior Vice President - Law Department and Chief Intellectual Property Counsel of Johnson & Johnson, having joined the corporation in January 2000 after 27 years in private practice. In this position, he managed about 110 patent and trademark attorneys worldwide. Phil is Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Intellectual Property Law Education Foundation, Vice President and President Elect of the Intellectual Property Owners Association, and a member of the Board of the Intellectual Property Owners Association Education Foundation (Past President). He is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Coalition for 21st Century Patent Reform, of the Association of Corporate Patent Counsel (Past President) and of PhRMA’s IP Focus Group (Chair Emeritus). Previously, Phil served as President of INTERPAT.
Before joining Johnson & Johnson, Phil was a senior partner and co-chair of IP litigation at Woodcock Washburn in Philadelphia, where he specialized in intellectual property issues affecting major pharmaceutical, medical device and consumer product companies. Phil has served as trial counsel in over 100 patent cases, including over 50 resulting in reported decisions of the federal district courts and/or of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. Phil regularly testifies before both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on the subject of patent law reform and, more recently, abusive patent litigation. Phil served as a member of Chief Judge Michel’s Advisory Council on Patent Reform, and was recognized in the Congressional Record as a member of the Minority Whip’s “Kitchen Cabinet” for the America Invents Act. Thereafter, Phil served as IPO’s representative on the ABA-AIPLA-IPO committee of six experts (“COSE”) formed at Director Kappos’ request to propose to the USPTO implementing regulations for the PGR-IPR post-grant proceedings created by the AIA.
Phil co-authored “Compensatory Damages Issues In Patent Infringement Cases, A Pocket Guide for Federal District Court Judges,” published by the Federal Judicial Center, and has served that Center as a faculty member on its IP-related judicial education programming. Phil was also featured in the Landslide Publication March/April 2013 issue. The New Jersey Intellectual Property Law Association awarded Phil with its 2013 Jefferson Medal, presented on June 7, 2013.
Phil received his Bachelor of Science degree, cum laude with distinction in biology from Bucknell University, and his J.D. degree from Harvard Law School, where his third year advisor was now-Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Adam Mossoff is Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. He has published extensively on why patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property rights have been—and should be—legally secured to innovators and creators as property rights. His scholarship has been relied on by the United States Supreme Court, by lower federal courts, and by U.S. federal agencies. He has been invited to testify numerous times before the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives on intellectual property legislation. His writings on intellectual property policy have also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Investors Business Daily, and in other media outlets. His journal articles can be downloaded here.
Professor Mossoff is a longstanding member of the Executive Committee of the Intellectual Property Practice Group of the Federalist Society, on which he served as Chairperson from 2016-2018, and he is Chair of the Intellectual Property Working Group of the Regulatory Transparency Project of the Federalist Society. He is a Senior Fellow and Chair of the Forum for Intellectual Property at the Hudson Institute, a Visiting Intellectual Property Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Intellectual Property Understanding. He is a member of the Intellectual Property Rights Policy Committee of ANSI and he has served as Chair and Vice-Chair of the Intellectual Property Committee of the IEEE-USA, on which he remains a member in good standing.
Dana Rao is the Vice President of Intellectual Property and Litigation at Adobe Systems. He oversees all aspects of Adobe’s intellectual property and litigation matters, including procuring, licensing, and defending Adobe’s patents, trademarks, and copyrights, and managing all aspects of Adobe’s litigation practice.
Before Adobe, Dana was an Associate General Counsel of Patents at Microsoft Corporation, focusing on their Windows Phone and Xbox patent issues. Dana began his legal career at Fenwick & West, focusing on patent prosecution, licensing, and litigation. Dana received his undergraduate degree from Villanova University in Electrical Engineering, and received his law degree from The George Washington University School of Law, where he graduated Order of the Coif.
Partner, Fenwick & West LLP
Robert Sachs is President at Robert R. Sachs PC and concentrates his practice on strategic patent counseling and prosecution for software technologies. Bob has extensive experience in developing patent portfolios for companies of all sizes, from startups to multi-nationals.
He is the primary evaluator for standards essential patents on today's most important audio, video, and communications technologies, including 3GPP-LTE, IEEE 802.11, MPEG-4 AAC, DVB-MHP, OCAP, Digital Radio Mondiale, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, AMR-WB+, G.711, G.729, AGORA-C, and NFC-IP. He conducts and supervises patent evaluations in US, as well as Europe, Japan, China, South Korea, Mexico and Canada.
One of Bob’s areas of expertise is patentable subject matter: the question of what kinds of inventions are eligible for patent protection, and particularly whether software and life sciences related inventions are patentable. This issue has become the new battleground in the development of the patent law, with several important cases having been recently decided by the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. While most authors and scholars take a results-oriented approach to this question, Bob instead starts with the first principles of creativity and innovation that drive humans to solve functional problems. From that understanding, software and life sciences inventions are squarely in the domain of what the patent law is designed to protect.
Assistant Professor of Law, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School
Caroline Cecot is an Assistant Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. She teaches environmental and administrative law and has published articles in peer-reviewed journals and law reviews on cost-benefit analysis, regulatory reform, and environmental regulation.
Professor Cecot holds a JD from Vanderbilt Law School, where she received the Robert F. Jackson and Archie B. Martin Memorial Prizes for her grades; was elected to Order of the Coif; and served as Senior Articles Editor for the Vanderbilt Law Review and Articles Editor for the Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review. Professor Cecot also holds a PhD in law and economics from Vanderbilt University. Following her graduate studies, Professor Cecot was the Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Law and Economics at Vanderbilt Law School and clerked for the Honorable Raymond J. Lohier, Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She was also Legal Fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, where she authored amicus curiae briefs and submitted comments on environmental and regulatory issues. Professor Cecot graduated from Harvard College magna cum laude with an AB degree in economics.
J. B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law, George Washington University Law School
Robert L. Glicksman is a nationally and internationally recognized expert on environmental, natural resources, and administrative law issues. A graduate of the Cornell Law School, his areas of expertise include environmental, natural resources, administrative, and property law. Before joining the law school faculty in 2009, Professor Glicksman taught at the University of Kansas School of Law, where he joined the faculty in 1982 and was named the holder of the Robert W. Wagstaff Distinguished Professor of Law in 1995. Professor Glicksman has practiced with law firms in DC and New Jersey before joining and while on leave from academia, focusing on environmental, energy, and administrative law issues. He has consulted on various environmental and natural resources law issues, including work for the Secretariat of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation in Montreal, Canada.
Professor Glicksman has extensive publications in his areas of expertise. He is co-author of two law school casebooks, Environmental Protection: Law and Policy (6th ed. Aspen Publishers) and Administrative Law: Agency Action in Legal Context (Foundation Press); the four-volume treatise, Public Natural Resources Law (2d ed. Thomson/West); two monographs, Risk Regulation at Risk: A Pragmatic Approach, and Pollution Limits and Polluters’ Efforts to Comply: The Role of Government Monitoring and Enforcement, both published by Stanford University Press); and Modern Public Land Law in a Nutshell (3d ed. West). He has written numerous book chapters and articles on a variety of environmental and natural resources law topics, concentrating recently on topics such as climate change, federalism issues in environmental law, the challenges facing the federal land management agencies, and environmental enforcement. His articles have been published in law reviews and journals that include the Texas Law Review, Pennsylvania Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Vanderbilt Law Review, the Wake Forest Law Review, the Indiana Law Journal, the Stanford Environmental Law Journal, the Virginia Environmental Law Journal, and the Administrative Law Review.
Professor Glicksman has been a member scholar for the Center for Progressive Reform since 2002 and a member of the Center’s Board of Directors since 2008.
Founding Partner, Boyden Gray & Associates
Ambassador C. Boyden Gray is the founding partner of Boyden Gray & Associates, a law and strategy firm in Washington, D.C., focused on constitutional and regulatory issues.
Mr. Gray worked in the White House for twelve years, first as counsel to the Vice President during the Reagan administration and then as White House Counsel to President George H.W. Bush. In the Reagan administration, he was Counsel to the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief, for which he wrote the original Executive Order 12291 requiring cost-benefit analysis and White House review of regulations (later renumbered as current EO 12866). In the George H.W. Bush Administration, Mr. Gray was in charge of judicial selection and was also instrumental in the enactment of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, the Energy Policy Act of 1992, and a cap-and-trade system for acid rain emissions. In 1993, he received the Presidential Citizens Medal. Under President George W. Bush, Mr. Gray was U.S. Ambassador to the European Union and U.S. Special Envoy to Europe for Eurasian Energy.
Mr. Gray practiced law for 25 years at the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and was chairman of the Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section of the American Bar Association from 2000 to 2002. Early in his career, Mr. Gray helped to develop the Business Roundtable and served as its first counsel. He is an adjunct professor at Antonin Scalia Law School and a former adjunct professor at NYU Law School (teaching energy and environmental law). Mr. Gray is on the Board of Directors of the Atlantic Council, the Federalist Society, Reason Foundation, and the Trust for the National Mall.
Mr. Gray earned his A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard, where he was an editor of the Crimson, and his J.D. with high honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was editor-in-chief of the Law Review. Mr. Gray served in the United States Marine Corps, and after law school, he clerked for Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
Professor of Law, Jacksonville University College of Law
Nathan Richardson is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina School of Law and a Visiting Fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF). Previously, he served as a Resident Scholar at RFF and managing editor of the blog Common Resources.
His areas of expertise and research encompass a wide range of environmental and energy issues, including U.S. climate policy (particularly regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act), state and local regulation of oil and gas development (including hydraulic fracturing), the evolution of the electric utility sector, and the management of forests, particularly in the Southeast. Other interests include law and economics and European environmental and energy policy. His research has examined environmental liability, environmental federalism, and the relationship between law, regulatory institutions, and policy design.
Professor Richardson earned a B.S. from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and earned his J.D. cum laude from the University of Chicago, where he served as Articles Editor of the Chicago Journal of International Law. Professor Richardson is licensed to practice law in California and the District of Columbia.
Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; Co-Director, Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State
Adam J. White is the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State.
Mr. White practiced constitutional and administrative law, particularly in the regulation of energy and financial markets. He started his legal career as a law clerk for Judge David B. Sentelle at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
Mr. White has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Affairs, Commentary, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and Notre Dame Law Review, among other publications. He is a regular contributor to the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice and Comment blog, and for many years, he was one of the Weekly Standard’s lead writers on constitutional law and the Supreme Court.
Mr. White has testified often before Congress, including before the Senate’s Committees on the Judiciary; Commerce, Science, and Transportation; and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and before the House’s Judiciary and Financial Services Committees. In 2018, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary called him to testify in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings to advise senators on Kavanaugh’s approach to administrative law.
In 2021, he served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, where he criticized “Court packing” and other efforts to restructure the Supreme Court. In 2017, he was appointed to serve on the Administrative Conference of the United States. He also serves on the leadership council for the American Bar Association’s Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section, which he will chair in 2023–24. Before joining AEI, he was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Mr. White has a JD from Harvard Law School and a bachelor of business administration from the College of Business at the University of Iowa.
Associate Professor of Law and Director, Program on Economics & Privacy, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Associate Professor of Law James C. Cooper brings over a decade of public and private sector experience to his research and teaching. He served as Deputy and Acting Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Office of Policy Planning, Advisor to Federal Trade Commissioner William Kovacic, and an associate in the antitrust group of Crowell and Moring, LLP. His research on vertical restraints, price discrimination, behavioral economics and antitrust, and privacy policy have appeared in top journals and are widely cited.
Professor Cooper has a BA from the University of South Carolina, received his PhD in economics from Emory University, and his law degree (magna cum laude) from Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, where he was a Levy Fellow and a member of the George Mason Law Review.
He teaches Economics for Lawyers, Advanced Seminar on Law & Economics, and Digital Information Policy Seminar.
Senior Vice President for Legal Studies, Cato Institute
Clark Neily is senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute. His areas of interest include constitutional law, overcriminalization, civil forfeiture, police accountability, and gun rights. Neily is the author of Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and National Review Online, as well as various law reviews, including the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, George Mason Law Review, Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, NYU Journal of Law and Liberty, and Texas Review of Law and Politics. Neily is a frequent guest speaker and lecturer for the Federalist Society, Institute for Humane Studies, and American Constitution Society.
Before joining Cato in 2017, Neily was a senior attorney and constitutional litigator at the Institute for Justice and director of the Institute’s Center for Judicial Engagement. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law, where he teaches constitutional litigation and public-interest law.
Neily served as co-counsel in District of Columbia v. Heller, the historic case in which the Supreme Court held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun for self-defense.
Neily began his legal career as a law clerk to Judge Royce Lamberth on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. After that he spent four years in the trial department of the Dallas-based firm Thompson & Knight. Neily received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Texas, where he was Chief Articles Editor of the Texas Law Review.
Policy Director, The Hamilton Project; Fellow in Economic Studies, Brookings Institution
Ryan Nunn is a fellow in Economic Studies and policy director for the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. Prior to joining Brookings, Nunn worked at the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the Office of Economic Policy. Nunn also teaches at the University of Maryland.
Nunn earned his Ph.D. in economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interests include labor economics and public finance, with a particular focus on labor market institutions.
Regulation Fellow, Penn Program on Regulation, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Gabe Scheffler is a Regulation Fellow in the Penn Program on Regulation. His research focuses primarily on health law and policy, occupational regulation, and administrative law. Before joining Penn Law School, he was a Staff Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers and a research assistant at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for International Development.
Associate Professor of Law and Director of Economic Education at the Global Antitrust Institute, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School
John M. Yun is an Associate Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, and the Director of Economic Education at the Global Antitrust Institute (GAI). Prior to joining Scalia Law, he was an Acting Deputy Assistant Director in the Bureau of Economics, Antitrust Division, at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). He has also taught economics at Georgetown University, Emory University, and Georgia Tech. He received his BA in economics at UCLA and his PhD in economics at Emory University.
Adjunct Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Gregory Conko is an Adjunct Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Vice President of Programs at DonorsTrust. His research at CEI focuses on health care, food and drug regulation, agriculture and agricultural trade, and nutrition and public health. He also has broad expertise in science and environmental policy and in administrative and regulatory law.
Since 2021, Conko has managed the grants and grantee programs at the donor-advised fund sponsor DonorsTrust, but he continues to research and write on policy matters for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Before joining DonorsTrust, Conko was Deputy Director of the George Mason University Law & Economics Center, a Senior Fellow and later Executive Director of CEI.
Conko is the author or co-author of numerous books, studies, and articles, and Barron’s called his book, The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution, co-authored with Henry I. Miller, one of the 25 best books of 2004. His other writings have appeared in such journals as Nature Biotechnology, Transgenic Research, Health Matrix: Journal of Law & Medicine, and the Cumberland Law Review, and in such newspapers as the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today.
Conko is a member of the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project Working Group on FDA & Health, a member of the American Council on Science and Health’s Board of Scientific and Policy Advisors. He received a JD degree magna cum laude from the George Mason University School of Law and a BA in political science and history from American University. He lives in Virginia with his wife and son.
Senior Counsel, Covington & Burling LLP and Founder & Chair, Common Good
Philip K. Howard is a well-known leader of government and legal reform in America. He is Chair of Common Good and a bestselling author, and has advised both parties on needed reforms. In his new book, Not Accountable (Rodin Books, 2023), he argues that public employee unions undermine democratic governance and should be unconstitutional.
Philip is the author of the bestseller The Death of Common Sense (Random House, 1995), The Collapse of the Common Good (Ballantine Books, 2002), Life Without Lawyers (W.W. Norton, 2009), The Rule of Nobody (W.W. Norton, 2014), and Try Common Sense (W.W. Norton, 2019). His commentaries are published frequently in major media outlets.
In 2002, Philip formed Common Good, a nonpartisan coalition dedicated to simplifying laws so that Americans can use common sense in daily choices. His 2010 TED Talk has been viewed by more than 750,000 people. His 2015 report, “Two Years, Not Ten Years,” exposed the economic and environmental costs of delayed infrastructure approvals, and its proposals have since been incorporated into federal law. Philip has appeared often on television and radio, including several times on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.”
The son of a minister, Philip got his start working summers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner. He has been active in public affairs his entire adult life. He is Senior Counsel at the law firm Covington & Burling, LLP. A graduate of Yale College and the University of Virginia Law School, Philip lives in Manhattan with his wife Alexandra. They have four children.
Clinical Professor and Senior Scholar and Senior Fellow for Copyright Research and Policy of C-IP2, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Sandra Aistars is Senior Fellow for Copyright Research and Policy and a Senior Scholar at the Center for Intellectual Property x Innovation Policy (C-IP2). She also leads the law school’s Arts & Entertainment Advocacy Program. Professor Aistars has over twenty years of advocacy experience on behalf of copyright and other intellectual property owners. She has served on trade missions and been an industry advisor to the Department of Commerce on intellectual property implications for international trade negotiations; worked on legislative and regulatory matters worldwide; frequently testified before Congress and federal agencies regarding intellectual property matters; chaired cross-industry coalitions and technology standards efforts; and is regularly tapped by government agencies to lecture in U.S. government-sponsored study tours for visiting legislators, judges, prosecutors, and regulators.
Immediately prior to joining Scalia Law, Professor Aistars was the Chief Executive Officer of the Copyright Alliance – a nonprofit, public interest organization that represents the interests of artists and creators across the creative spectrum. While at Scalia Law, she continues to collaborate with the Copyright Alliance as a member of its Academic Advisory Board. Professor Aistars currently serves on the boards of the Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts (WALA) and the Howard Intellectual Property Program (HIPP), and she has previously served as trustee of the Copyright Society of the USA (CSUSA). Professor Aistars has also previously served as Vice President and Associate General Counsel at Time Warner Inc. She began her legal career in private practice at Weil, Gotshal and Manges LLP.
Partner, Steptoe & Johnson LLP
Stewart Baker is a partner in the law firm of Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C. From 2005 to 2009, he was the first Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security. His law practice covers cybersecurity, data protection, homeland security, and travel and foreign investment regulation; he has been awarded one patent.
Mr. Baker has been General Counsel of the National Security Agency and General Counsel of the commission that investigated WMD intelligence failures prior to the Iraq war. He is the author of Skating on Stilts, a book on terrorism, cybersecurity, and other technology issues; he also hosts the weekly Cyberlaw Podcast.
Senior Counsel, Electronic Privacy Information Center
Alan Butler is Senior Counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, DC. In that capacity, Mr. Butler manages EPIC's litigation, including the Amicus Program, and files briefs in emerging privacy and civil liberties cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and other appellate courts. Mr. Butler has argued on behalf of EPIC in privacy and open government cases in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the Third Circuit, and the Supreme Courts of New Mexico and New Jersey. Mr. Butler has authored briefs on behalf of EPIC in significant privacy cases, including an amicus brief in Riley v. California that was cited in the Supreme Court's unanimous opinion upholding Fourth Amendment protections for cell phones. He has also authored briefs on national security, open government, workplace privacy, and consumer privacy issues. Mr. Butler is also Chair of the Privacy and Information Protection Committee of the ABA Section on Civil Rights and Social Justice. He is co-author of the most recent edition of Communications Law and Policy: Cases and Materials and has also published several articles on emerging privacy issues, including: Products Liability and the Internet of (Insecure) Things: Should Manufacturers Be Liable for Damage Caused by Hacked Devices?, Get a Warrant: The Supreme Court's New Course for Digital Privacy Rights after Riley v. California, Standing Up to Clapper: How to Increase Transparency and Oversight of FISA Surveillance, and When Cyberweapons End Up on Private Networks: Third Amendment Implications for Cybersecurity Policy. Mr. Butler is a graduate of UCLA School of Law and Washington University in St. Louis, where he earned a B.A. in Economics. He is a frequent speaker and commentator on cybersecurity, consumer privacy, and surveillance law issues.
Senior Fellow and Academic Director, Penn Carey Law School
Gus Hurwitz is a Senior Fellow and the Academic Director of the Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School where he is working to develop academic and scholarly programs at the intersecution of law, technology, and policy.
He is also Director of Law & Economics Programs at the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE), a think tank based in Portland, Oregon, where he directs its law and economics-focused research program and helps to translate academic research into applied policy issues.
Hurwitz's research focuses on the regulation of technology, including administrative and regulatory law, antitrust law, torts and products liability, and media law - alongside cognate fields. Inrecent years he has worked on an AI standardization initiative with Seoul National University, a UNICEF-organized study of broadband deployment to public schools in Rwanda, and a book on conglomerate and ecosystems theories of antitrust.
He has published over 30 articles and book chapters, two books (one on cybersecurity law & policy, one on media regulation in the digital era) and have two more in process, over 100 shorter writings (op-eds, shorter analyses, blog posts, &c), hosted over 100 podcast episodes, and regularly appear or am quoted in popular media (including the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Associated Press). His work has been cited by legislators, federal courts of appeals, and federal regulatory agencies.
He was previously a full professor and founding director of the Governance & Technology Center at the University of Nebraska, prior to which he was the inaugural research fellow at the Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition (CTIC). From 2007 to 2010, he was a trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division in the Telecommunications and Media Enforcement Section.
He also is, or has been, affiliated with the Classical Liberal Institute at New York University School of Law, the National Security Institute at George Mason University, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
Before attending law school, Hurwitz worked at Los Alamos National Lab and interned at the Naval Research Lab. During this time his work was recognized by the Federal Laboratory Consortium, Los Alamos National Lab, IEEE & ACM, Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, R&D Magazine, and even the Guinness Book of World Records.
A current list of Hurwitz’s publications is available on his website: GusHurwitz.net.
Senior Counsel and Director of Strategy, Future of Privacy Forum
Brenda Leong, CIPP/US, is Senior Counsel and Director of Strategy at the Future of Privacy Forum. She oversees strategic planning of organizational goals, as well as managing the FPF portfolio on biometrics, particularly facial recognition, along with the ethics and privacy issues associated with artificial intelligence. She works on industry standards and collaboration on privacy concerns, by partnering with stakeholders and advocates to reach practical solutions to the privacy challenges for consumer and commercial data uses. Prior to working at FPF, Brenda served in the U.S. Air Force, including policy and legislative affairs work from the Pentagon and the U.S. Department of State. She is a 2014 graduate of George Mason University School of Law.
Founding Partner, Cooper & Kirk PLLC
Charles J. Cooper is a founding member and the chairman of Cooper & Kirk, PLLC, “one of the Nation’s leading litigation boutiques” (Above The Law 2017). The National Law Journal recently wrote that Mr. Cooper’s “brilliant legal career has so far spanned five decades and thrust Cooper into the spotlight in some of the most historic moments of the country’s modern history.” He has argued nine cases before the United States Supreme Court and scores of appeals before each of the 13 federal courts of appeals and several state supreme courts. He has been lead trial counsel in numerous complex, weeks-long trials in federal courts throughout the country. Named by the National Law Journal as one of the 10 best litigators in Washington D.C., Mr. Cooper’s work has been reported in numerous press accounts, and he has been called a “powerhouse attorney” (Fortune 2015), “a hard-nosed litigator” (Washington Post 2017), and “one of the country’s most in-demand civil litigators and a Washington legal institution unto himself” (The American Spectator 2014).
After graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1977, where he ranked first in his class and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Alabama Law Review, Mr. Cooper began his career as a law clerk to Judge Paul Roney on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and to Justice William H. Rehnquist in 1978–79. He then practiced law in Atlanta for two years before joining the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of, among other things, appellate matters. In 1985 President Reagan appointed him to the position of Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, which is the office responsible for providing legal opinions and advice to the White House, the Attorney General, and Executive Branch departments and agencies on issues covering the full spectrum of federal constitutional, statutory, and regulatory law.
In 1988 he returned to private practice as a litigation partner in the Washington, D.C. office of McGuireWoods. From 1990 until the founding of Cooper & Kirk in 1996, he was a partner at Shaw Pittman (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman), where he headed the firm’s Constitutional and Government Litigation Group.
Mr. Cooper has represented a wide range of public and private clients in highly complex constitutional, civil rights, antitrust, healthcare, banking, intellectual property, elections, campaign finance, administrative, commercial, and government contract cases. He has led trial teams in cases that have won judgments and settlements valued in the billions of dollars and that have established ground-breaking constitutional precedents.
Much of Mr. Cooper’s practice has involved representing high-profile clients in nationally prominent matters, including: the State of Florida in a First Amendment suit brought by the Disney Company concerning its autonomous regulatory authority over its Disney World property; the Commonwealth of Virginia in a suit seeking to enjoin the removal of noncitizens from its voter rolls; 38 members of the Duke Lacrosse team falsely accused of rape by officials of Duke University and the City of Durham; Harper Lee in a copyright dispute with the heirs of Gregory Peck; high-ranking former government officials such as former Attorneys General John Ashcroft, Jeff Sessions, and William Barr, and Ambassador John Bolton; several Governors and United States Senators; over 100 Members of Congress; and many state, territorial, and local government bodies and officials. He has also represented and advised government officials and public figures in connection with sensitive private issues that needed to be, and were, resolved discreetly without becoming matters of public record.
In 1998 Chief Justice Rehnquist appointed Mr. Cooper to the Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Judicial Conference of the United States, where he served for three terms. He also served as a Public Member, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, of the National Commission on Judicial Discipline and Removal. He is a member of numerous professional associations, including the American Law Institute (since 1993) and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers (since 1996). He is also an active member of the Federalist Society and the Republican National Lawyers Association, which in 2010 named him Republican Lawyer of the Year and in 2016 honored him with its Edwin Meese III Award.
Mr. Cooper has published scores of articles and spoken extensively on constitutional and legal policy topics. He has appeared before congressional committees on 26 occasions, testifying as an expert on a wide variety of legal issues, including the Chevron doctrine of judicial deference to administrative agencies, the diversity of citizenship jurisdiction of federal courts, statehood bills for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, and the impeachment of President Clinton.
Founding Principal, Gupta Wessler PLLC
Deepak Gupta is the founding principal of Gupta Wessler PLLC. He focuses on Supreme Court, appellate, and complex litigation on a wide range of issues, including constitutional law, class actions, and consumers’ and workers’ rights.
Deepak is “known as a skilled appellate lawyer” (New York Times), “one of the emerging giants of the appellate and the Supreme Court bar,” a “heavy hitter,” and a “principled” and “incredibly talented lawyer” (Law 360). He is described in Chambers and Partners USA as “an excellent lawyer” with a “vibrant appellate practice focused on public interest cases and plaintiff-side representations.” Fastcase recently recognized him as “one of the country’s top litigators,” noting that “what sets him apart” is his legal creativity. The National Law Journal has singled out Deepak’s “calm, comfortable manner that conveys confidence” in oral argument.
Deepak regularly appears in the U.S. Supreme Court and appellate courts nationwide. In the 2016-2017 U.S. Supreme Court term, Deepak’s firm was counsel of record for parties in three merits cases; he was lead counsel in two, prevailing in both. Beyond the Supreme Court, Deepak has handled appeals in every federal circuit and seven state supreme courts. He is frequently sought out by trial lawyers to defend their most consequential victories or resurrect worthy claims on appeal—often after years of hard-fought litigation. He also works with co-counsel to design cases from the ground up—focusing on class actions and administrative and constitutional challenges. In one class action, Deepak represented all of the nation’s federal bankruptcy judges, recovering more than $50 million in back pay for the judges over Congress’s violation of the Constitution’s Judicial Compensation Clause. As the American Lawyer observed, “it’s hard to imagine a higher compliment than being hired to represent federal judges.”
Deepak’s clients have included national nonprofits, state and local governments, members of Congress, retail merchants, tech companies, and classes of consumers and workers harmed by corporate wrongdoing. He currently represents the American Association for Justice (on forced arbitration and civil justice issues), Everytown for Gun Safety (in Second Amendment litigation), and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (in litigation over the Emoluments Clauses).
Before founding the firm in 2012, Deepak served as Senior Counsel for Litigation and Senior Counsel for Enforcement Strategy at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As the first appellate litigator hired under Elizabeth Warren’s leadership, he launched the Bureau’s amicus program, defended its regulations, and worked with the Solicitor General’s office on Supreme Court matters. For seven years previously, he was an attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group, where he founded and directed the Consumer Justice Project and was the Alan Morrison Supreme Court Project Fellow. Before that, he worked on voting rights litigation at the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, prisoners’ rights litigation at the ACLU, and religion clause litigation at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Deepak frequently engages in public advocacy and speaking, has testified multiple times before the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, and appears frequently in the national print and broadcast media. He is currently a 2018-2019 Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School and has previously taught courses on public interest law and appellate advocacy as an Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown and American universities. He served as a law clerk to Judge Lawrence K. Karlton of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California and studied law at Georgetown, Sanskrit at Oxford, and philosophy at Fordham.
Deepak is an elected member of the American Law Institute and sits on the boards of directors of the National Consumer Law Center, The Impact Fund, and the Alliance for Justice, and the advisory boards of the University of California’s Civil Justice Research Initiative, the Biden Institute, and the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies.
Editor in Chief, Journal of Law, Economics & Policy
Assistant Professor of Law, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School
Paolo Saguato is an Assistant Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University specializing in financial regulation. His research interests encompass the intersection of banking, securities and derivatives regulation; the international and comparative dynamics and regulations of financial institutions; financial innovation and technology; and corporate law and theory. His recent scholarship has been published in the Yale Journal on Regulation; the Stanford Journal of Law, Business and Finance; the Journal of Corporate Law Studies; and the Oxford Handbook of Financial Regulation.
Before joining Antonin Scalia Law School, Professor Saguato was a Research Fellow at the Georgetown Law Center (Institute of International Economic Law) and a Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he received the Teaching Excellence Award. Before that he was a Global Hauser Fellow at New York University School of Law where he was affiliated with the Center for Financial Institutions. Professor Saguato earned a BA (Laurea in Scienze Giuridiche) and a JD (Laurea Magistrale in Giurisprudenza) summa cum laude at the University of Genoa (Italy) and a PhD in Private, Business, and International Law at the same university. In addition, he holds a LLM from Yale Law School, which he attended as a Fulbright Scholar, where he focused his studies on financial markets regulation and corporate law and was a senior editor of the Yale Journal on Regulation.
Professor Saguato teaches Business Associations and International Finance and Regulation.
A.B. Chettle Chair in Civil Procedure, Georgetown University Law Center
Professor Vladeck teaches civil procedure, federal courts, a practicum on privacy and technology (taught jointly with MIT), and directs the Civil Litigation Clinic, a student clinic that handles trial court litigation focused on public-interest cases. He also serves as Faculty Director of the Law Center’s Center on Privacy and Technology.
From 2002 to 2009, Professor Vladeck served as Director of the Civil Rights section of Georgetown Law’s Institute for Public Representation, a student clinic that handles complex trial court and appellate litigation focused on civil rights and other public-interest litigation, while also teaching civil procedure and federal courts. From 2009 to 2012, Professor Vladeck took leave from Georgetown to serve as the Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
At the FTC, he supervised the Bureau’s 450 lawyers, investigators, paralegals and support staff in carrying out the Bureau’s work to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive or fraudulent practices. Before joining the Law Center faculty full-time in 2002, Professor Vladeck spent over 25 years with Public Citizen Litigation Group, a national public interest law firm, serving the last ten years as the Group’s director. He has briefed and argued a number of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and more than sixty cases before federal courts of appeal and state courts of law resort.
He is a Senior Fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Law, Science and Technology, and an elected member of the American Law Institute. He also serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and on the boards of the National Consumers Law Center and the Center for Democracy and Technology. Professor Vladeck frequently testifies before Congress and writes on administrative law, First Amendment, consumer protection, privacy, and access to justice issues.
Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Agriculture
Devon Westhill is the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The U.S. Senate confirmed President Donald Trump’s nomination of Westhill on October 7, 2025.
Westhill returns to the USDA where he previously headed the civil rights office as Deputy Assistant Secretary in President Trump’s first term. His previous government appointments also include service at the U.S. Department of Labor, liaison to the Administrative Conference of the U.S., and liaison to the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Prior to returning to government service, Westhill was President and General Counsel of a nonprofit civil rights organization.
Westhill has testified on civil rights matters before Congress, federal agencies, and as an expert witness in federal court. He has spoken hundreds of times at college campuses, conferences, and on radio and TV programs, and he is frequently quoted in print publications, and his writing has appeared in numerous national outlets. A U.S. Navy veteran, Westhill earned his BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his JD from the University of Florida.
George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
TODD J. ZYWICKI is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University and Research Fellow of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. During the Fall 2023 semester he served as the Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy for the Bruce Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado-Boulder. From 2020-2021 he was Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Taskforce on Federal Consumer Financial Law. In 2021 he was inducted to the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers. He is also a Senior Fellow of the F.A. Hayek Program for the Advanced Study of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at George Mason University and a former Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute. From 2015-2017 he was Executive Director of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. He served as Co-Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review from 2006-2017. From 2003-2004, Professor Zywicki served as the Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. He has also taught at Vanderbilt University Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Boston College Law School, Mississippi College School of Law, and China University of Political Science and Law.
Professor Zywicki clerked for Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and worked as an associate at Alston & Bird in Atlanta, Georgia, where he practiced bankruptcy and commercial law. He received his J.D. from the University of Virginia, where he was executive editor of the Virginia Tax Review and John M. Olin Scholar in Law and Economics. Professor Zywicki also received an M.A. in Economics from Clemson University and an A.B. cum Laude with high honors in his major from Dartmouth College.
Professor Zywicki is also a Lone Mountain Fellow of the Property and Environment Research Center, a Fellow of the International Centre for Economic Research in Turin, Italy, and a former Senior Fellow of the Goldwater Institute. During the Fall 2008 Semester Professor Zywicki was the Searle Fellow of the George Mason University School of Law and was a 2008-09 W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Arch W. Shaw National Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He has lectured and consulted with government officials around the world, including Iceland, Italy, Japan, and Guatemala. In 2006 Professor Zywicki served as a Member of the United States Department of Justice Study Group on “Identifying Fraud, Abuse and Errors in the United States Bankruptcy System.”
Professor Zywicki is the author of more than 130 articles in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed economics journals. He is one of the Top 10 most-cited law professors in the field of Commercial Law and one of the Top 25 law professors on Twitter as measured by engagement levels. He is one of the Top 50 Most Downloaded Law Authors at the Social Science Research Network. He has testified multiple times before Congress on issues of consumer bankruptcy law and consumer credit and is a frequent commentator on legal issues in the print and broadcast media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Nightline, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Neil Cavuto Show, Fox & Friends, Smerconish, Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream, Fox Business, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg News, BBC, The Diane Rehm Show, Lou Dobbs Show, Jerry Doyle Show, and The Laura Ingraham Show.
Professor Zywicki is former Chairman and a current member of the Board of Directors of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Humane Studies, Bill of Rights Institute, the Executive Committee for the Federalist Society's Financial Institutions and E-Commerce Practice Group, the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment. He formerly served on the Governing Board and the Advisory Council for the Financial Services Research Program at George Washington University School of Business. He is currently the Chair of the Academic Advisory Council for the following organizations: The Bill of Rights Institute, the film “We the People in IMAX,” and the McCormick-Tribune Foundation “Freedom Museum” in Chicago, Illinois. He is a member of the Board of Visitors of Ralston College and was a member of the Board of Trustees of Yorktown University. From 2005-2009 he served as an elected Alumni Trustee of the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees.
Dean and Anthony B. Buzbee Endowed Dean's Chair, Texas A&M University School of Law
A graduate of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Yale Law School, Robert B. Ahdieh served as law clerk to Judge James R. Browning of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit before his selection for the Honor's Program in the Civil Division of the US Department of Justice.
While still in law school, Ahdieh published what remains one of the seminal treatments of the constitutional transformation of post-Soviet Russia: "Russia's Constitutional Revolution—Legal Consciousness and the Transition to Democracy." Ahdieh's work has also appeared in the Boston University Law Review, Michigan Law Review, theMinnesota Law Review, the NYU Law Review, and the Southern California Law Review, among other journals.
Ahdieh’s scholarly interests revolve around questions of regulatory and institutional design, especially in the financial arena. His particular focus has been on various non-traditional regulatory structures and modes of regulation, including those grounded in dynamics of coordination. Though relatively less studied in the legal literature, the framework of coordination holds significant promise both in helping us theorize existing regulatory patterns and in defining new regulatory constructs for the future.
Ahdieh has explored regulatory and institutional design in a variety of transactional areas, including corporate and securities law, international trade and finance, and contracts. Within these, his work has emphasized two particular patterns of coordination. The first—intersystemic governance—draws on domestic regimes of federalism and transnational regimes of global governance and subsidiarity to highlight the potential benefits of complex systems of overlapping jurisdiction. The second draws on the dynamics at work in so-called “coordination games” to highlight distinct occasions for potential regulatory intervention, as well as various non-traditional regulatory forms, in our modern economic, social, and political order.
During the 2007–2008 academic year, Ahdieh was a visiting professor and the Microsoft/LAPA Fellow at Princeton University's Program in Law and Public Affairs. In Spring 2014, he served as Douglas McK. Brown Visiting Chair in Law, University of British Columbia. He has also visited at Columbia and Georgetown law schools, as well as numerous law schools overseas.
T.J. Maloney Chair in Business Law, Fordham University School of Law
Professor Griffith is an expert in corporate and financial regulatory law. He writes and speaks on corporate law, political economy, and the constitutional rights of corporations and other business associations. In addition to his academic writing, he has authored or contributed to many amicus briefs, including: Iowa v SEC, NCPPR v SEC, AFBR v SEC, and In re Tesla.
Professor of Law and Rouse Chairholder, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Professor Miller holds an Allison and Dorothy Rouse Chair in Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School. An elected member of the American Law Institute and a research member of the European Corporate Governance Institute, Professor Miller is also a Fellow and the Co-Director of the Program on Organizations, Business and Markets at the Classical Liberal Institute at the New York University Law School, an Adjunct Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and an Affiliated Scholar at the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding. Prior to joining George Mason University in 2025, Professor Miller was the F. Arnold Daum Chair in Corporate Finance and Law and a Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law, where he had also served as the Associate Dean for Faculty Development.
Professor Miller’s research concerns corporate and securities law, the economic analysis of law, and the philosophy of law. He is particularly interested in applying economic concepts and methods to understand provisions in contracts between sophisticated commercial parties. He has written on material adverse effect clauses under Delaware law, the fiduciary duties of corporate directors, director oversight liability, the history and development of Delaware corporate law, and much more. His articles and working papers are available on his SSRN page.
Professor Miller has been cited by federal and state courts in the United States, including the Delaware Supreme Court and the Delaware Court of Chancery, as well as by the Commercial Court of the United Kingdom and the Ontario Superior Court of Justice (Commercial List) in Canada. Additionally, he is a member of the Committee on Mergers, Acquisitions & Corporate Control Contests and a former chair of the Corporation Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association.
Earlier in his career, Professor Miller was a Professor of Law at the Villanova University School of Law and the Associate Director of the Matthew J. Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good at Villanova University. He has been a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at the Cardozo Law School, and an Olin Fellow in Law and Economics at the Columbia Law School.
Before entering academia, Professor Miller was an associate with Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. He earned his J.D. from the Yale Law School where he was a Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal and an Olin Fellow in Law, Economics and Public Policy. He earned his M.A. and M.Phil. degrees in philosophy from Columbia University, where he held a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and a Western Civilization Fellowship from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. He earned his B.A. in philosophy and mathematics from Columbia College.
Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics, The Wharton School, The University of Pennsylvania
David Zaring’s scholarship addresses administrative and regulatory law from an international perspective. Professor Zaring comes to the business school from the Washington & Lee University School of Law. At Washington & Lee, he was an assistant professor and Alumni Faculty Fellow from 2005 to 2007. He had previously served as Acting Assistant Professor in the Lawyering Program at New York University School of Law from 2002 to 2005, and as a visiting professor at Vanderbilt Law School in the fall of 2007. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, Professor Zaring clerked for Chief Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and then for Judge Judith Rogers on the US. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He served as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice in the Federal Programs Branch of the Civil Division and as a special assistant to the General Counsel in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development before entering the academy.
George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
TODD J. ZYWICKI is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University and Research Fellow of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. During the Fall 2023 semester he served as the Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy for the Bruce Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado-Boulder. From 2020-2021 he was Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Taskforce on Federal Consumer Financial Law. In 2021 he was inducted to the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers. He is also a Senior Fellow of the F.A. Hayek Program for the Advanced Study of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at George Mason University and a former Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute. From 2015-2017 he was Executive Director of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. He served as Co-Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review from 2006-2017. From 2003-2004, Professor Zywicki served as the Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. He has also taught at Vanderbilt University Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Boston College Law School, Mississippi College School of Law, and China University of Political Science and Law.
Professor Zywicki clerked for Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and worked as an associate at Alston & Bird in Atlanta, Georgia, where he practiced bankruptcy and commercial law. He received his J.D. from the University of Virginia, where he was executive editor of the Virginia Tax Review and John M. Olin Scholar in Law and Economics. Professor Zywicki also received an M.A. in Economics from Clemson University and an A.B. cum Laude with high honors in his major from Dartmouth College.
Professor Zywicki is also a Lone Mountain Fellow of the Property and Environment Research Center, a Fellow of the International Centre for Economic Research in Turin, Italy, and a former Senior Fellow of the Goldwater Institute. During the Fall 2008 Semester Professor Zywicki was the Searle Fellow of the George Mason University School of Law and was a 2008-09 W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Arch W. Shaw National Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He has lectured and consulted with government officials around the world, including Iceland, Italy, Japan, and Guatemala. In 2006 Professor Zywicki served as a Member of the United States Department of Justice Study Group on “Identifying Fraud, Abuse and Errors in the United States Bankruptcy System.”
Professor Zywicki is the author of more than 130 articles in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed economics journals. He is one of the Top 10 most-cited law professors in the field of Commercial Law and one of the Top 25 law professors on Twitter as measured by engagement levels. He is one of the Top 50 Most Downloaded Law Authors at the Social Science Research Network. He has testified multiple times before Congress on issues of consumer bankruptcy law and consumer credit and is a frequent commentator on legal issues in the print and broadcast media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Nightline, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Neil Cavuto Show, Fox & Friends, Smerconish, Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream, Fox Business, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg News, BBC, The Diane Rehm Show, Lou Dobbs Show, Jerry Doyle Show, and The Laura Ingraham Show.
Professor Zywicki is former Chairman and a current member of the Board of Directors of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Humane Studies, Bill of Rights Institute, the Executive Committee for the Federalist Society's Financial Institutions and E-Commerce Practice Group, the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment. He formerly served on the Governing Board and the Advisory Council for the Financial Services Research Program at George Washington University School of Business. He is currently the Chair of the Academic Advisory Council for the following organizations: The Bill of Rights Institute, the film “We the People in IMAX,” and the McCormick-Tribune Foundation “Freedom Museum” in Chicago, Illinois. He is a member of the Board of Visitors of Ralston College and was a member of the Board of Trustees of Yorktown University. From 2005-2009 he served as an elected Alumni Trustee of the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees.
Dean and Anthony B. Buzbee Endowed Dean's Chair, Texas A&M University School of Law
A graduate of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Yale Law School, Robert B. Ahdieh served as law clerk to Judge James R. Browning of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit before his selection for the Honor's Program in the Civil Division of the US Department of Justice.
While still in law school, Ahdieh published what remains one of the seminal treatments of the constitutional transformation of post-Soviet Russia: "Russia's Constitutional Revolution—Legal Consciousness and the Transition to Democracy." Ahdieh's work has also appeared in the Boston University Law Review, Michigan Law Review, theMinnesota Law Review, the NYU Law Review, and the Southern California Law Review, among other journals.
Ahdieh’s scholarly interests revolve around questions of regulatory and institutional design, especially in the financial arena. His particular focus has been on various non-traditional regulatory structures and modes of regulation, including those grounded in dynamics of coordination. Though relatively less studied in the legal literature, the framework of coordination holds significant promise both in helping us theorize existing regulatory patterns and in defining new regulatory constructs for the future.
Ahdieh has explored regulatory and institutional design in a variety of transactional areas, including corporate and securities law, international trade and finance, and contracts. Within these, his work has emphasized two particular patterns of coordination. The first—intersystemic governance—draws on domestic regimes of federalism and transnational regimes of global governance and subsidiarity to highlight the potential benefits of complex systems of overlapping jurisdiction. The second draws on the dynamics at work in so-called “coordination games” to highlight distinct occasions for potential regulatory intervention, as well as various non-traditional regulatory forms, in our modern economic, social, and political order.
During the 2007–2008 academic year, Ahdieh was a visiting professor and the Microsoft/LAPA Fellow at Princeton University's Program in Law and Public Affairs. In Spring 2014, he served as Douglas McK. Brown Visiting Chair in Law, University of British Columbia. He has also visited at Columbia and Georgetown law schools, as well as numerous law schools overseas.
T.J. Maloney Chair in Business Law, Fordham University School of Law
Professor Griffith is an expert in corporate and financial regulatory law. He writes and speaks on corporate law, political economy, and the constitutional rights of corporations and other business associations. In addition to his academic writing, he has authored or contributed to many amicus briefs, including: Iowa v SEC, NCPPR v SEC, AFBR v SEC, and In re Tesla.
Professor of Law and Rouse Chairholder, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Professor Miller holds an Allison and Dorothy Rouse Chair in Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School. An elected member of the American Law Institute and a research member of the European Corporate Governance Institute, Professor Miller is also a Fellow and the Co-Director of the Program on Organizations, Business and Markets at the Classical Liberal Institute at the New York University Law School, an Adjunct Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and an Affiliated Scholar at the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding. Prior to joining George Mason University in 2025, Professor Miller was the F. Arnold Daum Chair in Corporate Finance and Law and a Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law, where he had also served as the Associate Dean for Faculty Development.
Professor Miller’s research concerns corporate and securities law, the economic analysis of law, and the philosophy of law. He is particularly interested in applying economic concepts and methods to understand provisions in contracts between sophisticated commercial parties. He has written on material adverse effect clauses under Delaware law, the fiduciary duties of corporate directors, director oversight liability, the history and development of Delaware corporate law, and much more. His articles and working papers are available on his SSRN page.
Professor Miller has been cited by federal and state courts in the United States, including the Delaware Supreme Court and the Delaware Court of Chancery, as well as by the Commercial Court of the United Kingdom and the Ontario Superior Court of Justice (Commercial List) in Canada. Additionally, he is a member of the Committee on Mergers, Acquisitions & Corporate Control Contests and a former chair of the Corporation Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association.
Earlier in his career, Professor Miller was a Professor of Law at the Villanova University School of Law and the Associate Director of the Matthew J. Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good at Villanova University. He has been a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at the Cardozo Law School, and an Olin Fellow in Law and Economics at the Columbia Law School.
Before entering academia, Professor Miller was an associate with Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. He earned his J.D. from the Yale Law School where he was a Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal and an Olin Fellow in Law, Economics and Public Policy. He earned his M.A. and M.Phil. degrees in philosophy from Columbia University, where he held a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and a Western Civilization Fellowship from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. He earned his B.A. in philosophy and mathematics from Columbia College.
Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics, The Wharton School, The University of Pennsylvania
David Zaring’s scholarship addresses administrative and regulatory law from an international perspective. Professor Zaring comes to the business school from the Washington & Lee University School of Law. At Washington & Lee, he was an assistant professor and Alumni Faculty Fellow from 2005 to 2007. He had previously served as Acting Assistant Professor in the Lawyering Program at New York University School of Law from 2002 to 2005, and as a visiting professor at Vanderbilt Law School in the fall of 2007. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, Professor Zaring clerked for Chief Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and then for Judge Judith Rogers on the US. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He served as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice in the Federal Programs Branch of the Civil Division and as a special assistant to the General Counsel in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development before entering the academy.
George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
TODD J. ZYWICKI is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University and Research Fellow of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. During the Fall 2023 semester he served as the Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy for the Bruce Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado-Boulder. From 2020-2021 he was Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Taskforce on Federal Consumer Financial Law. In 2021 he was inducted to the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers. He is also a Senior Fellow of the F.A. Hayek Program for the Advanced Study of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at George Mason University and a former Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute. From 2015-2017 he was Executive Director of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. He served as Co-Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review from 2006-2017. From 2003-2004, Professor Zywicki served as the Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. He has also taught at Vanderbilt University Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Boston College Law School, Mississippi College School of Law, and China University of Political Science and Law.
Professor Zywicki clerked for Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and worked as an associate at Alston & Bird in Atlanta, Georgia, where he practiced bankruptcy and commercial law. He received his J.D. from the University of Virginia, where he was executive editor of the Virginia Tax Review and John M. Olin Scholar in Law and Economics. Professor Zywicki also received an M.A. in Economics from Clemson University and an A.B. cum Laude with high honors in his major from Dartmouth College.
Professor Zywicki is also a Lone Mountain Fellow of the Property and Environment Research Center, a Fellow of the International Centre for Economic Research in Turin, Italy, and a former Senior Fellow of the Goldwater Institute. During the Fall 2008 Semester Professor Zywicki was the Searle Fellow of the George Mason University School of Law and was a 2008-09 W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Arch W. Shaw National Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He has lectured and consulted with government officials around the world, including Iceland, Italy, Japan, and Guatemala. In 2006 Professor Zywicki served as a Member of the United States Department of Justice Study Group on “Identifying Fraud, Abuse and Errors in the United States Bankruptcy System.”
Professor Zywicki is the author of more than 130 articles in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed economics journals. He is one of the Top 10 most-cited law professors in the field of Commercial Law and one of the Top 25 law professors on Twitter as measured by engagement levels. He is one of the Top 50 Most Downloaded Law Authors at the Social Science Research Network. He has testified multiple times before Congress on issues of consumer bankruptcy law and consumer credit and is a frequent commentator on legal issues in the print and broadcast media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Nightline, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Neil Cavuto Show, Fox & Friends, Smerconish, Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream, Fox Business, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg News, BBC, The Diane Rehm Show, Lou Dobbs Show, Jerry Doyle Show, and The Laura Ingraham Show.
Professor Zywicki is former Chairman and a current member of the Board of Directors of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Humane Studies, Bill of Rights Institute, the Executive Committee for the Federalist Society's Financial Institutions and E-Commerce Practice Group, the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment. He formerly served on the Governing Board and the Advisory Council for the Financial Services Research Program at George Washington University School of Business. He is currently the Chair of the Academic Advisory Council for the following organizations: The Bill of Rights Institute, the film “We the People in IMAX,” and the McCormick-Tribune Foundation “Freedom Museum” in Chicago, Illinois. He is a member of the Board of Visitors of Ralston College and was a member of the Board of Trustees of Yorktown University. From 2005-2009 he served as an elected Alumni Trustee of the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees.
Professor of Law & Helen L. Crocker Faculty Scholar, Stanford Law School
Jud Campbell joined the faculty of Stanford Law School in 2023. He previously served as a professor of law at the University of Richmond School of Law and as a visiting professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School and at Harvard Law School. His academic focus is constitutional history and First Amendment law. His publications include articles in the Stanford Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Texas Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, and Law and History Review. After completing his J.D. at Stanford Law School, he clerked for Judge Diane S. Sykes on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and for Judge José A. Cabranes on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He then served as the Executive Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and two master’s degrees from the London School of Economics, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar.
Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law and Director, Classical Liberal Institute, New York University School of Law; Director, Classical Liberal Institute, Civitas Institute University of Texas at Austin
Richard A. Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, at New York University, a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas Austin, and a senior Lecturer, the University of Chicago. He received an LL.D., h.c . from the University of Ghent, 2003 , and an LLD h.c . from the University of Siegen in 2018 and the Bradley Prize in 2011. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985. He has edited both the Journal of Legal Studies (1981-1991) and the Journal of Law and Economics (1991-2001). He is also a founder and director of the Classical Liberal Institute at NYU Law School. His most recent book is The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (2014). His other books include Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain ( 1985); Bargaining with the State (1993); Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995); Principles for a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty and the Common Good (1998); Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Theory of Classical Liberalism (2003); Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration and the Rule of Law (2011), and most recently, The Myth of Birthright citizenship—and Beyond (2026). He has taught courses in , administrative law, antitrust, constitutional, contracts, environmental law, land use planning; real property, torts and water law. He has written and spoken extensively on a wide range of topics, and is writes a regular column for Defining Ideas.
Former Solicitor General of Texas
Jonathan F. Mitchell is Principal at Mitchell Law PLLC. He received his law degree with high honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was an articles editor of The University of Chicago Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif.
After graduating from law school, Mr. Mitchell clerked for Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and for Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States. He then served as an Attorney-Adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice from 2003 through 2006. After leaving the Department of Justice, Mr. Mitchell served as a Visiting Researcher at Georgetown University Law Center, a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Law School from 2006 through 2008, and an Assistant Professor of Law at George Mason University from 2008 through 2010.
In 2010, Mr. Mitchell was appointed Solicitor General of Texas, a position he held until January 2015. After leaving the Texas Solicitor General’s office, Mr. Mitchell served as the Searle Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law before joining the Hoover Institution as a Visiting Fellow from 2015 to 2016. Mr. Mitchell also served as a Visiting Professor of Law at Stanford Law School before opening his own law firm in 2018.
Mr. Mitchell has published numerous works of scholarship in top-10 law journals, and he has written articles on textualism, national-security law, criminal law and procedure, judicial review and judicial federalism, and the legality of stare decisis in constitutional adjudication.
Mr. Mitchell has argued eight times before the Supreme Court of the United States, and more than 20 times in the federal courts of appeals. He has also argued before Supreme Court of Texas and in numerous trial courts. Mr. Mitchell has authored the principal merits brief in 11 Supreme Court cases, and has written and submitted more than 20 amicus curiae briefs in the Supreme Court.
Mr. Mitchell devised the novel enforcement mechanism in the Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as Senate Bill 8, which avoids pre-enforcement judicial review by prohibiting government officials from enforcing the statute and empowering private citizens to bring lawsuits against those who violate it. This produced an end-run around Roe v. Wade and allowed Texas and other states to impose pre-viability abortion bans despite the continued existence of Roe.
Associate Attorney, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Lochlan F. Shelfer is a litigation associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. He is a member of the firm’s Appellate and Constitutional Law and Administrative Law practice groups.
Mr. Shelfer has litigated a wide range of appellate and trial matters in federal and state court. Mr. Shelfer’s appellate practice includes representing corporate clients in high-stakes commercial disputes, litigating cutting-edge legal issues before the Supreme Court of the United States, bringing merits and collection actions against foreign sovereigns, and representing pro bono clients before the courts of appeals. He has argued an appeal before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, addressing matters of federal jurisdiction. In addition, Mr. Shelfer regularly represents clients in litigation under the Administrative Procedure Act.
Mr. Shelfer received his law degree from Yale Law School, where he served as an Articles Editor of the Yale Law Journal and was awarded the Judge William E. Miller Prize for best paper on the Bill of Rights for his work "How the Constitution Shall Not Be Construed," BYU Law Review (2017), and the Joseph Parker Prize for best paper on legal history for his work "Special Juries in the Supreme Court," Yale Law Journal (October, 2013). Prior to attending law school, Mr. Shelfer graduated summa cum laude from New York University with a B.A. in Classics and from Johns Hopkins University with a Ph.D. in Classics, specializing in the history of law. From 2013–2014, Mr. Shelfer served as a law clerk to the Honorable Carlos T. Bea of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Mr. Shelfer is a member of the bars of Maryland and the District of Columbia.
Assistant Professor of Law, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School
Megan Stevenson is an economist and legal scholar who became an Assistant Professor of Law at George Mason University, in 2017. Her research uses advanced econometric techniques to evaluate criminal law and policy in areas such as bail, pretrial detention, juvenile justice, and risk assessment. Her studies are published or forthcoming in top journals in both economics and law, such as the Stanford Law Review and the Review of Economics and Statistics. Her research on bail was cited extensively in a landmark federal civil rights decision, O’Donnell v. Harris, and has received widespread media coverage. In addition to legal scholarship, Professor Stevenson has written a number of op-eds for news outlets such as the Houston Chronicle and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.
Prior to joining the law faculty at George Mason, Professor Stevenson was a fellow at the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School (2015-2017). She holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies (2009, with highest distinction) and a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics (2016), both from the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches Law & Economics and Criminal Law.
Professor of Law, Georgetown Law
Professor Teitelbaum joined the Georgetown faculty in 2009. Before coming to Georgetown, he clerked for Judge Richard M. Berman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, practiced corporate and securities law at Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP in New York, and was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Cornell Law School.
Assistant Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Lael Weinberger is an assistant professor of law at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School. Previously, Lael clerked for Justice Neil Gorsuch on the United States Supreme Court, Judge Frank Easterbrook on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and Chief Justice Daniel Eismann on the Idaho Supreme Court. Lael also practiced law at the Washington, D.C., office of Gibson Dunn and held fellowships at Stanford and Harvard law schools. Lael earned a law degree and a Ph.D. in history, both from the University of Chicago. Lael's academic work has appeared in journals such as the University of Chicago Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, and Constitutional Commentary, among others. He has also written widely for broader public audiences, with his writings and reviews appearing in publications including Newsweek, National Review, Claremont Review, First Things, Christianity Today, LA Review of Books, World, and the New Rambler Review.
Should Congress Amend Section 101 of the Patent Act?
Intellectual Property Practice Group
TeleforumCreative Regulators and Environmental Protection
14th Annual Symposium of the Journal of Law, Economics & Policy
Arlington, VARegulating the Modern Workforce
14th Annual Symposium of the Journal of Law, Economics & Policy
Arlington, VALuncheon Keynote Address by Philip K. Howard
14th Annual Symposium of the Journal of Law, Economics & Policy
Arlington, VA21st Century Business Models Meet 20th Century Regulation
14th Annual Symposium of the Journal of Law, Economics & Policy
Arlington, VAFinancial Innovation and Innovative Financial Regulators
14th Annual Symposium of the Journal of Law, Economics & Policy
Arlington, VA14th Annual Symposium of the Journal of Law, Economics & Policy
Regulatory Reform, Transparency, and the American Economy
Arlington, VAFinancial Crisis and Regulatory Frameworks
Robert B. Ahdieh, Sean J. Griffith, Robert T. Miller, David Zaring, Todd J. Zywicki
With January 2018 marking roughly a decade after the start of the most recent financial...
Financial Crisis and Regulatory Frameworks
Robert B. Ahdieh, Sean J. Griffith, Robert T. Miller, David Zaring, Todd J. Zywicki
With January 2018 marking roughly a decade after the start of the most recent financial...
Young Legal Scholars Paper Presentations
Jud Campbell, Richard A. Epstein, Jonathan Mitchell, Lochlan Shelfer, Megan Stevenson, Joshua C. Teitelbaum, Lael Weinberger
The winners of our Young Legal Scholars Paper Competition will present their papers, and various...