Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
Jennifer Walker Elrod is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She was nominated to the Fifth Circuit in 2007, and she served as a Circuit Judge on the court until assuming the role of Chief Judge in October 2024. Prior to serving as a Circuit Judge, Chief Judge Elrod was appointed and then twice elected Judge of the 190th District Court of Harris County, Texas, where she spent over five years presiding over more than 200 jury and non-jury trials.
Chief Judge Elrod graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was an active member of the Harvard Federalist Society, an Ames Moot Court finalist, and a Senior Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. She clerked for the Honorable Sim Lake in the Southern District of Texas. Before serving as a judge, Chief Judge Elrod worked in private practice, focusing on civil litigation, antitrust, and employment matters.
She has been repeatedly recognized for her work as a jurist, as well as for her pro bono work and contributions to the community. She has been named the 2022 Texas Review of Law & Politics’ Jurist of the Year, the 2018 Harvard Federalist Society’s Alumni of the Year, the 2016–17 Texas Association of Civil Trial and Appellate Specialists’ Appellate Judge of the Year, and the 2008 Mexican-American Bar Association of Texas’s Judge of the Year.
Chief Judge Elrod is actively engaged in the academic and legal communities. Chief Judge Elrod currently serves on the Board of Directors and as the Jurist-in-Residence at the South Texas College of Law, where she teaches civil procedure and First Amendment law. She is also a member of the American Law Institute and of the Board of Advisors for the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and she is a former member of the Board of Regents of her alma mater, Baylor University, and the Board of Visitors at Brigham Young University Law School. She previously served as the Chair of the Codes of Conduct Committee for the Judicial Conference of the United States. She has also served as the M.D. Anderson Visiting Public Service Professor at the Texas Tech University School of Law and as Jurist-in-Residence at Brigham Young University Law School, and she has taught legal writing at the University of Houston Law Center. She presented the Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Distinguished Lecture at the Washington and Lee University School of Law and is a frequent speaker on the topics of trial and appellate procedure, ethics, employment law, and constitutional law. Chief Judge Elrod also serves on the board of the Garland R. Walker Inn of Court, and co-produces an annual musical CLE, for which her pupilage group has won multiple national awards.
Chief Judge Elrod’s publications include: Trial by Siri: AI Comes to the Courtroom; Don’t Mess with Texas Judges: In Praise of the State Judiciary; For Good: Enriching Your Practice and Your Life Through Pro Bono and Community Service; Is the Jury Still Out?: A Case for the Continued Viability of the American Jury; and W(h)ither the Jury? The Diminishing Role of the Jury Trial in our Legal System.
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.
Partner, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP
Mr. George S. Cary has decades of experience in sophisticated antitrust matters, representing companies on industry-transforming transactions and complex monopolization litigation.
He regularly guides clients through global mergers and acquisitions involving the most challenging regions and issues, and his diverse litigation docket features cases involving the application of antitrust to intellectual property and high-technology markets. Chambers and Partners has ranked George in its top tier of global antitrust lawyers every year for the last decade.
Before joining the firm in 1998, Mr. Cary served as Deputy Director of the United States Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition (FTC), where he oversaw a record number of merger transactions. He was lead trial counsel for the FTC in its successful challenge of the Staples/Office Depot merger, considered the most significant merger case of the decade, and he was the recipient of the Brandeis Award, awarded to the FTC’s outstanding litigator. Mr. Cary was a principal author of the modifications to the Federal Horizontal Merger Guidelines, which incorporated consideration of efficiencies in merger assessment. Prior to joining the FTC, Mr. Cary was an antitrust and litigation partner in a Los Angeles-based law firm.
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.
Partner, Allen & Overy (Belgium) LLP
Mr. Jürgen has extensive experience advising clients on complex international, EU and German cartel, merger control, and abuse of dominance cases. Mr. Jürgen’s practice encompasses a broad range of sectors, including high technologies, energy, shipping and transport, raw materials, chemicals, finance, consumer, and industrial products. In addition, Mr. Jürgen litigates before the European courts in Luxembourg.
Mr. Jürgen completed an internship with DG Competition and worked as an International Fellow at the US Federal Trade Commission. He has been appointed a Non-Governmental Adviser to the International Competition Network (which includes more than 100 competition authorities worldwide), where he regularly contributes to the merger and cartel working groups.
Mr. Jürgen obtained his German law degree (First State Exam) from the University of Hamburg in 1999 and qualified as a German lawyer in 2001 (Second State Exam). In addition, he holds a masters degree in International and European Law from the University of Toulouse (1996), an LLM degree focussing on EU competition law from the College of Europe (1999), and an LLM degree specialising in US antitrust law and economics from Georgetown University.
He is admitted to practise in Frankfurt and New York, and is listed as a European lawyer with the Brussels bar (E-list).
As a member of our German cross-border antitrust team he shares his time between our Brussels and Hamburg offices.
Mr. Jürgen is recommended by Chambers Europe 2013: "Clients describe him as a young, up-and-coming lawyer who we trust greatly. He provides extremely robust advice."
President, Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies
Lawrence J. Spiwak is President of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that studies broad public-policy issues related to governance, social and economic conditions, with a particular emphasis on the law and economics of the digital age. Mr. Spiwak is a prolific scholar whose work is frequently cited by policymakers, major news media and academic journals around the world, and is in the top 1.3%of authors downloaded on the Social Science Research Network. Mr. Spiwak currently serves as the co-chair of the Federal Communications Bar Association’s (FCBA) committee responsible for overseeing the FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS LAW JOURNAL and is a member of the program committee of the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (“TPRC”). Mr. Spiwak is also the recipient of the FCBA’s Distinguished Service Award. Prior to joining the Phoenix Center, Mr. Spiwak was a Senior Attorney with the Competition Division in the FCC’s Office of General Counsel from 1994-1998. While in college, Mr. Spiwak was accepted into the Presidential Stay-In School program where he was responsible for delivering classified and confidential material among senior White House and Reagan Administration officials and received a full FBI security clearance. Mr. Spiwak received his B.A. with Special Honors from the George Washington University and his J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Mr. Spiwak is a member in good standing of the bars of New York, Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Senior Assistant Attorney General, Office of the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Virginia
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 Counsel, Crowell & Moring LLP
Lisa Kimmel is a senior counsel in Crowell & Moring's Antitrust Group. She resides in the firm's Washington, D.C. office. Lisa's practice covers merger and civil nonmerger antitrust investigations and antitrust counseling. Lisa also advocates for clients on competition policy matters before federal and state antitrust agencies, focusing in particular on the technology and digital commerce sectors.
Lisa joined Crowell & Moring in 2015 from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), where she worked for nearly five years as an attorney advisor on antitrust and competition policy matters for Commissioner and later, Chairwoman, Edith Ramirez. During her time at the FTC, Lisa advised the chairwoman on antitrust enforcement and policy matters across a broad range of sectors, and was her lead advisor on antitrust enforcement and competition policy matters in the technology sector, including matters related to industry standards and the acquisition or assertion of intellectual property rights. Before joining the FTC, Lisa practiced with the antitrust group at an AmLaw 100 firm, where she worked in the firm's San Francisco and Washington, D.C. offices.
Lisa’s recent private practice experience includes:
Lisa earned her J.D. and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an active member of the ABA Antitrust Section, where she is vice-chair of the Media & Technology Committee, past editor of the Unilateral Conduct Committee newsletter, and co-editor of a forthcoming revision to the Handbook on Antitrust Aspects of Standard Setting. Lisa is a member of the MLex Antitrust Advisory Board and speaks and writes regularly on antitrust issues involving the technology sector and intellectual property rights.
Admitted to practice: California, District of Columbia
Partner, Antitrust and Competition, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Maureen Ohlhausen is a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where she advises industry-leading clients on complex antitrust and litigation matters, with a focus on high-profile cases. Sought after for her depth of experience on antitrust and Federal Trade Commission (FTC)-related issues, Maureen is known for her relationships with officials in the U.S. and abroad.
After finishing law school and clerking at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Maureen joined the FTC in 1997. She held a series of roles at the agency over the next 12 years, rising to the position of Director of the FTC Office of Policy Planning, where she led the agency’s work on e-commerce and headed the FTC’s Internet Access Task Force, which produced an influential report analyzing competition and consumer protection legal issues in the broadband and internet sectors. She then went into private practice at a leading telecommunications law firm, where she headed the FTC practice group.
In 2012, Maureen was confirmed by the Senate as a Commissioner of the FTC and was appointed Acting Chairman in January 2017, a role she held until May 2018. As Acting Chairman, Maureen directed all aspects of the agency’s antitrust work, including merger review, conduct enforcement, and all consumer protection enforcement, with an emphasis on privacy and technology issues. Under her leadership, the FTC won several influential merger challenges in court and reached a number of key digital privacy settlements.
To date, Maureen is the only FTC Commissioner to have received the Robert Pitofsky Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of her contributions to the FTC.
Following the end of her term at the FTC, and immediately prior to joining Wilson Sonsini, Maureen was chair of the global antitrust and competition practice at Baker Botts, based in that firm’s Washington, D.C., office.
A recognized thought leader, Maureen is a frequent author and speaker, and is often quoted by leading print and broadcast media on antitrust, FTC, and privacy and data security matters. She has published dozens of articles on antitrust, privacy, intellectual property, regulation, FTC litigation, telecommunications, and international law issues in prestigious publications. During her tenure at the FTC and in private practice, she testified more than two dozen times before Congress, including before the Senate Commerce Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Antitrust Sub-Committee. She also testified before the Antitrust Modernization Commission.
Partner, Axinn, Veltrop & Harkrider LLP
Koren Wong-Ervin is a recognized thought leader on competition issues who has testified before Congress on domestic and international issues in antitrust policy. She has more than eighteen years of experience in government, private practice, and as in-house counsel, including representing defendants and plaintiffs in high-stakes litigations and representing companies in domestic and foreign investigations. While at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Koren served as an Attorney Advisor to Commissioner Joshua Wright and Counsel for Intellectual Property & International Antitrust.
The combination of Koren's experience representing defendants—along with her experience at the FTC and as a former plaintiffs class action attorney—gives her insights into the thinking on both sides of cases, including complex multi-district litigations, allowing her to develop both effective offensive and defensive strategies. On top of this, her in-house experience as the Director of Antitrust Litigation & Policy at a major technology company gives her a first-hand understanding of how companies work and unique insight into the needs of clients. Koren also has a deep understanding of economics, as evidenced by the fact that she has trained over 500 foreign judges and enforcers on a variety of economic topics.
Koren’s scholarship has been cited by courts and the Department of Justice. She has authored over sixty articles, including on vertical mergers and restraints, acquisitions of potential competitors, consummated mergers, multisided platforms, the intersection of antitrust and intellectual property, incremental innovations or “product hopping,” optimal penalties, extraterritoriality, methodologies for calculating patent infringement damages, and international due process and convergence. She has spoken at over 200 domestic and international events.
Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Eric R. Claeys is Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. He has written widely in the fields of property, private law, and constitutional law. Professor Claeys’s current research interests focus on flourishing- and labor-based natural rights justifications for property—in American property theory, in intellectual property, and in contemporary regulation of shale gas exploration and hydraulic fracturing. He is a member of the American Law Institute, he serves on the ALI’s Members’ Consultative Group for the first Restatement of Copyright, and he also serves as an adviser to the Restatement (Fourth) of the Law of Property.
Professor Claeys received his JD from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. He received his AB from Princeton University, and he is a former visiting fellow and current member of Princeton’s Politics Department’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. After law school, Professor Claeys clerked for the Hon. Melvin Brunetti, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and the Hon. William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States.
Professor Claeys’s main teaching interests include Property, Torts, Jurisprudence, and Intellectual Property. In recent years, he has also taught Water Law, Remedies, Estates and Trusts, Trade Secrecy, Constitutional Law, Torts, and Oil and Gas law. Spring 2018, he is teaching Torts and Jurisprudence as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School.
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.
Vice President, Networks, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Nathan Kaczmarek is Vice President for Networks at the Federalist Society. He began his legal career in Detroit representing nationwide clients in all phases of healthcare litigation and complex medical malpractice claims. He has since served as a Senior Legal and Policy Advisor in the U.S. House of Representatives and as Counsel for the Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management in the U.S. Senate. Prior to overseeing the Networks, he was Director of the Practice Groups, the Regulatory Transparency Project, and the Article I Initiative for the Federalist Society.
Nathan holds degrees from Hillsdale College and Thomas M. Cooley Law School. He is a Liaison Representative for The Administrative Conference of the United States. He also serves as Vice President of the Associates of St. John Bosco, a Virginia based non-profit dedicated to Catholic high school and college students.
Partner, Antitrust and Competition, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Maureen Ohlhausen is a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where she advises industry-leading clients on complex antitrust and litigation matters, with a focus on high-profile cases. Sought after for her depth of experience on antitrust and Federal Trade Commission (FTC)-related issues, Maureen is known for her relationships with officials in the U.S. and abroad.
After finishing law school and clerking at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Maureen joined the FTC in 1997. She held a series of roles at the agency over the next 12 years, rising to the position of Director of the FTC Office of Policy Planning, where she led the agency’s work on e-commerce and headed the FTC’s Internet Access Task Force, which produced an influential report analyzing competition and consumer protection legal issues in the broadband and internet sectors. She then went into private practice at a leading telecommunications law firm, where she headed the FTC practice group.
In 2012, Maureen was confirmed by the Senate as a Commissioner of the FTC and was appointed Acting Chairman in January 2017, a role she held until May 2018. As Acting Chairman, Maureen directed all aspects of the agency’s antitrust work, including merger review, conduct enforcement, and all consumer protection enforcement, with an emphasis on privacy and technology issues. Under her leadership, the FTC won several influential merger challenges in court and reached a number of key digital privacy settlements.
To date, Maureen is the only FTC Commissioner to have received the Robert Pitofsky Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of her contributions to the FTC.
Following the end of her term at the FTC, and immediately prior to joining Wilson Sonsini, Maureen was chair of the global antitrust and competition practice at Baker Botts, based in that firm’s Washington, D.C., office.
A recognized thought leader, Maureen is a frequent author and speaker, and is often quoted by leading print and broadcast media on antitrust, FTC, and privacy and data security matters. She has published dozens of articles on antitrust, privacy, intellectual property, regulation, FTC litigation, telecommunications, and international law issues in prestigious publications. During her tenure at the FTC and in private practice, she testified more than two dozen times before Congress, including before the Senate Commerce Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Antitrust Sub-Committee. She also testified before the Antitrust Modernization Commission.
Partner, Axinn, Veltrop & Harkrider LLP
Koren Wong-Ervin is a recognized thought leader on competition issues who has testified before Congress on domestic and international issues in antitrust policy. She has more than eighteen years of experience in government, private practice, and as in-house counsel, including representing defendants and plaintiffs in high-stakes litigations and representing companies in domestic and foreign investigations. While at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Koren served as an Attorney Advisor to Commissioner Joshua Wright and Counsel for Intellectual Property & International Antitrust.
The combination of Koren's experience representing defendants—along with her experience at the FTC and as a former plaintiffs class action attorney—gives her insights into the thinking on both sides of cases, including complex multi-district litigations, allowing her to develop both effective offensive and defensive strategies. On top of this, her in-house experience as the Director of Antitrust Litigation & Policy at a major technology company gives her a first-hand understanding of how companies work and unique insight into the needs of clients. Koren also has a deep understanding of economics, as evidenced by the fact that she has trained over 500 foreign judges and enforcers on a variety of economic topics.
Koren’s scholarship has been cited by courts and the Department of Justice. She has authored over sixty articles, including on vertical mergers and restraints, acquisitions of potential competitors, consummated mergers, multisided platforms, the intersection of antitrust and intellectual property, incremental innovations or “product hopping,” optimal penalties, extraterritoriality, methodologies for calculating patent infringement damages, and international due process and convergence. She has spoken at over 200 domestic and international events.
Senior Counsel, Crowell & Moring LLP
Lisa Kimmel is a senior counsel in Crowell & Moring's Antitrust Group. She resides in the firm's Washington, D.C. office. Lisa's practice covers merger and civil nonmerger antitrust investigations and antitrust counseling. Lisa also advocates for clients on competition policy matters before federal and state antitrust agencies, focusing in particular on the technology and digital commerce sectors.
Lisa joined Crowell & Moring in 2015 from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), where she worked for nearly five years as an attorney advisor on antitrust and competition policy matters for Commissioner and later, Chairwoman, Edith Ramirez. During her time at the FTC, Lisa advised the chairwoman on antitrust enforcement and policy matters across a broad range of sectors, and was her lead advisor on antitrust enforcement and competition policy matters in the technology sector, including matters related to industry standards and the acquisition or assertion of intellectual property rights. Before joining the FTC, Lisa practiced with the antitrust group at an AmLaw 100 firm, where she worked in the firm's San Francisco and Washington, D.C. offices.
Lisa’s recent private practice experience includes:
Lisa earned her J.D. and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an active member of the ABA Antitrust Section, where she is vice-chair of the Media & Technology Committee, past editor of the Unilateral Conduct Committee newsletter, and co-editor of a forthcoming revision to the Handbook on Antitrust Aspects of Standard Setting. Lisa is a member of the MLex Antitrust Advisory Board and speaks and writes regularly on antitrust issues involving the technology sector and intellectual property rights.
Admitted to practice: California, District of Columbia
Senior Assistant Attorney General, Office of the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Virginia
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.
Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Eric R. Claeys is Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. He has written widely in the fields of property, private law, and constitutional law. Professor Claeys’s current research interests focus on flourishing- and labor-based natural rights justifications for property—in American property theory, in intellectual property, and in contemporary regulation of shale gas exploration and hydraulic fracturing. He is a member of the American Law Institute, he serves on the ALI’s Members’ Consultative Group for the first Restatement of Copyright, and he also serves as an adviser to the Restatement (Fourth) of the Law of Property.
Professor Claeys received his JD from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. He received his AB from Princeton University, and he is a former visiting fellow and current member of Princeton’s Politics Department’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. After law school, Professor Claeys clerked for the Hon. Melvin Brunetti, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and the Hon. William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States.
Professor Claeys’s main teaching interests include Property, Torts, Jurisprudence, and Intellectual Property. In recent years, he has also taught Water Law, Remedies, Estates and Trusts, Trade Secrecy, Constitutional Law, Torts, and Oil and Gas law. Spring 2018, he is teaching Torts and Jurisprudence as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School.
Professor of Law, South Texas College of Law Houston
Josh Blackman is a national thought leader on constitutional law and the United States Supreme Court. Josh’s work was quoted during two presidential impeachment trials. He has testified before Congress and advises federal and state lawmakers. Josh regularly appears on TV, including NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and the BBC. Josh is also a frequent guest on NPR and other syndicated radio programs. He has published commentaries in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and leading national publications.
Since 2012, Josh has served as a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston. He holds the Centennial Chair of Constitutional Law. Josh is an Adjunct Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Josh has written more than seven dozen law review articles that have been cited more than a thousand times. Josh was selected as the Jurist of the Year by the Texas Journal of Law & Public Policy, received the inaugural Meese III Originalism Award, and was awarded the Inaugural Joseph Story Award. Josh was selected by Forbes Magazine for the “30 Under 30” in Law and Policy. Josh is the President of the Harlan Institute, and founded FantasySCOTUS, the Internet’s Premier Supreme Court Fantasy League. He blogs at the Volokh Conspiracyand posts@JoshMBlackman.
Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
ILYA SOMIN is Professor of Law at George Mason University and the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, democratic theory, federalism, and migration rights. He is the author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom (Oxford University Press, revised and expanded edition, 2022), Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (Stanford University Press, revised and expanded second edition, 2016), and The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain (University of Chicago Press, 2015, rev. paperback ed., 2016), coauthor of A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and co-editor of Eminent Domain: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Democracy and Political Ignorance has been translated into Italian and Japanese.
Somin’s work has appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Critical Review, and others. Somin has also published articles in a variety of popular press outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, CNN, NBC, The Atlantic, USA Today, Boston Globe, US News and World Report, South China Morning Post, National Law Journal and Reason. He has been quoted or interviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, The Economist, the Christian Science Monitor, the Financial Times, The Guardian, the Associated Press, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, BBC, Reuters, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Al Jazeera, and the Voice of America, among other media.
Somin’s writings have been cited in decisions by the United States Supreme Court, multiple state supreme courts and lower federal courts, and the Supreme Court of Israel. He is co-counsel for the plaintiffs in VOS Selections, Inc. v. Trump, a case challenging the constitutionality of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. Somin has testified on the use of drones for targeted killing in the War on Terror before the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights. In 2009, he testified on property rights issues at the United States Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Somin writes regularly for the popular Volokh Conspiracy law and politics blog, now affiliated with Reason magazine (previously affiliated with the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017). From 2006 to 2013, he served as Co-Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review, one of the country’s top-rated law and economics journals.
Somin has served as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has also been a visiting professor or scholar at the Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Hamburg, Germany, the University of Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Uriel Reichman University in Israel, and Zhengzhou University in China. He is a University Affiliate of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and an affiliated faculty member of the George Mason University Institute for Immigration Research. Before joining the faculty at George Mason, Somin was the John M. Olin Fellow in Law at Northwestern University Law School in 2002-2003. In 2001-2002, he clerked for the Hon. Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Professor Somin earned his B.A., Summa Cum Laude, at Amherst College, M.A. in Political Science from Harvard University, and J.D. from Yale Law School.
Panel Two: Ethics in the Executive Branch
2017 Annual Texas Chapters Conference
Houston, TXThe European Commission’s Google Decision: Searching for Answers
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Every state has laws or regulations that require individuals seeking to offer a certain service...
TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC - Post-Decision SCOTUScast
J Hartline
On May 22, 2017, the Supreme Court decided TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group...
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Eric R. Claeys
Why is a state or local government more likely to prevail against a landowner in...
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Josh Blackman, Ilya Somin
Eighteen days after the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Trump v. International Refugee Assistance Project and stay...