Professor of Law, Michigan State University (currently serving as FCC General Counsel)
Professor Candeub joined the MSU Law faculty in fall 2004. He is also a Fellow with MSU's Institute of Public Utilities. Prior to joining MSU, he served as an advisor at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). From 1998 to 2000, Professor Candeub was a litigation associate for the Washington D.C. firm of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue and also has served as a corporate associate with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, also in Washington, D.C. Immediately following law school, he clerked for Chief Judge J. Clifford Wallace, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. While in law school, Professor Candeub was an articles editor for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
Professor Candeub's scholarly interests focus on the law and regulation of communications, internet, technology. His numerous law review articles and scholarly papers have placed him at the center of legal and policy controversies, and he often writes for popular outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and US News. Federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have cited and relied upon his work.
He joined the Trump administration in 2019 as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Telecommunications and Information and assumed the role of Acting Assistant Secretary. He later joined the Department of Justice as Deputy Associate Attorney General.
Professor Candeub is a senior fellow at the D.C.-based Center of Renewing America.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
John B. Nalbandian serves as a United States Circuit Judge from Kentucky on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He was nominated and confirmed to that position in 2018. Prior to that, Judge Nalbandian was a partner in the litigation practice group of Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP in Cincinnati, where he served as the firm’s lead appellate lawyer and also practiced complex litigation in state and federal courts. Judge Nalbandian was board certified by the Ohio State Bar Association as a specialist in appellate law. Prior to joining Taft, Judge Nalbandian practiced for five years in the appellate section of Jones Day in Washington, DC. Upon graduation from law school, Judge Nalbandian clerked for the Honorable Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Houston. While in private practice, he also served as a board member of the State Justice Institute, a nonprofit organization established by the federal government to improve the administration of justice in state courts. He served as President of the Cincinnati Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society. He has also been involved in his community as a board member of the Greater Cincinnati Minority Counsel Program, and as a board member of the Asian Pacific Bar Association of Southwest Ohio. Judge Nalbandian earned his B.S., magna cum laude, from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was inducted into the Order of the Coif and served as managing editor of the Virginia Law Review.
Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA School of Law
Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), as well as the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA School of Law. He recently retired from teaching at UCLA, after 30 years there, and is now focusing on research.
Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (8th ed. 2023), and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed. 2016), as well as over 100 academic law journal articles, mostly on First Amendment law. He is a member of The American Law Institute; the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Free Speech Law; and the creator and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a leading legal blog founded in 2002 (hosted at the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017 and now at Reason Magazine).
Senior Vice President, Strand Consult
Roslyn Layton, PhD is a leading international expert on technology policy. She is Senior Vice President of Strand Consult, an independent consultancy serving the global mobile telecom industry. She is also a Visiting Researcher at Aalborg University Copenhagen where she earned a doctoral thesis on network neutrality by measuring the outcome of the policy across 53 countries over 5 years. She served on the Presidential Transition Team for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and her work was critical to the FCC’s defense for the Restoring Internet Freedom Order. She has testified to the United States Senate and House on multiple topics including spectrum, broadband, mobile mergers, competition, and privacy. She founded the think tank China Tech Threat to study the problems of technology produced by the People’s Republic of China. She serves as the Program Chair for the Telecom Policy Research Conference, the leading interdisciplinary academic gathering. Her recent paper on rural broadband describes the empirical case for policy reform to recover network infrastructure costs from streaming video entertainment providers. She is a Senior Contributor to Forbes.
Technology Policy Manager, R Street Institute
Founding Partner, Lodestar Law and Economics PLLC
Josh is the founder of Lodestar Law and Economics, PLLC. On January 1, 2013, the U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed Wright as a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). He is a leading scholar in antitrust law, economics, intellectual property, regulation, and consumer protection, and has published more than 100 articles and book chapters, co-authored a leading antitrust casebook, and edited several book volumes focusing on these issues. Commentators have recognized Wright as “widely considered his generation’s greatest mind on antitrust law,” and his academic work ranks him as one of the most cited antitrust academics in the world. Wright was also awarded the Paul M. Bator Award by the Federalist Society in 2014 to “an academic who demonstrated excellence in legal scholarship, a commitment to teaching, a concern for students, and who has made a significant public impact.” Wright also served as the Executive Director of the Global Antitrust Institute, the world’s premiere academic institute focused upon antitrust education for judges and regulators and has taught hundreds of judges and thousands of regulators from dozens of countries.
Wright’s practice focuses upon helping clients solve complex competition, consumer protection, and regulatory problems by providing legal and economic analysis, strategic advice and counseling, and economic expert testimony.
Former Acting Deputy Secretary, Department of Homeland Security
Senior Fellow for Homeland Security at The Center for Renewing America, Mr. Cuccinelli has been a trial and appellate litigator, including constitutional law, for over 25 years. Additionally, Mr. Cuccinelli served in state government in the Virginia State Senate from 2002-2010, and as Virginia’s Attorney General from 2010-2014. As Virginia’s Attorney General, Mr. Cuccinelli led national litigation against Obamacare and other illegal and unconstitutional federal overreach. He also led Virginia from being among the worst states in fighting human trafficking to becoming one of the best; and his successful prosecutorial efforts resulted in record enforcement against gangs, health care fraud and child predators, all while protecting life and constitutional rights.
Mr. Cuccinelli also served in the federal government, first as the Acting Director of
United States Citizenship & Immigration Services, and then as the Acting Deputy
Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security. During his tenure, Mr. Cuccinelli
was a leading spokesman for the administration on immigration, election security and
homeland security issues. He was responsible for planning and managing a budget of
over $50 billion per year, while serving as the chief operating officer for the Department
of the federal government responsible for responding to most forms of crises in the
United States. Mr. Cuccinelli was appointed by the President to serve as an original
member of the Coronavirus Task Force upon the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Following his time in federal service, Mr. Cuccinelli assumed leadership of the joint
Susan B. Anthony List/American Principles Project Election Transparency Initiative, in
which position Mr. Cuccinelli seeks to fend off a federal takeover of state elections while
at the same time advancing election reforms to achieve security, transparency and
accountability in our elections.
Mr. Cuccinelli continues to be a frequent media contributor on the wide array of
subjects in which he is an expert.
Mr. Cuccinelli and his wife, Teiro, grew up and live in Virginia and they have seven
children, two sons-in-law and most joyously of all – four grandchildren (so far).
In his spare time, Mr. Cuccinelli enjoys spending time with his family, reading, shooting,
playing ultimate frisbee and watching college basketball.
Director, Washington Legislative Office, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Laura W. Murphy is in her second tenure as Director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, a position she first held from 1993-2005. Since returning Murphy has maintained strong relationships with leaders in the United States Congress and the Obama Administration to advance the ACLU’s public policy priorities including national security, criminal justice, human rights, privacy, reproductive rights, civil rights and First Amendment issues.
Recently, Murphy played a leadership role in the passage of the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 signed into law by President Obama on August 3, 2010—a law that reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine and that begins to address some of the racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Under her leadership, the ACLU Washington Legislative Office worked with Congress and the White House to gain support around federally-funded abortions for servicewomen and military dependents in the cases of rape or incest. The provision was signed into law on January 2, 2013.
Prior to her return to the ACLU, she founded and directed her own firm, Laura Murphy & Associates, L.L.C., where she utilized her 30 years of policy-making and political expertise to guide and advise corporate and non-profit clients at the national, state and local levels.
Murphy is well known for her notable legislative career advancing human rights and civil liberties. Both major newspapers on Capitol Hill, Roll Call and The Hill, selected Murphy as one of the 50 most influential lobbyists and one of 17 top nonprofit lobbyists in 1997 and 2003, respectively. In 1997, and again in 2003, the Congressional Black Caucus honored her for her significant contributions to legislation that advances civil rights and civil liberties. She has been given awards for her work with Congress and the White House by ACLU affiliates in Massachusetts, Mississippi and Maryland. Murphy has also been instrumental in garnering support from African Americans for same sex marriage, especially in her home state of Maryland. Murphy’s family has a storied history in the civil rights movement and in the Black press, and they were intimately involved in the successful 2012 campaign for marriage equality in Maryland.
In previous professional positions Murphy served as chief of staff to a California Assembly Speaker and a cabinet member for the Mayor of the District of Columbia. Murphy has testified more than a dozen times before Congress and is an experienced national spokesperson. She has been a frequent guest on television and radio including PBS, “NBC Nightly News” and “The Today Show”, “ABC World News”, CNN, Fox News, and National Public Radio.
Founding Director, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University
Jameel Jaffer is the founding director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which works to protect and expand the freedoms of speech and the press through strategic litigation, research, and public education. Until recently, Jaffer was deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union and director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, in which role he oversaw the ACLU’s work relating to free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights.
Jaffer has litigated some of the most significant post-9/11 cases relating to national security and civil liberties, including cases concerning detention, interrogation, surveillance, targeted killing, and government secrecy. He co-led the litigation that resulted in the publication of the Bush administration’s “torture memos”—a lawsuit the New York Times described as “among the most successful in the history of public disclosure.” More recently, he led the ACLU’s litigation that resulted in the publication of the Obama administration’s “drone memos.”
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.
Chairman and President, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
Kevin J. "Seamus" Hasson is Founder and President of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a bipartisan, public-interest law firm that protects the free expression of all religious traditions. Since 1994, Hasson and the Becket Fund have successfully represented clients from nearly every faith tradition including Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, Native Americans, Unitarians and Zoroastrians. Along the way, The Becket Fund has won kudos from thinkers from Pope John Paul II to Elie Wiesel.
Hasson enjoys broad credibility in the national media. He has been widely quoted, appearing for example, in Newsweek, US News and World Report, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor and USA Today, as well as in regional media from The L.A. Times to The Chicago Tribune to The Philadelphia Enquirer. He has appeared on broadcast news programs including The Today Show, Dateline NBC, McLaughlin One on One, NPR's Talk of the Nation, and CNN Talkback Live. He's also appeared twice on Al-Jazeera, debating Saudi clerics.
Hasson lectures and debates frequently, in venues ranging from Oxford to the Vatican, from Harvard to BYU. He is the author of The Right to be Wrong: Ending the Culture War over Religion in America.
Before founding the Becket Fund in 1994, Hasson was an attorney at Williams & Connolly in Washington D.C., where he focused on religious liberty litigation. From 1986 to 1987, he served in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department where he advised the White House and cabinet departments on church-state relations. He is a 1985 magna cum laude graduate of Notre Dame Law School and also holds a Master's degree in theology from Notre Dame.
Arthur N. Rupe Debate: Section 230 in the Algorithmic Age
Adam Candeub, John B. Nalbandian, Eugene Volokh
The Michigan Law Federalist Society is pleased to host students and attorneys from across...
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Nothing Lasts Forever: Creative Destruction and Schumpeter’s Lessons for Antitrust Enforcement
The Federalist Society is pleased to announce its Student Blog Initiative, a project of the...
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World IP Day: Trade Agreements Should Include Stronger Online Copyright Protections
World Intellectual Property Day is April 26, a day to heighten awareness regarding the importance...
Net Neutrality Without the FCC?: Why the FTC Can Regulate Broadband Effectively
Roslyn Layton, Tom W. Struble
Note from the Editor: This article argues that the FTC has jurisdiction over broadband and the...
Lunch with Former AG Alberto Gonzales
Portland, OregonNet Neutrality Meets Regulatory Economics 101
Joshua D. Wright
Note from the Editor: This article reproduces then-Commissioner Joshua D. Wright's remarks at the Federalist...
High Stakes: The FCC Gambles with America’s Global Leadership
Kenneth T. Cuccinelli
Note from the Editor: On February 4, 2015, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler put...
Jameel Jaffer and Laura Murphy Testimony Before The House Committee on the Judiciary Oversight Hearing on The Administration’s Use of FISA Authorities
Laura W. Murphy, Jameel Jaffer
Before The House Committee on the Judiciary Oversight Hearing on The Administration’s Use of...
Net Neutrality vs. Net Reality: Why an Evidence-Based Approach to Enforcement, And Not More Regulation, Could Protect Innovation on the Web
Maureen K. Ohlhausen
Related Links: Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Hearing on “Network Neutrality” (testimony of...
Do Private School Tuition Tax Credits Violate the Religion Clauses of the Oregon Constitution?
Portland, Oregon