Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and Director, Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law, Harvard Law School
Noah Feldman specializes in constitutional studies, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, free speech, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory. Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, he is also a Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. In 2003 he served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution. He received his A.B. summa cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D.Phil. in Oriental Studies from Oxford University in 1994. From 1999 to 2002, he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. Before that he served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998 to 1999) and to Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1997 to 1998). He received his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1997, serving as Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal. He’s the author of eight books: The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President (Random House, 2017); Cool War: The Future of Global Competition (Random House, 2013); Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices (Twelve Publishing, 2010); The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2008); Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2005); What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation building (Princeton University Press 2004); and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2003. He also co-authored two textbooks with Kathleen Sullivan: Constitutional Law, Twentieth Edition (Foundation Press, Fall 2019) and First Amendment (Foundation Press, 2016).
Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law
James Lindgren is a law professor at Northwestern University, with a BA from Yale and a JD and a PhD in (quantitative) sociology from the University of Chicago. He is a cofounder of the Section on Scholarship of the Association of American Law Schools and a former chair of its Section on Social Science and the Law. He has published in the Yale Law Journal and the Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, California, Northwestern, Georgetown, and UCLA Law Reviews, among others. His work includes "Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal " (Yale Law Journal, 2002) and "Term Limits for the Supreme Court: Life Tenure Reconsidered " (Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 2006). In Evans v. US (1992), the US Supreme Court adopted Lindgren's view of the overlap of bribery and federal extortion. He blogs at the Washington Post.
President, JCN
Carrie Campbell Severino is the president of the JCN, and co-author with Mollie Hemingway of the bestselling book Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Court. As a go-to expert on the confirmation process, Mrs. Severino has been extensively quoted in the media. She regularly appears on television, including FOX, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and ABC’s This Week.
Severino writes and speaks on a wide range of judicial issues, including the constitutional limits on government, the federal nomination process, and state judicial selection. She has testified before Congress on constitutional questions and briefed Senators on judicial nominations, and regularly files briefs in high-profile Supreme Court cases. She was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and to Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School (J.D.), Duke University (B.A., Biology), and Michigan State University (M.A., Linguistics).
Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies, Manhattan Institute
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Previously he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute.
Shapiro is the author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (2025) and Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020), coauthor of Religious Liberties for Corporations? (2014), and editor of 11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review (2008-18). He has contributed to a variety of academic, popular, and professional publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, and Newsweek. He also regularly provides commentary for various media outlets, writes the Shapiro’s Gavel newsletter on Substack, and once appeared on the Colbert Report.
Shapiro has testified many times before Congress and state legislatures and has filed more than 500 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court. He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, is a member of the board of fellows of the Jewish Policy Center, was an inaugural Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute, and has been an adjunct law professor at the George Washington University and University of Mississippi. He is also the chairman of the board of advisers of the Mississippi Justice Institute, a barrister in the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court, and a former member of the Virginia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Earlier in his career, Shapiro was a special assistant/adviser to the Multi-National Force in Iraq on rule-of-law issues and practiced at Patton Boggs and Cleary Gottlieb. Before entering private practice, he clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He holds an AB from Princeton University, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School.
Professor of Law, Harry Radzyner Law School, Interdisciplinary Center
Rivka Weill is a Professor of Law (tenured) at the Radzyner Law School, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC). In recent years, she was a Visiting Law Professor at Cardozo Law School (2016-2017), David R. Greenbaum and Laureine Knight Greenbaum Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at University of Chicago Law School (Fall 2017) and Visiting Law Professor at Yale Law School (Spring 2018). She earned her LLM and JSD from Yale Law School and holds an additional degree in Accounting from Tel-Aviv University. She was a clerk and legal adviser for the President of the Supreme Court of Israel, Aharon Barak. In recent years, she received three times the IDC’s “Best Researcher in Law School” award (2012, 2015, 2017) as well as the IDC’s “Best Lecturer in Law School” award (2010). Her work focuses on constitutional law as well as administrative law with a focus on theoretical and comparative dimensions. She has published in leading law journals in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. Professor Weill gave invited talks at prestigious universities across the United States, Europe, New Zealand and Australia.
Among her articles are Court Packing as an Antidote (Cardozo Law Review, 2020), The Strategic Common Law Court of Aharon Barak and its Aftermath: On Judicially-led Constitutional Revolutions and Democratic Backsliding (Law & Ethics of Human Rights, 2020), Secession and the Prevalence of Both Militant Democracy and Eternity Clauses Worldwide (Cardozo Law Review, 2018), On the Nexus of Eternity Clauses, Proportional Representation, and Banned Political Parties (Election Law Journal, 2017), Resurrecting Legislation (I*CON, 2016), Exodus: Structuring Redemption of Captives (Cardozo Law Review, 2014), The New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism Notwithstanding: On Judicial Review and Constitution-Making (American Journal of Comparative Law, 2014), Hybrid Constitutionalism: the Israeli Case for Judicial Review and Why We Should Care (Berkeley Journal of International Law, 2012), Reconciling Parliamentary Sovereignty and Judicial Review: On the Theoretical and Historical Origins of the Legislative Override Power (Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2012), Centennial to the Parliament Act 1911: the Manner and Form Fallacy (Public Law, 2012), Evolution vs. Revolution: Dueling Models of Dualism (American Journal of Comparative Law, 2006), We the British People (Public Law, 2004), Dicey was not Diceyan (Cambridge Law Journal, 2003).
Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and Director, Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law, Harvard Law School
Noah Feldman specializes in constitutional studies, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, free speech, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory. Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, he is also a Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. In 2003 he served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution. He received his A.B. summa cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D.Phil. in Oriental Studies from Oxford University in 1994. From 1999 to 2002, he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. Before that he served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998 to 1999) and to Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1997 to 1998). He received his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1997, serving as Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal. He’s the author of eight books: The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President (Random House, 2017); Cool War: The Future of Global Competition (Random House, 2013); Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices (Twelve Publishing, 2010); The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2008); Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2005); What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation building (Princeton University Press 2004); and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2003. He also co-authored two textbooks with Kathleen Sullivan: Constitutional Law, Twentieth Edition (Foundation Press, Fall 2019) and First Amendment (Foundation Press, 2016).
Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law
James Lindgren is a law professor at Northwestern University, with a BA from Yale and a JD and a PhD in (quantitative) sociology from the University of Chicago. He is a cofounder of the Section on Scholarship of the Association of American Law Schools and a former chair of its Section on Social Science and the Law. He has published in the Yale Law Journal and the Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, California, Northwestern, Georgetown, and UCLA Law Reviews, among others. His work includes "Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal " (Yale Law Journal, 2002) and "Term Limits for the Supreme Court: Life Tenure Reconsidered " (Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 2006). In Evans v. US (1992), the US Supreme Court adopted Lindgren's view of the overlap of bribery and federal extortion. He blogs at the Washington Post.
President, JCN
Carrie Campbell Severino is the president of the JCN, and co-author with Mollie Hemingway of the bestselling book Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Court. As a go-to expert on the confirmation process, Mrs. Severino has been extensively quoted in the media. She regularly appears on television, including FOX, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and ABC’s This Week.
Severino writes and speaks on a wide range of judicial issues, including the constitutional limits on government, the federal nomination process, and state judicial selection. She has testified before Congress on constitutional questions and briefed Senators on judicial nominations, and regularly files briefs in high-profile Supreme Court cases. She was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and to Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School (J.D.), Duke University (B.A., Biology), and Michigan State University (M.A., Linguistics).
Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies, Manhattan Institute
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Previously he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute.
Shapiro is the author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (2025) and Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020), coauthor of Religious Liberties for Corporations? (2014), and editor of 11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review (2008-18). He has contributed to a variety of academic, popular, and professional publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, and Newsweek. He also regularly provides commentary for various media outlets, writes the Shapiro’s Gavel newsletter on Substack, and once appeared on the Colbert Report.
Shapiro has testified many times before Congress and state legislatures and has filed more than 500 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court. He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, is a member of the board of fellows of the Jewish Policy Center, was an inaugural Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute, and has been an adjunct law professor at the George Washington University and University of Mississippi. He is also the chairman of the board of advisers of the Mississippi Justice Institute, a barrister in the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court, and a former member of the Virginia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Earlier in his career, Shapiro was a special assistant/adviser to the Multi-National Force in Iraq on rule-of-law issues and practiced at Patton Boggs and Cleary Gottlieb. Before entering private practice, he clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He holds an AB from Princeton University, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School.
Professor of Law, Harry Radzyner Law School, Interdisciplinary Center
Rivka Weill is a Professor of Law (tenured) at the Radzyner Law School, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC). In recent years, she was a Visiting Law Professor at Cardozo Law School (2016-2017), David R. Greenbaum and Laureine Knight Greenbaum Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at University of Chicago Law School (Fall 2017) and Visiting Law Professor at Yale Law School (Spring 2018). She earned her LLM and JSD from Yale Law School and holds an additional degree in Accounting from Tel-Aviv University. She was a clerk and legal adviser for the President of the Supreme Court of Israel, Aharon Barak. In recent years, she received three times the IDC’s “Best Researcher in Law School” award (2012, 2015, 2017) as well as the IDC’s “Best Lecturer in Law School” award (2010). Her work focuses on constitutional law as well as administrative law with a focus on theoretical and comparative dimensions. She has published in leading law journals in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. Professor Weill gave invited talks at prestigious universities across the United States, Europe, New Zealand and Australia.
Among her articles are Court Packing as an Antidote (Cardozo Law Review, 2020), The Strategic Common Law Court of Aharon Barak and its Aftermath: On Judicially-led Constitutional Revolutions and Democratic Backsliding (Law & Ethics of Human Rights, 2020), Secession and the Prevalence of Both Militant Democracy and Eternity Clauses Worldwide (Cardozo Law Review, 2018), On the Nexus of Eternity Clauses, Proportional Representation, and Banned Political Parties (Election Law Journal, 2017), Resurrecting Legislation (I*CON, 2016), Exodus: Structuring Redemption of Captives (Cardozo Law Review, 2014), The New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism Notwithstanding: On Judicial Review and Constitution-Making (American Journal of Comparative Law, 2014), Hybrid Constitutionalism: the Israeli Case for Judicial Review and Why We Should Care (Berkeley Journal of International Law, 2012), Reconciling Parliamentary Sovereignty and Judicial Review: On the Theoretical and Historical Origins of the Legislative Override Power (Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2012), Centennial to the Parliament Act 1911: the Manner and Form Fallacy (Public Law, 2012), Evolution vs. Revolution: Dueling Models of Dualism (American Journal of Comparative Law, 2006), We the British People (Public Law, 2004), Dicey was not Diceyan (Cambridge Law Journal, 2003).
Former UCLA & NBA Athlete
Ed O'Bannon led the UCLA men's basketball team to the 1995 NCAA Basketball Championship. He received the NCAA Tournament's Most Outstanding Player Award and won numerous other awards, including the John Wooden Award, which recognizes the best college basketball player in the country. O'Bannon was the ninth player selected in the 1995 NBA Draft and enjoyed a 10-year professional basketball career. After retiring from the game, O'Bannon entered the car dealership industry. In 2009, O'Bannon filed a federal lawsuit against the NCAA and Electronic Arts. In a landmark decision, which was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals, O'Bannon defeated the NCAA. O'Bannon received no compensation from the case. O'Bannon, who is from Los Angeles, now resides in Henderson, Nevada with his wife, Rosa. They have three children.
Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs; Director of the Sports and Entertainment Law Institute, University of New Hampshire School of Law
Michael McCann is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at UNH Law. Dean McCann is responsible for overseeing the law school’s program of legal education. His specific duties include day-to-day management of UNH Law’s degree programs with an emphasis on implementation and analysis of strategic initiatives to achieve institutional excellence. Dean McCann also supervises senior staff offices, including the registrar and career services, and he manages budgets, contracts and international programing.
Dean McCann is the Founding Director of the UNH Law Sports and Entertainment Law Institute (SELI). SELI offers hands-on training and experiential opportunities in this cutting-edge area of law. Dean McCann has held several other leadership posts at the University including Chair of the UNH Law Faculty Appointments Committee and Co-Chair of the UNH Law Dean Search and Selection Committee. Graduating students in UNH Law’s Class of 2015 selected McCann to deliver the faculty portion of their commencement address.
Dean McCann is one of the nation’s leading experts in sports law. He is Sports Illustrated’s Legal Analyst, an Investigative Writer for Sports Illustrated and the on-air Legal Analyst for NBA TV. McCann has authored more than 700 legal columns and articles for SI and is a key member of SI’s investigative team. He has covered the Boston Marathon bombings, Deflategate, the murder trials of Aaron Hernandez, sexual misconduct allegations against players, owners and team executives, the USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal, the ouster of Donald Sterling from the NBA Colin Kaepernick’s collusion grievance against the NFL, the FBI’s investigation into college basketball corruption, amateurism litigation against the NCAA, concussion class actions, the legality of sports betting and numerous other legal controversies.
McCann was the first member of the media to interview Lance Armstrong after Armstrong’s interview with Oprah Winfrey. He interviewed Armstrong at his home in Austin, Texas and authored "My Dance With Lance" (Sports Illustrated, March 11, 2013 issue, pages 14-15).
As a journalist, McCann has also broken several national news stories. Those stories include that relevant FBI wiretaps did not implicate University of Arizona basketball coach Sean Miller in the college hoops scandal, that attorneys for Colin Kaepernick deposed New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, that University of Arkansas football coach Bobby Petrino hired his mistress over 150 more qualified candidates, that Donald Sterling informed the NBA of his refusal to comply with the NBA’s sanction and that Sterling hired a legal team with a threat to sue the NBA, and that the Los Angeles Angels were set to trade troubled outfielder Josh Hamilton.
McCann is also a best-selling author and an accomplished scholar. McCann and former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon co-authored “Court Justice: The Inside Story of My Battle Against the NCAA” (Diversion Books, 2018). The book — which was named by The Christian Science Monitor as the No. 1 Sports Book in Spring 2018 and has been a best-selling book in several Amazon categories — tells the story of O’Bannon’s life in basketball and his historic court case against the NCAA. McCann is also the Editor and co-author of "The Oxford Handbook of American Sports Law" (Oxford University Press, 2017). The book is intended for law students, graduate students, college students and attorneys interested in the study of American sports law. In addition, McCann has authored more than 20 law review articles, with placements in the Yale Law Journal, Wisconsin Law Review, and Boston College Law Review, among other prominent law reviews. One notable law review article is “American Needle v. NFL: An Opportunity to Reshape Sports Law", 119 YALE L.J. 726 (2010).
Professor - Sport Management, Drexel University LeBow College of Business
Ellen J. Staurowsky, Ed.D., is a full professor in the Department of Sport Management at Drexel University. She is a fellow of both the North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM) and the AAHPERD Research Consortium.
Dr. Staurowsky is internationally recognized as an expert on social justice issues in sport which include gender equity and Title IX, pay equity and equal employment opportunity, college athletes’ rights and the exploitation of college athletes, the faculty role in reforming college sport, representation of women in sport media, and the misappropriation of American Indian imagery in sport. She is co-author of the book, College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA Amateur Myth (Praeger Press) and editor and author of Women and Sport: A Continuing Journey from Liberation to Celebration (Human Kinetics Publishers).
In addition to publications in scholarly journals such as the* Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Sociology of Sport Journal, Quest, Journal of Sport Management, the International Journal of Sport Sociology, the Marquette Sports Law Review, the Journal of Legal Aspects of Sport, the International Journal of Sport History, and Sport Management Review her critiques and analyses on a variety of issues have appeared in *The Chronicle of Higher Education, Huffington Post, Street & Smith’s SportsBusiness Journal, The NCAA News, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Athletic Management Magazine, and News From Indian Country. She was a columnist with the College Sport Business News, Women in Coaching Blog, and co-founder and editor of the LBGT Issues in Sport: Theory to Practice Blog. She currently serves as a contributing/senior writer with Sports Litigation Alert.
She has served as a research consultant to the National College Players Association, co-authoring several reports addressing issues regarding college football and basketball player value, including The $6 Billion Heist: Robbing College Athletes Under the Guise of Amateurism, TV Money Windfall in Big Time College Sports: $784 Million Reasons for Reform, The Price of Poverty: A Comparison of Big-Time College Athletes Fair Market Value, Their Current Compensation, and the U.S. Federal Poverty Line, and An Examination of the Financial Shortfall for Athletes on Full Scholarship at NCAA Division I Institutions – 2009-2010.
As a researcher and advocate on behalf of women in sport, she has served as the lead author on the Women’s Sports Foundation’s comprehensive and expansive research report entitled* Her Life Depends on It: Sport and Physical Activity in the Lives of American Girls and Wome*n (second and third editions). She also co-authored WSF’s report on women in the college sport workplace entitled* Beyond X’s and O’s: Gender Bias and Coaches of Women’s Teams*.
As a teacher and researcher, she has received numerous honors including the Women’s Sports Foundation Researcher of the Year award, the National Association for Girls and Women in Sport’s President’s Award, the University of South Carolina College Sport Research Institute’s Lifetime Research Achievement Award, and the Laughlin Education Award from Ursinus College for her contributions to education nationally.
Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Professor Yankah hold degrees from the University of Michigan, Columbia Law School and Oxford University. His work focuses on questions of criminal theory and punishment and political theory and particularly, questions political obligation and its interaction with justifications of punishment. His work has appeared in law review articles and peer reviewed legal theory journals and books including NOMOS, Ratio Juris, Law and Philosophy, Criminal Law and Philosophy and the Illinois Law Review. He has been a visiting fellow at the Israeli Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS), a Visiting Professor of Law at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya and a Distinguished Visiting Faculty Member at the University of Toronto School of Law.
He has been recognized numerous times by his students for his dedication to teaching; most recently he was awarded the Cardozo Alumni of the Year Award by Cardozo BALLSA, becoming the first non-Cardozo graduate or faculty member to be recognized. His interests have also led him to develop expertise in voting rights and election law and he serves as the co-chair of the New York Democratic Lawyers Council, the voting rights arm of the New York Democratic party and the coordinating arm of the DNC believed to be the largest voting rights group in the country. He sits on the Board of the Innocence Project and was awarded as an Advocate of Justice (2017) and has served on the Board of the American Constitution Society (NY Chapter). He maintains a public presence writing for publications spanning The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Huffington Post, among others, and has been a regular commentator on criminal law issues on television and radio including MSNBC, BBC, BBC International, PBS and NPR.
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.
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.
Associate Professor of Law, Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law
Professor Nelson joined the Villanova Law School faculty in 2017 as the Associate Professor of Law (Business Ethics), and she holds a courtesy appointment in the Management & Operations Department of Villanova Business School. A scholar, legal consultant, and start-up advisor, Professor Nelson teaches and writes on issues related to business law, ethics, and white collar crime. She also works collaboratively with two of the Law School’s Centers of Excellence—the John F. Scarpa Center for Law and Entrepreneurship and the David F. and Constance B. Girard-diCarlo Center for Ethics, Integrity, and Compliance—to advance legal scholarship and teaching that lie at the intersection of ethics and business. Professor Nelson came to Villanova from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she has served since 2015 as a Senior Fellow at the Carol and Lawrence Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research. She also was an advisor in the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies for the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Professor Nelson has received numerous awards from the Academy of Legal Studies in Business, including its 2016 Ralph Bunche Outstanding International Paper and its 2015 Outstanding Proceedings awards. Her scholarship has been published in both legal and business journals, including Harvard Law Review, Berkeley Business Law Journal, Journal of Management Inquiry, Cardozo Law Review, Journal of Legal Studies in Business (forthcoming), and The Georgetown Law Journal. Her book co-authored with Lynn Stout, Business Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know, will be published by the Oxford University Press in 2018.
In addition to her roles at Penn and Stanford, Professor Nelson previously taught at the Drucker School at Claremont Graduate University, the Mihaylo School at Cal State Fullerton, and was a faculty mentor at the Haas Business School of the University of California at Berkeley.
Prior to her work in academia, Nelson served as staff counsel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and clerked for the Honorable David M. Ebel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and the Honorable William H. Yohn Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. She previously worked as a deputy district attorney and as a business litigator in Denver, Colorado. Nelson is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was the Supreme Court Co-Chair of the Harvard Law Review. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with honors and distinction in the major from Yale University.
Professor of Law, Florida International University College of Law
Hannibal Travis teaches and conducts research in the fields of cyberlaw, intellectual property, antitrust, international and comparative law, and human rights. He joined FIU after several years practicing intellectual property and Internet law at O’Melveny & Myers in San Francisco, California, and at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York. He has also served as the Irving Cypen Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Florida, a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Villanova University, and a Visiting Fellow at Oxford. He graduated summa cum laude in philosophy from Washington University, where he was named to Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he served as a teaching assistant in philosophy classes taught at Harvard College. After law school, Professor Travis clerked for the United States District Court in Los Angeles, California. Professor Travis has published articles on copyright, trademark, and antitrust law in a variety of journals and books. He has also published works on antitrust law, telecommunications law, and net neutrality in American University Law Review, Hofstra Law Review, and Santa Clara Law Review.
His works have focused on the intellectual property implications of new technologies and user-generated content, as well as antitrust law as applied to broadband and Wi-Fi Internet access markets. He has contributed to symposia and edited volumes on the international and comparative law of copyright and performers’ rights, including a piece on software contracts and copyright that was selected by West Group as one of the best articles relating to intellectual property law that was published in 2010. Professor Travis has also published widely on genocide, cultural survival, and human rights. He is currently an editorial advisory board member of Genocide Studies International (University of Toronto Press), and has served as a peer reviewer for manuscripts submitted to Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Routledge, and Genocide Studies and Prevention (the journal of the International Association of Genocide Scholars). He has coached FIU’s Jessup International Law Moot Court team, Lefkowitz Trademark Law Moot Court team, and BMI Copyright Law Moot Court team. He is a member of the Copyright Society of the USA and the American Law and Economics Association.
Associate Clinical Professor of Law and Founder/Director, Tech Startup Clinic, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Aaron Wright is an expert in corporate and intellectual property law, with extensive experience in Internet and new technology issues. Before joining Cardozo's faculty, he sold a company to Wikia, the for-profit sister project of Wikipedia, where he ran Wikia’s New York office, served as General Counsel and Vice President of Product and Business Development, and helped build an open source search engine. Wright has clerked for the Honorable William J. Martini of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey and worked as an associate at several prominent New York law firms, including Patterson Belknap and Jenner & Block. He received his J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where he served as the editor-in-chief of the Cardozo Law Review. He has a forthcoming book about blockchain technology and the law (co-authored with Primavera De Filippi) that will be published by Harvard University Press.
Joel focuses his litigation practice on the defense of patent infringement claims and challenges to patent validity as well as disputes over trademarks, copyrights and other intellectual property. A registered patent attorney, he has deep experience in post-grant practice before the Patent Office, particularly contested review conducted in parallel with patent infringement litigation. Joel works closely with trial teams preparing patent portfolios for assertive litigation through rigorous “pre-examination” claim validity review and owner-directed re-examination and correction. He has also represented clients in copyright matters and related questions involving the rights surrounding various methods of copying, storing, reproducing and streaming digital media.
Joel litigates and advises candidates, election officials and members of the public on election law, including ballot access and integrity provisions of federal law. He has extensive experience in voter roll integrity and language minority ballot access provisions of federal election statutes. Joel has investigated and enforced statewide violations of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act, and implemented election day polling place observers in primary and general elections in numerous jurisdictions.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Judge Carlos Bea serves as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He received his Bachelor's Degree from Stanford University in 1956 and his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1958. Judge Bea was born in San Sebastian, Spain, and immigrated with his family to Cuba in 1939. In 1952, he represented Cuba on the Cuban National basketball team in the Helsinki Olympics. Judge Bea became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1958. He engaged in private practice in San Francisco, principally in the area of civil trials (jury and non-jury), from 1959-75 at Dunne, Phelps & Mills and from 1975-90 at Carlos Bea, A Law Corporation. He taught courses in civil litigation advocacy at Hastings College of Law and Stanford Law School. From 1990 to 2003, Judge Bea served as a judge of the San Francisco Superior Court. He was nominated by President George W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and was confirmed in 2003.
Judge Bea and his wife Louise reside in San Francisco, where they raised their four sons, Sebastian, Alexander, Nicholas, and Dominic.
Dr. John Eastman is the former Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service and former Dean at Chapman University's Dale E. Fowler School of Law, where he had been a member of the faculty since 1999, specializing in Constitutional Law, Legal History, and Property. He is a founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute that he founded in 1999. He has a Ph.D. in Government from the Claremont Graduate School and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, and a B.A. in Politics and Economics from the University of Dallas. He serves as the Chairman of the Board of the National Organization for Marriage.
Prior to joining the Chapman law faculty, Dr. Eastman served as a law clerk to the Honorable Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States, and to the Honorable J. Michael Luttig, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and practiced law with the national law firm of Kirkland & Ellis. Dr. Eastman has also represented numerous clients in important constitutional law matters and has argued before the Supreme Court. On behalf of the Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, he has participated as amicus curiae before the Supreme Court of the United States, U.S. Courts of Appeals, and State Supreme Courts in more than one hundred cases of constitutional significance, including Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (the school vouchers case), Kelo v. New London, Ct. (eminent domain), and Van Orden v. Perry (the 10 Commandments case). He has also appeared as an expert legal commentator on numerous television and radio programs, including C-SPAN, Fox News, PBS, NewsHour, and The O'Reilly Factor.
Fox Family Pavilion Distinguished Scholar in Residence, University of Pennsylvania
MARCI A. HAMILTON is a Fox Family Pavilion Distinguished Scholar in Residence in the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the founder, CEO, and Academic Director of CHILD USA, www.childusa.org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit academic think tank at the University of Pennsylvania dedicated to interdisciplinary, evidence-based research to prevent child abuse and neglect. Before joining the program on religion at Penn, Professor Hamilton was the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University.
Hamilton is the leading public intellectual critic of extreme religious liberty and its impact on vulnerable populations including children, LGBTQ, and women. The author of God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, she is also a columnist for Verdict on Justia.com. Hamilton successfully challenged the constitutionality of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA”) at the Supreme Court in Boerne v. Flores (1997), and defeated the RFRA claim brought by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee against hundreds of child sex abuse survivors in Committee of Unsecured Creditors v. Listecki (7th Cir. 2015).
Drawing on her experience studying and advising in cases involving clergy sex abuse, Hamilton is the leading expert on child sex abuse statutes of limitations and has submitted testimony and advised legislators in every state where significant reform has occurred. She is the author of Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children (Cambridge University Press), which advocates for the elimination of child sex abuse statutes of limitations. She has also filed countless pro bono amicus briefs for the protection of children at the United States Supreme Court and the state supreme courts. Her textbook, Children and the Law, co-authored with Martin Gardner, will be published Fall 2017 by Carolina Academic Press, formerly Lexis/Nexis.
Hamilton clerked for United States Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Hamilton has been honored with the 2016 Voice Today, Voice of Gratitude Award; the 2015 Religious Liberty Award, American Humanist Association; the 2014 Freethought Heroine Award; the National Crime Victim Bar Association’s Frank Carrington Champion of Civil Justice Award, 2012; the E. Nathaniel Gates Award for outstanding public advocacy and scholarship, 2008; and selected as a Pennsylvania Woman of the Year Award, 2012, among others. She is also frequently quoted in the national media on RFRA, RLUIPA, First Amendment, clergy sex abuse, and statute of limitations issues.
Professor Hamilton is a graduate of Vanderbilt University, B.A., summa cum laude; Pennsylvania State University, M.A. (English, fiction writing, High Honors); M.A. (Philosophy); and the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, J.D., magna cum laude, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Order of the Coif.
Joel focuses his litigation practice on the defense of patent infringement claims and challenges to patent validity as well as disputes over trademarks, copyrights and other intellectual property. A registered patent attorney, he has deep experience in post-grant practice before the Patent Office, particularly contested review conducted in parallel with patent infringement litigation. Joel works closely with trial teams preparing patent portfolios for assertive litigation through rigorous “pre-examination” claim validity review and owner-directed re-examination and correction. He has also represented clients in copyright matters and related questions involving the rights surrounding various methods of copying, storing, reproducing and streaming digital media.
Joel litigates and advises candidates, election officials and members of the public on election law, including ballot access and integrity provisions of federal law. He has extensive experience in voter roll integrity and language minority ballot access provisions of federal election statutes. Joel has investigated and enforced statewide violations of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act, and implemented election day polling place observers in primary and general elections in numerous jurisdictions.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Judge Carlos Bea serves as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He received his Bachelor's Degree from Stanford University in 1956 and his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1958. Judge Bea was born in San Sebastian, Spain, and immigrated with his family to Cuba in 1939. In 1952, he represented Cuba on the Cuban National basketball team in the Helsinki Olympics. Judge Bea became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1958. He engaged in private practice in San Francisco, principally in the area of civil trials (jury and non-jury), from 1959-75 at Dunne, Phelps & Mills and from 1975-90 at Carlos Bea, A Law Corporation. He taught courses in civil litigation advocacy at Hastings College of Law and Stanford Law School. From 1990 to 2003, Judge Bea served as a judge of the San Francisco Superior Court. He was nominated by President George W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and was confirmed in 2003.
Judge Bea and his wife Louise reside in San Francisco, where they raised their four sons, Sebastian, Alexander, Nicholas, and Dominic.
Dr. John Eastman is the former Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service and former Dean at Chapman University's Dale E. Fowler School of Law, where he had been a member of the faculty since 1999, specializing in Constitutional Law, Legal History, and Property. He is a founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute that he founded in 1999. He has a Ph.D. in Government from the Claremont Graduate School and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, and a B.A. in Politics and Economics from the University of Dallas. He serves as the Chairman of the Board of the National Organization for Marriage.
Prior to joining the Chapman law faculty, Dr. Eastman served as a law clerk to the Honorable Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States, and to the Honorable J. Michael Luttig, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and practiced law with the national law firm of Kirkland & Ellis. Dr. Eastman has also represented numerous clients in important constitutional law matters and has argued before the Supreme Court. On behalf of the Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, he has participated as amicus curiae before the Supreme Court of the United States, U.S. Courts of Appeals, and State Supreme Courts in more than one hundred cases of constitutional significance, including Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (the school vouchers case), Kelo v. New London, Ct. (eminent domain), and Van Orden v. Perry (the 10 Commandments case). He has also appeared as an expert legal commentator on numerous television and radio programs, including C-SPAN, Fox News, PBS, NewsHour, and The O'Reilly Factor.
Fox Family Pavilion Distinguished Scholar in Residence, University of Pennsylvania
MARCI A. HAMILTON is a Fox Family Pavilion Distinguished Scholar in Residence in the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the founder, CEO, and Academic Director of CHILD USA, www.childusa.org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit academic think tank at the University of Pennsylvania dedicated to interdisciplinary, evidence-based research to prevent child abuse and neglect. Before joining the program on religion at Penn, Professor Hamilton was the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University.
Hamilton is the leading public intellectual critic of extreme religious liberty and its impact on vulnerable populations including children, LGBTQ, and women. The author of God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, she is also a columnist for Verdict on Justia.com. Hamilton successfully challenged the constitutionality of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA”) at the Supreme Court in Boerne v. Flores (1997), and defeated the RFRA claim brought by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee against hundreds of child sex abuse survivors in Committee of Unsecured Creditors v. Listecki (7th Cir. 2015).
Drawing on her experience studying and advising in cases involving clergy sex abuse, Hamilton is the leading expert on child sex abuse statutes of limitations and has submitted testimony and advised legislators in every state where significant reform has occurred. She is the author of Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children (Cambridge University Press), which advocates for the elimination of child sex abuse statutes of limitations. She has also filed countless pro bono amicus briefs for the protection of children at the United States Supreme Court and the state supreme courts. Her textbook, Children and the Law, co-authored with Martin Gardner, will be published Fall 2017 by Carolina Academic Press, formerly Lexis/Nexis.
Hamilton clerked for United States Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Hamilton has been honored with the 2016 Voice Today, Voice of Gratitude Award; the 2015 Religious Liberty Award, American Humanist Association; the 2014 Freethought Heroine Award; the National Crime Victim Bar Association’s Frank Carrington Champion of Civil Justice Award, 2012; the E. Nathaniel Gates Award for outstanding public advocacy and scholarship, 2008; and selected as a Pennsylvania Woman of the Year Award, 2012, among others. She is also frequently quoted in the national media on RFRA, RLUIPA, First Amendment, clergy sex abuse, and statute of limitations issues.
Professor Hamilton is a graduate of Vanderbilt University, B.A., summa cum laude; Pennsylvania State University, M.A. (English, fiction writing, High Honors); M.A. (Philosophy); and the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, J.D., magna cum laude, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Order of the Coif.
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.
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.
Associate Professor of Law, Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law
Professor Nelson joined the Villanova Law School faculty in 2017 as the Associate Professor of Law (Business Ethics), and she holds a courtesy appointment in the Management & Operations Department of Villanova Business School. A scholar, legal consultant, and start-up advisor, Professor Nelson teaches and writes on issues related to business law, ethics, and white collar crime. She also works collaboratively with two of the Law School’s Centers of Excellence—the John F. Scarpa Center for Law and Entrepreneurship and the David F. and Constance B. Girard-diCarlo Center for Ethics, Integrity, and Compliance—to advance legal scholarship and teaching that lie at the intersection of ethics and business. Professor Nelson came to Villanova from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she has served since 2015 as a Senior Fellow at the Carol and Lawrence Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research. She also was an advisor in the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies for the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Professor Nelson has received numerous awards from the Academy of Legal Studies in Business, including its 2016 Ralph Bunche Outstanding International Paper and its 2015 Outstanding Proceedings awards. Her scholarship has been published in both legal and business journals, including Harvard Law Review, Berkeley Business Law Journal, Journal of Management Inquiry, Cardozo Law Review, Journal of Legal Studies in Business (forthcoming), and The Georgetown Law Journal. Her book co-authored with Lynn Stout, Business Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know, will be published by the Oxford University Press in 2018.
In addition to her roles at Penn and Stanford, Professor Nelson previously taught at the Drucker School at Claremont Graduate University, the Mihaylo School at Cal State Fullerton, and was a faculty mentor at the Haas Business School of the University of California at Berkeley.
Prior to her work in academia, Nelson served as staff counsel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and clerked for the Honorable David M. Ebel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and the Honorable William H. Yohn Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. She previously worked as a deputy district attorney and as a business litigator in Denver, Colorado. Nelson is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was the Supreme Court Co-Chair of the Harvard Law Review. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with honors and distinction in the major from Yale University.
Professor of Law, Florida International University College of Law
Hannibal Travis teaches and conducts research in the fields of cyberlaw, intellectual property, antitrust, international and comparative law, and human rights. He joined FIU after several years practicing intellectual property and Internet law at O’Melveny & Myers in San Francisco, California, and at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York. He has also served as the Irving Cypen Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Florida, a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Villanova University, and a Visiting Fellow at Oxford. He graduated summa cum laude in philosophy from Washington University, where he was named to Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he served as a teaching assistant in philosophy classes taught at Harvard College. After law school, Professor Travis clerked for the United States District Court in Los Angeles, California. Professor Travis has published articles on copyright, trademark, and antitrust law in a variety of journals and books. He has also published works on antitrust law, telecommunications law, and net neutrality in American University Law Review, Hofstra Law Review, and Santa Clara Law Review.
His works have focused on the intellectual property implications of new technologies and user-generated content, as well as antitrust law as applied to broadband and Wi-Fi Internet access markets. He has contributed to symposia and edited volumes on the international and comparative law of copyright and performers’ rights, including a piece on software contracts and copyright that was selected by West Group as one of the best articles relating to intellectual property law that was published in 2010. Professor Travis has also published widely on genocide, cultural survival, and human rights. He is currently an editorial advisory board member of Genocide Studies International (University of Toronto Press), and has served as a peer reviewer for manuscripts submitted to Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Routledge, and Genocide Studies and Prevention (the journal of the International Association of Genocide Scholars). He has coached FIU’s Jessup International Law Moot Court team, Lefkowitz Trademark Law Moot Court team, and BMI Copyright Law Moot Court team. He is a member of the Copyright Society of the USA and the American Law and Economics Association.
Associate Clinical Professor of Law and Founder/Director, Tech Startup Clinic, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Aaron Wright is an expert in corporate and intellectual property law, with extensive experience in Internet and new technology issues. Before joining Cardozo's faculty, he sold a company to Wikia, the for-profit sister project of Wikipedia, where he ran Wikia’s New York office, served as General Counsel and Vice President of Product and Business Development, and helped build an open source search engine. Wright has clerked for the Honorable William J. Martini of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey and worked as an associate at several prominent New York law firms, including Patterson Belknap and Jenner & Block. He received his J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where he served as the editor-in-chief of the Cardozo Law Review. He has a forthcoming book about blockchain technology and the law (co-authored with Primavera De Filippi) that will be published by Harvard University Press.
Professor of History, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center
KC Johnson is professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where he has taught since 1999. He has written 13 books on topics in U.S. political history, U.S. foreign policy, and legal and policy debates surrounding campus due process and civil liberties. His Duke lacrosse case blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, was named ABA Journal’s Best Ethics Blog in 2007; and he continues to blog on higher-ed matters at the blog Minding the Campus.
Special Counsel, Campus Advocacy, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)
One of FIRE’s longest-serving employees, Robert Shibley began at FIRE straight out of Duke Law School in 2003, with the intention of doing nonprofit work for a couple of years before finding a permanent job. This lasted 19 years, including six as FIRE’s executive director. During his time at FIRE, Robert launched FIRE’s first major litigation initiative, traveled to dozens of campuses to speak about the First Amendment and Title IX issues on campus, and oversaw FIRE’s expansion into off-campus issues before a stint representing students and faculty members in private practice at the firm of Allen Harris PLLC.
Having realized things on campus were even worse than he had believed, Robert returned to FIRE as Special Counsel for Campus Advocacy in order to finish the job he started: restoring free speech and due process to America’s college campuses. Robert is the author of Twisting Title IX, from Encounter Books. His writing has appeared everywhere from The Wall Street Journal to The Washington Post, USA Today, and TIME, and he has appeared on national and international broadcasts including the BBC and NPR, The O’Reilly Factor, CNN Tonight, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and (perhaps most famously) Dr. Phil.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit
Stephanos Bibas is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Judge Bibas was previously a professor of law and criminology at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. As director of the Penn Law Supreme Court Clinic, he argued six cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and filed briefs in dozens of others. He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University in 1989 with a B.A. in political theory and from Oxford University in 1991 with a B.A. in jurisprudence. He then earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1994.
After graduating from Yale Law, Judge Bibas clerked for Judge Patrick Higginbotham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court and was a litigation associate at Covington & Burling LLP in Washington, D.C. Thereafter, Judge Bibas served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he successfully prosecuted the world’s leading expert in Tiffany stained glass for hiring a grave robber to steal priceless Tiffany windows from cemeteries. Before his tenure at Penn Law, Judge Bibas taught at the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Iowa College of Law and was a research fellow at Yale Law School. He has published two books and seventy scholarly articles.
Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Professor Yankah hold degrees from the University of Michigan, Columbia Law School and Oxford University. His work focuses on questions of criminal theory and punishment and political theory and particularly, questions political obligation and its interaction with justifications of punishment. His work has appeared in law review articles and peer reviewed legal theory journals and books including NOMOS, Ratio Juris, Law and Philosophy, Criminal Law and Philosophy and the Illinois Law Review. He has been a visiting fellow at the Israeli Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS), a Visiting Professor of Law at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya and a Distinguished Visiting Faculty Member at the University of Toronto School of Law.
He has been recognized numerous times by his students for his dedication to teaching; most recently he was awarded the Cardozo Alumni of the Year Award by Cardozo BALLSA, becoming the first non-Cardozo graduate or faculty member to be recognized. His interests have also led him to develop expertise in voting rights and election law and he serves as the co-chair of the New York Democratic Lawyers Council, the voting rights arm of the New York Democratic party and the coordinating arm of the DNC believed to be the largest voting rights group in the country. He sits on the Board of the Innocence Project and was awarded as an Advocate of Justice (2017) and has served on the Board of the American Constitution Society (NY Chapter). He maintains a public presence writing for publications spanning The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Huffington Post, among others, and has been a regular commentator on criminal law issues on television and radio including MSNBC, BBC, BBC International, PBS and NPR.
Joel focuses his litigation practice on the defense of patent infringement claims and challenges to patent validity as well as disputes over trademarks, copyrights and other intellectual property. A registered patent attorney, he has deep experience in post-grant practice before the Patent Office, particularly contested review conducted in parallel with patent infringement litigation. Joel works closely with trial teams preparing patent portfolios for assertive litigation through rigorous “pre-examination” claim validity review and owner-directed re-examination and correction. He has also represented clients in copyright matters and related questions involving the rights surrounding various methods of copying, storing, reproducing and streaming digital media.
Joel litigates and advises candidates, election officials and members of the public on election law, including ballot access and integrity provisions of federal law. He has extensive experience in voter roll integrity and language minority ballot access provisions of federal election statutes. Joel has investigated and enforced statewide violations of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act, and implemented election day polling place observers in primary and general elections in numerous jurisdictions.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Judge Carlos Bea serves as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He received his Bachelor's Degree from Stanford University in 1956 and his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1958. Judge Bea was born in San Sebastian, Spain, and immigrated with his family to Cuba in 1939. In 1952, he represented Cuba on the Cuban National basketball team in the Helsinki Olympics. Judge Bea became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1958. He engaged in private practice in San Francisco, principally in the area of civil trials (jury and non-jury), from 1959-75 at Dunne, Phelps & Mills and from 1975-90 at Carlos Bea, A Law Corporation. He taught courses in civil litigation advocacy at Hastings College of Law and Stanford Law School. From 1990 to 2003, Judge Bea served as a judge of the San Francisco Superior Court. He was nominated by President George W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and was confirmed in 2003.
Judge Bea and his wife Louise reside in San Francisco, where they raised their four sons, Sebastian, Alexander, Nicholas, and Dominic.
Dr. John Eastman is the former Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service and former Dean at Chapman University's Dale E. Fowler School of Law, where he had been a member of the faculty since 1999, specializing in Constitutional Law, Legal History, and Property. He is a founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute that he founded in 1999. He has a Ph.D. in Government from the Claremont Graduate School and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, and a B.A. in Politics and Economics from the University of Dallas. He serves as the Chairman of the Board of the National Organization for Marriage.
Prior to joining the Chapman law faculty, Dr. Eastman served as a law clerk to the Honorable Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States, and to the Honorable J. Michael Luttig, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and practiced law with the national law firm of Kirkland & Ellis. Dr. Eastman has also represented numerous clients in important constitutional law matters and has argued before the Supreme Court. On behalf of the Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, he has participated as amicus curiae before the Supreme Court of the United States, U.S. Courts of Appeals, and State Supreme Courts in more than one hundred cases of constitutional significance, including Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (the school vouchers case), Kelo v. New London, Ct. (eminent domain), and Van Orden v. Perry (the 10 Commandments case). He has also appeared as an expert legal commentator on numerous television and radio programs, including C-SPAN, Fox News, PBS, NewsHour, and The O'Reilly Factor.
Fox Family Pavilion Distinguished Scholar in Residence, University of Pennsylvania
MARCI A. HAMILTON is a Fox Family Pavilion Distinguished Scholar in Residence in the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the founder, CEO, and Academic Director of CHILD USA, www.childusa.org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit academic think tank at the University of Pennsylvania dedicated to interdisciplinary, evidence-based research to prevent child abuse and neglect. Before joining the program on religion at Penn, Professor Hamilton was the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University.
Hamilton is the leading public intellectual critic of extreme religious liberty and its impact on vulnerable populations including children, LGBTQ, and women. The author of God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, she is also a columnist for Verdict on Justia.com. Hamilton successfully challenged the constitutionality of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA”) at the Supreme Court in Boerne v. Flores (1997), and defeated the RFRA claim brought by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee against hundreds of child sex abuse survivors in Committee of Unsecured Creditors v. Listecki (7th Cir. 2015).
Drawing on her experience studying and advising in cases involving clergy sex abuse, Hamilton is the leading expert on child sex abuse statutes of limitations and has submitted testimony and advised legislators in every state where significant reform has occurred. She is the author of Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children (Cambridge University Press), which advocates for the elimination of child sex abuse statutes of limitations. She has also filed countless pro bono amicus briefs for the protection of children at the United States Supreme Court and the state supreme courts. Her textbook, Children and the Law, co-authored with Martin Gardner, will be published Fall 2017 by Carolina Academic Press, formerly Lexis/Nexis.
Hamilton clerked for United States Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Hamilton has been honored with the 2016 Voice Today, Voice of Gratitude Award; the 2015 Religious Liberty Award, American Humanist Association; the 2014 Freethought Heroine Award; the National Crime Victim Bar Association’s Frank Carrington Champion of Civil Justice Award, 2012; the E. Nathaniel Gates Award for outstanding public advocacy and scholarship, 2008; and selected as a Pennsylvania Woman of the Year Award, 2012, among others. She is also frequently quoted in the national media on RFRA, RLUIPA, First Amendment, clergy sex abuse, and statute of limitations issues.
Professor Hamilton is a graduate of Vanderbilt University, B.A., summa cum laude; Pennsylvania State University, M.A. (English, fiction writing, High Honors); M.A. (Philosophy); and the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, J.D., magna cum laude, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Order of the Coif.
Court-Packing, Term Limits, and More: The Debate Over Reforming the Judiciary
Noah Feldman, James T. Lindgren, Carrie Campbell Severino, Ilya Shapiro, Rivka Weill, Nicholas Marr
On December 16, 2020, The Federalist Society's Federalism and Separation of Powers Practice Group hosted...
Court-Packing, Term Limits, and More: The Debate Over Reforming the Judiciary
Noah Feldman, James T. Lindgren, Carrie Campbell Severino, Ilya Shapiro, Rivka Weill, Nicholas Marr
On December 16, 2020, The Federalist Society's Federalism and Separation of Powers Practice Group hosted...
O'Bannon v. NCAA: Intellectual Property, Antitrust, & College Sports [POLICYbrief]
Ed O'Bannon, Michael A. McCann, Ellen J. Staurowsky, Ekow N. Yankah
When former college athlete Ed O’Bannon discovered that his name, image, and likeness were being...
Panel: Social Media and Freedom of Speech
Richard A. Epstein, Justin (Gus) Hurwitz, J.S. Nelson, Hannibal Travis, Aaron Wright
Over the past year, there have been a number of discussions about social media and...
Panel: Social Media and Freedom of Speech
21st Annual Federalist Society Faculty Conference
New Orleans, LAThe Death of Due Process: The Perils of Learning, Speaking, & Free Thinking on Campus
Land of the Free, Home of the Jailed?
Cardozo Student Chapter
New York, NYFederalism and Religious Liberty
Joel Ard, Carlos T. Bea, John C. Eastman, Marci A. Hamilton
How should federalism affect “moral” issues like abortion, traditional marriage, and state RFRA laws? What...
Federalism and Religious Liberty
Joel Ard, Carlos T. Bea, John C. Eastman, Marci A. Hamilton
How should federalism affect “moral” issues like abortion, traditional marriage, and state RFRA laws? What...
Federalism and Religious Liberty
2016 Annual Western Chapters Conference
Simi Valley, CA