Gordon Stewart Wood is an American historian and professor at Brown University. He is a recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992). His book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969) won the 1970 Bancroft Prize. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.
Professor Emeritus, Uiversity of Connecticut
A native of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Robert A. Gross received the B.A. in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966 and the M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1976) in history from Columbia University. He taught at Amherst College (1976-88), the University of Sussex (1981-83) and the College of William and Mary (1988-2003) before coming to UConn. He is the recipient of various national awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim, Howard, and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Antiquarian Society.
Prof. Gross specializes in the social and cultural history of the U.S., from the colonial era through the nineteenth century. His first book on the American Revolution, The Minutemen and Their World (1976), won the Bancroft Prize in American History; it was re-issued in a 25th anniversary edition in 2001 and will be published by Picador in a new, revised edition in 2022 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. He has continued studies of the Revolutionary era in such works as In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion (1993). For two decades he has been deeply involved in the interdisciplinary field known as the history of the book, serving on the editorial board for the multi-volume History of the Book in America published by the University of North Carolina Press and co-editing with Mary Kelley the second volume of the series, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 (2010). His other recent work examines New England writers — notably, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson — in historical context. From that project has come The Transcendentalists and Their World, which Farrar, Straus, & Giroux published in November 2021.
Partner, Boyden Gray PLLC
Trent McCotter is a partner with Boyden Gray PLLC. He previously served as Deputy Associate Attorney General of the United States and as an Assistant U.S. Attorney.
Mr. McCotter maintains an extensive appellate practice. He has considerable experience identifying and briefing cases that draw the Supreme Court’s attention, having persuaded the Court to grant certiorari in numerous cases raising issues of sovereignty, constitutional rights, due process, and criminal law. He has authored and submitted over 60 briefs at the Court.
He has also personally argued more than fifteen federal appeals across the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Ninth, Eleventh, Federal, and D.C. Circuits—including once arguing three separate appeals in just four days. He has also twice argued before the 17-judge en banc Fifth Circuit. He has been counsel in over 50 other appeals raising matters from FOIA and the APA to constitutional rights and statutory construction.
As Deputy Associate Attorney General, Mr. McCotter oversaw DOJ’s Civil Appellate and Federal Programs branches, which are responsible for defending nearly all major litigation against the federal government. During his three years as a federal trial attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia’s “Rocket Docket,” Mr. McCotter won the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service.
During his DOJ tenures, Mr. McCotter also assisted with the confirmations of two Supreme Court justices and over a dozen lower-court judges.
Mr. McCotter served as an inaugural clerk to the Hon. Steven J. Menashi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and also clerked for the Hon. R. Lanier Anderson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
ILYA SOMIN is Professor of Law at George Mason University and the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, democratic theory, federalism, and migration rights. He is the author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom (Oxford University Press, revised and expanded edition, 2022), Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (Stanford University Press, revised and expanded second edition, 2016), and The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain (University of Chicago Press, 2015, rev. paperback ed., 2016), coauthor of A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and co-editor of Eminent Domain: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Democracy and Political Ignorance has been translated into Italian and Japanese.
Somin’s work has appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Critical Review, and others. Somin has also published articles in a variety of popular press outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, CNN, NBC, The Atlantic, USA Today, Boston Globe, US News and World Report, South China Morning Post, National Law Journal and Reason. He has been quoted or interviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, The Economist, the Christian Science Monitor, the Financial Times, The Guardian, the Associated Press, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, BBC, Reuters, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Al Jazeera, and the Voice of America, among other media.
Somin’s writings have been cited in decisions by the United States Supreme Court, multiple state supreme courts and lower federal courts, and the Supreme Court of Israel. He is co-counsel for the plaintiffs in VOS Selections, Inc. v. Trump, a case challenging the constitutionality of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. Somin has testified on the use of drones for targeted killing in the War on Terror before the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights. In 2009, he testified on property rights issues at the United States Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Somin writes regularly for the popular Volokh Conspiracy law and politics blog, now affiliated with Reason magazine (previously affiliated with the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017). From 2006 to 2013, he served as Co-Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review, one of the country’s top-rated law and economics journals.
Somin has served as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has also been a visiting professor or scholar at the Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Hamburg, Germany, the University of Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Uriel Reichman University in Israel, and Zhengzhou University in China. He is a University Affiliate of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and an affiliated faculty member of the George Mason University Institute for Immigration Research. Before joining the faculty at George Mason, Somin was the John M. Olin Fellow in Law at Northwestern University Law School in 2002-2003. In 2001-2002, he clerked for the Hon. Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Professor Somin earned his B.A., Summa Cum Laude, at Amherst College, M.A. in Political Science from Harvard University, and J.D. from Yale Law School.
Judge, United States District Court, Southern District of Florida
On April 4, 2019, Judge Altman was confirmed to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. At 36, he became the youngest federal district court judge in the country—and the youngest federal judge ever appointed in the Southern District of Florida.
Judge Altman received a BA from Columbia University, where he played quarterback on the football team and pitched for the baseball team—earning All-Ivy honors. Judge Altman received his JD from the Yale Law School, where he was projects editor of the Yale Law Journal. After law school, the Judge clerked on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for the Honorable Stanley Marcus.
Judge Altman then became a federal prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami, where he twice received the Director of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys’ Award for Superior Performance by a federal prosecutor. In 2013, Judge Altman was named “Federal Prosecutor of the Year” by the Miami-Dade Chiefs of Police and the Law Enforcement Officers’ Charitable Foundation.
In 2014, Judge Altman became a partner at the Miami law firm of Podhurst Orseck, where he represented the victims of airplane crashes and bank fraud conspiracies.
Assistant Professor of Law, United States Military Academy, West Point
Jennifer Maddocks is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law at the United States Military Academy, West Point. She teaches the department’s course on comparative legal systems and is a Faculty Fellow with the Lieber Institute for Law and Warfare. She also serves as the Managing Editor for the Lieber Institute’s Articles of War blog.
Dr. Maddocks started her legal career in private practice, working for eight years as an employment lawyer at law firms in London and in Dorset, England. She then served for more than thirteen years as an officer in the British Army Legal Services. During her military career, Dr. Maddocks performed a range of roles including operational deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, she spent one year assigned to the International Military Advisory and Training Team in Sierra Leone and three years at the Service Prosecuting Authority in Germany. From 2016 to 2018, Dr. Maddocks was assigned to the Stockton Center for International Law at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. There, she commenced her PhD studies, focusing on State responsibility for international law violations involving non-State actors in armed conflict under the supervision of Professor Michael Schmitt. Following her return to the UK, Dr. Maddocks worked as the legal adviser at an operational headquarters, advising on a variety of international law issues. She was awarded her PhD in January 2022 and joined the Department of Law in September 2022.
Professor Emeritus of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Jeremy A. Rabkin is a Professor Emeritus of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. Before joining the faculty in June 2007, he was for over two decades a professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Professor Rabkin serves on the board of directors of the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest law firm based in Washington, D.C. Previously he was a board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the board of academic advisors of the American Enterprise Institute.
Professor Rabkin’s books include Law Without Nations? (Princeton University Press, 2005). He authored “If You Need a Friend, Don’t Call a Cosmopolitan,” a chapter in Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship (Sigal R. Ben-Porath & Rogers M. Smith eds., University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). His articles have appeared in major law reviews and political science journals and his journalistic contributions in a range of magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
John C. Jeffries, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Paul B. Stephan is an expert on international business, international dispute resolution and comparative law, with an emphasis on Soviet and post-Soviet legal systems. In addition to writing prolifically in these fields, Stephan has advised governments and international organizations, taken part in cases in the Supreme Court of the United States, the federal courts, and various foreign judicial and arbitral proceedings, and lectured to professionals and scholarly groups around the world on issues raised by the globalization of the world economy. During 2006-07, he served as counselor on international law in the U.S. Department of State, and in 2020-21 as special counsel to the general counsel in the Department of Defense. He was a coordinating reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States.
Stephan received his B.A. and M.A. from Yale University in 1973 and 1974, respectively, and his J.D. from the University of Virginia in 1977. Before returning to Virginia, he clerked for Judge Levin Campbell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. He has taught as a visiting professor at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations, the University of Vienna, Münster University, Lausanne University, Melbourne University, University of Pantheon-Assas (Paris II), Sciences Po, Paris I, the Interdisciplinary Centre Herzliya, Sydney University, the Peking University School of Transnational Law in Shenzhen, China, the University of Tartu’s Pärna College, and Liverpool University. He also has visited at Columbia Law School and Duke Law School, and served as a scholar in residence in the London office of Wilmer Hale.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Stephan took part in a variety of projects involving law reform in former socialist states. He worked in Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Albania and Slovakia on behalf of the U.S. Treasury and in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan on behalf of the International Monetary Fund. He also organized training programs for tax administrators and judges from all of the formerly socialist countries under the auspices of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. His casebooks on international business, international trade and investment, and Doing Business in Emerging Markets are used at law schools both in the United States and abroad. He is the co-author, with Robert Scott, of The Limits of Leviathan: Contract Theory and the Enforcement of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and the author of The World Crisis and International Law: The Knowledge Economy and the Battle for the Future (2023). His current research focuses on the legal issues related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and legal responses to the rise of big data.
Partner, Baker Hostetler LLP
David Rivkin is a member of the firm's litigation, international and environmental teams and is co-leader of the firm's national appellate practice. He has extensive experience in constitutional, administrative and international law litigation and has been involved in numerous high-profile cases. With his prior experience in the government sector, David draws on a wealth of knowledge when providing compliance advice to companies and handling enforcement proceedings before government agencies on issues arising out of multilateral and unilateral sanctions, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), anti-boycott issues, bankruptcy and financial fraud matters, and environmental and energy issues.
David has developed and implemented legislative, regulatory and litigation initiatives for two presidential administrations. Over the years, he has published hundreds of articles, op-eds, book reviews and book chapters on a variety of international, legal, constitutional, defense, arms control, foreign policy, environmental and energy issues for various newspapers and magazines, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today and The Los Angeles Times, and has been a frequent commentator and guest on TV and radio shows including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, NPR and PBS.
Partner, Baker & Hostetler LLP
Lee A. Casey focuses on federal environmental, constitutional and international law and Alien Tort Statute issues. He also advises clients on compliance issues under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), U.S. trade sanctions regimes, and federal ethics requirements. Mr. Casey’s practice includes federal, district and appellate court litigation, as well as matters before federal agencies. Prior to joining BakerHostetler, Mr. Casey was an associate with Hunton & Williams, practicing in international, environmental and constitutional law. From 2004 through 2007 he served as an member of the United Nations Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights.
From 1986 to 1993, Mr. Casey served in various capacities in the federal government, including the Office of Legal Policy (1986-90) and the Office of Legal Counsel (1992-93) at the U.S. Department of Justice and served as Deputy Associate General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Energy (1990-92). The Office of Legal Counsel is responsible for advising the Attorney General and the White House on issues of constitutional law and statutory interpretation. The Office of Legal Policy served as a strategic “think tank” for the Reagan Justice Department and was responsible for reviewing candidates for appointments to the federal bench.
Before joining the government in 1986, Mr. Casey was an associate in the Los Angeles firm of Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp, practicing in the litigation section, with an emphasis on copyright, contract and First Amendment issues. From 1984 to 1985, Mr. Casey served as Law Clerk to the Honorable Alex Kozinski, then Chief Judge of the United States Claims Court. From 1982 to 1984, he practiced at the Detroit firm of Dykema Gossett, focusing on corporate, securities, commercial and intellectual property litigation, and from 1990 through 1994, he served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia.
Among the chapters, articles and papers that Mr. Casey has authored or co-authored are: “International Law and the Nation-State at the U.N.,” Reclaiming the Language of Freedom at the United Nations: A Guide for U.S. Policymakers, The Heritage Foundation (2006) (with David B. Rivkin, Jr.); “The Dangerous Myth of Universal Jurisdiction,” A Country I Do Not Recognize (ed. Robert H. Bork) (2005) (with David B. Rivkin, Jr.); “Leashing the Dogs of War,” The National Interest (Fall 2003) (with David B. Rivkin, Jr.); “The Limits of Legitimacy: The Rome Statute’s Unlawful Application to Non-State Parties,” 44 Va.J.Int’l L. 63 (Fall 2003) (with David B. Rivkin, Jr.); “Devil’s Advocates: The Danger of Judging Lawyers By Their Clients,” Policy Review (Feb. and Mar. 2002) (with David B. Rivkin, Jr.); “The Case Against the International Criminal Court,” 25 Fordham Int’l L.J. 840 (2002); “Europe in the Balance: The Alarmingly Undemocratic Drift of the European Union,” Policy Review (June and July 2001) (with David B. Rivkin Jr.); “Against an International Criminal Court,” Commentary, May 1998 (with David B. Rivkin, Jr.); “Federalism (Cont’d.),” Commentary, December 1996 (with David B. Rivkin, Jr.); “Presidents and War Powers: Another View,” Common Sense, Winter 1996 (with David B. Rivkin, Jr.); “How Binding Are Contracts?” The American Enterprise, Nov./Dec. 1993 (with David B. Rivkin, Jr.); and “Pirate Constitutionalism: An Essay in Self-Government,” 8 J. of L. & Politics 477 (1992).
Mr. Casey is a member of the California, Michigan and District of Columbia Bar Associations.
Partner, Baker & Hostetler LLP
Darin Bartram focuses his practice in the areas of constitutional litigation and appellate work, with particular experience in environmental law.
Premiere of FedSoc Films Documentary: "Let It Begin Here: The Battles of Lexington and Concord"
Gordon S. Wood, Robert A. Gross
To mark the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the Federalist Society...
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In May of 1773, to rescue the nearly bankrupt East India Company, the British Parliament...
Daniel Webster Debate Series: Does the Fourteenth Amendment Guarantee Birthright Citizenship to All?
Trent McCotter, Ilya Somin
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Luncheon & Remarks
Roy Kalman Altman
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Navigating Self-Defense and International Law in Gaza
Jennifer Maddocks, Jeremy A. Rabkin, Paul B. Stephan
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Unlawful Belligerency and its Implications Under International Law
David B. Rivkin, Lee A. Casey, Darin R. Bartram
By: Lee A. Casey, David B. Rivkin, Jr. & Darin R. Bartram* President Bush's Military...