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.
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.
Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow, The Heritage Foundation
Becky Norton Dunlop, a prominent leader, strategist, and counselor in the conservative movement, is The Heritage Foundation’s Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow.
Dunlop, who joined the leading think tank in 1998, holds the only policy chair in the country to be officially named for the 40th president. She succeeds Ed Meese, the U.S. attorney general under Reagan, who assumed emeritus status.
Dunlop oversees special projects, travels as an ambassador for Heritage, and works tirelessly to assure that the legacy of principles, policies, and practices represented by the life and service of Ronald Reagan remain in the hearts and minds of Americans.
Previously, Dunlop was Heritage’s vice president for external relations from 1998 until May 2016. She served on the Trump Transition team.
Dunlop was a senior official in the Reagan administration from 1981-1989 inside the White House, at the Justice Department, and at the Interior Department.
She served from 1994-1998 as Secretary of Natural Resources for the Commonwealth of Virginia in the Cabinet of then-Virginia Gov. George Allen.
As political director for the American Conservative Union from 1973- 1977, she was instrumental in organizing grass-roots activists for Reagan’s unsuccessful 1976 race for the Republican nomination and advised his successful 1980 nomination and general election campaigns.
From Reagan’s first inauguration in 1981 to 1985, her White House posts included Deputy Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel and Special Assistant to the President and Director of his Cabinet office. During Reagan’s second term, Dunlop served as senior special assistant to Meese, then attorney general, in charge of managing Cabinet-level domestic policy issues. She oversaw major policy reports on the environment, the family, federalism, tort reform, privatization, and welfare reform.
She completed her service in the Reagan administration as deputy undersecretary of the Interior Department and as assistant interior secretary for fish, wildlife, and parks.
Dunlop is one of the few of the insiders from the beginnings of the Reagan era who remain active in public policy leadership.
As Virginia’s natural resources chief, Dunlop worked to streamline, decentralize, and down-size agencies while protecting and improving the environment. She is one of the few “free-market environmentalists” to have headed a state agency and put ideas into action. Her book, “Clearing the Air” (Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, 2000), chronicles some of her experiences in advancing those principles.
In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed her to a part-time post as chairwoman of the Federal Service Impasses Panel. The seven-member panel resolves disputes between federal agencies management and labor unions. Under her leadership, it took on several hundred cases and eliminated backlogs.
Other current leadership roles include the boards of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, the Reagan Ranch Board of Governors, the Reagan Alumni Association, the Association for American Educators and the AAE Foundation, the Council for National Policy and the American Conservative Union.
In addition to topics addressing conservative principles and their roots in the nation’s founding, Dunlop is a sought-after public speaker on the idea that personnel is policy; on energy, natural resources and the environment (including free market environmentalism); on federalism as a former member of a governor’s Cabinet; Capitalism and the Rule of Law, and on the Reagan administration (including the 40th president’s effective leadership style).
A graduate of Miami University in Ohio, she currently resides in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband, George S. Dunlop. The Dunlops are members of Oakland Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia.
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.
Shareholder & Co-Chair of the Workplace Policy Institute, Littler Mendelson P.C.
Alexander T. MacDonald advises employers on all aspects of the employment and labor landscape, focusing on emerging legislation and regulation. He has extensive experience advising businesses on worker classification, arbitration, the administrative and regulatory process, and the future of work. He frequently writes, publishes, and speaks on these subjects. His work has been cited by scholars and appellate courts. He is a recognized voice for the management perspective.
Alexander is a co-chair of the Workplace Policy Institute (WPI) team. With WPI, he advises employers on legislative, administrative, and regulatory developments at the state and federal level. He advocates for employers in the regulatory and administrative process. He also helps employers protect their businesses by understanding and anticipating cutting-edge legal developments.
Alexander also has extensive experience in traditional labor law. He represents management in all aspects of labor-management relations, including unfair labor practice charges, grievance arbitrations, representation elections, contract negotiations, and related litigation, including litigation in the U.S. courts of appeals.
Before joining Littler, Alexander served as the director, future of work, for a major technology company. He also worked in a national labor and employment law firm and a major public-sector general counsel’s office. He was a law clerk to the senior judges in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
He is also a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. He served in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. In law school, he graduated first in his class
Shareholder & Co-Chair of the Workplace Policy Institute, Littler Mendelson P.C.
Alexander T. MacDonald advises employers on all aspects of the employment and labor landscape, focusing on emerging legislation and regulation. He has extensive experience advising businesses on worker classification, arbitration, the administrative and regulatory process, and the future of work. He frequently writes, publishes, and speaks on these subjects. His work has been cited by scholars and appellate courts. He is a recognized voice for the management perspective.
Alexander is a co-chair of the Workplace Policy Institute (WPI) team. With WPI, he advises employers on legislative, administrative, and regulatory developments at the state and federal level. He advocates for employers in the regulatory and administrative process. He also helps employers protect their businesses by understanding and anticipating cutting-edge legal developments.
Alexander also has extensive experience in traditional labor law. He represents management in all aspects of labor-management relations, including unfair labor practice charges, grievance arbitrations, representation elections, contract negotiations, and related litigation, including litigation in the U.S. courts of appeals.
Before joining Littler, Alexander served as the director, future of work, for a major technology company. He also worked in a national labor and employment law firm and a major public-sector general counsel’s office. He was a law clerk to the senior judges in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
He is also a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. He served in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. In law school, he graduated first in his class
George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
TODD J. ZYWICKI is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University and Research Fellow of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. During the Fall 2023 semester he served as the Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy for the Bruce Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado-Boulder. From 2020-2021 he was Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Taskforce on Federal Consumer Financial Law. In 2021 he was inducted to the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers. He is also a Senior Fellow of the F.A. Hayek Program for the Advanced Study of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at George Mason University and a former Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute. From 2015-2017 he was Executive Director of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. He served as Co-Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review from 2006-2017. From 2003-2004, Professor Zywicki served as the Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. He has also taught at Vanderbilt University Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Boston College Law School, Mississippi College School of Law, and China University of Political Science and Law.
Professor Zywicki clerked for Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and worked as an associate at Alston & Bird in Atlanta, Georgia, where he practiced bankruptcy and commercial law. He received his J.D. from the University of Virginia, where he was executive editor of the Virginia Tax Review and John M. Olin Scholar in Law and Economics. Professor Zywicki also received an M.A. in Economics from Clemson University and an A.B. cum Laude with high honors in his major from Dartmouth College.
Professor Zywicki is also a Lone Mountain Fellow of the Property and Environment Research Center, a Fellow of the International Centre for Economic Research in Turin, Italy, and a former Senior Fellow of the Goldwater Institute. During the Fall 2008 Semester Professor Zywicki was the Searle Fellow of the George Mason University School of Law and was a 2008-09 W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Arch W. Shaw National Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He has lectured and consulted with government officials around the world, including Iceland, Italy, Japan, and Guatemala. In 2006 Professor Zywicki served as a Member of the United States Department of Justice Study Group on “Identifying Fraud, Abuse and Errors in the United States Bankruptcy System.”
Professor Zywicki is the author of more than 130 articles in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed economics journals. He is one of the Top 10 most-cited law professors in the field of Commercial Law and one of the Top 25 law professors on Twitter as measured by engagement levels. He is one of the Top 50 Most Downloaded Law Authors at the Social Science Research Network. He has testified multiple times before Congress on issues of consumer bankruptcy law and consumer credit and is a frequent commentator on legal issues in the print and broadcast media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Nightline, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Neil Cavuto Show, Fox & Friends, Smerconish, Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream, Fox Business, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg News, BBC, The Diane Rehm Show, Lou Dobbs Show, Jerry Doyle Show, and The Laura Ingraham Show.
Professor Zywicki is former Chairman and a current member of the Board of Directors of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Humane Studies, Bill of Rights Institute, the Executive Committee for the Federalist Society's Financial Institutions and E-Commerce Practice Group, the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment. He formerly served on the Governing Board and the Advisory Council for the Financial Services Research Program at George Washington University School of Business. He is currently the Chair of the Academic Advisory Council for the following organizations: The Bill of Rights Institute, the film “We the People in IMAX,” and the McCormick-Tribune Foundation “Freedom Museum” in Chicago, Illinois. He is a member of the Board of Visitors of Ralston College and was a member of the Board of Trustees of Yorktown University. From 2005-2009 he served as an elected Alumni Trustee of the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees.
Professor of Political Science, Professor of International and Public Affairs, and Chair of Political Science, Brown University
Wendy Schiller is Professor of Political Science, Professor of International and Public Affairs, and Chair of Political Science at Brown University. She did her undergraduate work in political science at the University of Chicago, served on the staffs of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Governor Mario Cuomo, and then earned her PhD from the University of Rochester. After fellowships at the Brookings Institution and Princeton University, she came to Brown in 1994. She teaches popular courses titled The American Presidency, Introduction to the American Political Process, and Congress and Public Policy.
Among books she has authored or co-authored are Electing the Senate: Indirect Democracy before the Seventeenth Amendment (Princeton University Press), Gateways to Democracy: An Introduction to American Government (Cengage), The Contemporary Congress (Thomson-Wadsworth), and Partners and Rivals: Representation in U.S. Senate Delegations (Princeton University Press). She has also published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Studies in American Political Development, and the Journal of Politics.
Schiller has been a contributor to MSNBC, NPR, CNN.com, and Bloomberg News. She provides local political commentary to the Providence Journal, WPRO radio, RIPBS A Lively Experiment, and is the political analyst for WJAR10, the local NBC affiliate in Providence.
Professor, University of North Carolina at Wilmington
Mike Adams is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW). He writes a weekly column for The Daily Wire and speaks frequently on First Amendment and pro-life issues. After graduating from Mississippi State University in 1993 with a PhD in Criminology, his research emphasized social psychological causes of crime and delinquency. He won the Faculty Member of the Year Award from the Office of the Dean of Students in 1998 and again in 2000. Later, after his involvement in a free speech controversy in the wake of the 9/11 attack his research emphasis shifted to threats to free speech, due process, and academic integrity in higher education. In 2006, he was denied a promotion full professor and filed suit in federal court alleging that UNCW retaliated against him for his criticism the diversity movement in general as well as his criticism of specific policies within his own university. The retaliation lawsuit set up a legal challenge concerning whether Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), which denied First Amendment protection to public employees who were commenting about their “official duties,” applied to college professors. In Adams v. UNCW (2011), the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled in his favor. The ruling set up a federal trial on the issue of retaliation, which he also won before a jury in federal district court in Greenville, North Carolina.
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.
FIRE
Reed Larson Professor of Labor Law, Ave Maria School of Law and, National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation
John Raudabaugh is a labor lawyer and former Member of the U.S. National Labor Relations Board. He was a partner in law firms representing management concerning domestic and international labor law matters. Currently, he represents employees seeking relief from union and/or employer unfair labor practices. Mr. Raudabaugh has presented testimony to both Senate and House Committees regarding labor law reform. Professor Raudabaugh teaches Labor Law and a Labor Law Practicum at the Ave Maria School of Law. He is a graduate of the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce and New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations with B.S. and M.S. degrees in labor economics and a J.D. degree from the University of Virginia Law School of Law.
Vice President, Practice Groups, The Federalist Society
In Memoriam: Gordon Wood
The Federalist Society mourns the loss of Gordon S. Wood, one of the great historians...
Premiere of FedSoc Films Documentary: "Let It Begin Here: The Battles of Lexington and Concord"
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...
Bargaining Rights Gone Wrong: How State Courts Invented a Constitutional Duty to Bargain and How It Harms Individual Workers
Alexander T. MacDonald
Constitutions often give you the right to do things. They give you the right to...
Religious Schools, Collective Bargaining, & the Constitutional Legacy of NLRB v. Catholic Bishop
Alexander T. MacDonald
It would be difficult to find a corner of American labor law more anomalous than...
Elected v. Appointed: Senators & the Seventeenth Amendment [POLICYbrief]
Todd J. Zywicki, Wendy Schiller
Prior to the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, U.S. senators were appointed by their state legislators...
The Student Right to Counsel
Mike S. Adams, KC Johnson, Adam Kissell
Note from the Editor: This article argues that a student right to counsel in quasi-criminal...
Full Board Decisions of the National Labor Relations Board: Fiscal Year 2016
John N. Raudabaugh
Note from the Editor: This article critically reflects on the most recent term of the National...
Fisher v. UT–Austin and the Future of Racial Preferences in College Admissions
Elizabeth Slattery
Note from the Editor: This article discusses the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Fisher v. University...
Symposium: Empowering Environmental Justice Communities Locally and Globally