Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
Jennifer Walker Elrod is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She was nominated to the Fifth Circuit in 2007, and she served as a Circuit Judge on the court until assuming the role of Chief Judge in October 2024. Prior to serving as a Circuit Judge, Chief Judge Elrod was appointed and then twice elected Judge of the 190th District Court of Harris County, Texas, where she spent over five years presiding over more than 200 jury and non-jury trials.
Chief Judge Elrod graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was an active member of the Harvard Federalist Society, an Ames Moot Court finalist, and a Senior Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. She clerked for the Honorable Sim Lake in the Southern District of Texas. Before serving as a judge, Chief Judge Elrod worked in private practice, focusing on civil litigation, antitrust, and employment matters.
She has been repeatedly recognized for her work as a jurist, as well as for her pro bono work and contributions to the community. She has been named the 2022 Texas Review of Law & Politics’ Jurist of the Year, the 2018 Harvard Federalist Society’s Alumni of the Year, the 2016–17 Texas Association of Civil Trial and Appellate Specialists’ Appellate Judge of the Year, and the 2008 Mexican-American Bar Association of Texas’s Judge of the Year.
Chief Judge Elrod is actively engaged in the academic and legal communities. Chief Judge Elrod currently serves on the Board of Directors and as the Jurist-in-Residence at the South Texas College of Law, where she teaches civil procedure and First Amendment law. She is also a member of the American Law Institute and of the Board of Advisors for the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and she is a former member of the Board of Regents of her alma mater, Baylor University, and the Board of Visitors at Brigham Young University Law School. She previously served as the Chair of the Codes of Conduct Committee for the Judicial Conference of the United States. She has also served as the M.D. Anderson Visiting Public Service Professor at the Texas Tech University School of Law and as Jurist-in-Residence at Brigham Young University Law School, and she has taught legal writing at the University of Houston Law Center. She presented the Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Distinguished Lecture at the Washington and Lee University School of Law and is a frequent speaker on the topics of trial and appellate procedure, ethics, employment law, and constitutional law. Chief Judge Elrod also serves on the board of the Garland R. Walker Inn of Court, and co-produces an annual musical CLE, for which her pupilage group has won multiple national awards.
Chief Judge Elrod’s publications include: Trial by Siri: AI Comes to the Courtroom; Don’t Mess with Texas Judges: In Praise of the State Judiciary; For Good: Enriching Your Practice and Your Life Through Pro Bono and Community Service; Is the Jury Still Out?: A Case for the Continued Viability of the American Jury; and W(h)ither the Jury? The Diminishing Role of the Jury Trial in our Legal System.
Director of Litigation and Senior Attorney, Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute
Theodore H. Frank is director at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute and the Center for Class Action Fairness. Frank founded and ran CCAF as a non-profit, public interest law firm in 2009.
Frank has won several landmark appeals and tens of millions of dollars for consumers and other plaintiffs through his class action work. Adam Liptak of The New York Times calls Frank “the leading critic of abusive class action settlements” and the American Lawyer Litigation Daily referred to him as “the indefatigable scourge of underwhelming class action settlements.”
Previously, Frank clerked for the Honorable Frank H. Easterbrook on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and was a litigator at firms in Washington and Los Angeles and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Frank is a frequent public speaker and has testified before Congress multiple times on legal issues. He has been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, GQ, and the ABA Journal, among other publications.
In 2008, Frank was elected to membership in the American Law Institute. He also serves on the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society Litigation Practice Group. Frank graduated from The University of Chicago Law School in 1994 with high honors and as a member of the Order of the Coif and the Law Review. He is a member of the District of Columbia Bar and the state bars of California and Illinois.
Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Professor of Law Michael S. Greve joined the faculty of the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University in fall 2012 after having served as John G. Searle Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he specialized in constitutional law, courts, and business regulation and served as chairman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Prior to joining AEI, Greve was founder and co-director of the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest law firm specializing in constitutional litigation.
Greve has served previously as an adjunct professor at a number of universities, including Cornell and Johns Hopkins Universities, and has been a visiting professor at Boston College since 2004. He was awarded a PhD and an MA in government by Cornell University. Greve also earned a Diploma from the University of Hamburg in Germany.
A prolific writer, Greve is the author of nine books and a multitude of articles appearing in scholarly publications, as well as numerous editorials, short articles, and book reviews. He is a frequent speaker for professional and scholarly organizations and has made many appearances on radio and television.
In addition Greve has provided congressional and state legislative testimony, has lobbied and consulted in federal agency proceedings, and has provided litigation services and management in over 30 cases, including matters before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Senior Fellow, Ave Maria School of Law and Host of the Four Boxes Diner Second Amendment Channel
Mark W. Smith is Visiting Fellow in Pharmaceutical Public Policy and Law in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford; Presidential Scholar and a Senior Fellow in Law and Public Policy at The King’s College; and Distinguished Scholar and Senior Fellow of Law and Public Policy at the Ave Maria School of Law.
He is a constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner YouTube channel—which provides scholarly and historical analyses of the Second Amendment. Mark is also a New York Times bestselling author.
Professor Emeritus of Law, Indiana University; Co-Author, The Law of Lawyering
After graduating with honors from Harvard College in 1966, and from Rutgers Law School with highest honors in 1969, W. William Hodes began practice in a small civil rights and personal injury firm in New Orleans, where he had lived as a child. During the next eight years, he worked in Newark, New Jersey, first for the Kenneth Gibson administration, and then as senior staff attorney for the Education Law Center, a public interest law firm funded by the Ford Foundation.
In 1979, Hodes returned to the legal academy, first as a Bigelow Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, and then as a Professor of Law at the Indiana University School of Law in Indianapolis. For the next twenty years, Professor Hodes taught in the areas of Civil Procedure, Constitutonal Law, Federal Courts, Administrative Law, and Professional Responsibility. He gained a national reputation as a scholar, consultant, and expert witness in the areas of Legal Ethics and Professional Responsbility, as they were then known.
Beginning in 1985 however, those subjects began to be known as "The Law of Lawyering," after a book of that name was published, co-authored by Professor Hodes and Professor Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr., who had served as the Reporter to the Kutak Commission that developed the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. The treatise, which is now in its fourth edition and updated twice a year by Hodes and new co-author Peter R. Jarvis of Portland, Oregon, has become a mainstay resource for both the practicing bar and the academic community, and is often cited in court and ethics committee opinions.
While in the academy, Professor Hodes took two unusual sabbatical leaves. In the Spring of 1989, Hodes, who had spent his junior high school years in Beijing and is still fluent in Chinese, was a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at the China University of Politics and Law, teaching a course in American Civil Procedure and conducting research into Chinese People's Mediation. (The course was suspended in April, when the events leading to the June 4th Tiananmen Massacre began to unfold, and Professor Hodes began to accompany his students on protest marches.)
During the October 1996 Term of the United States Supreme Court, Professor Hodes served as law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had been his Civil Procedure and Conflicts of Law professor some thirty years earlier, during her Rutgers days. According to knowledgeable sources, Hodes was the oldest person to have served as a law clerk since the early 19th Century.
In 1999, W. William Hodes retired from law teaching (at age 56) in order to establish the William Hodes Professional Corporation, which was later renamed The William Hodes Law Firm; he became Professor Emeritus of Law at Indiana University as the new century began. Through this solo practice, Hodes can now devote full time to providing representation, consultation, expert testimony, legal opinions, and other counsel and assistance to lawyers in the areas of The Law of Lawyering, and Constitutional, Appellate, Supreme Court, and other complex litigation.
Kathleen Q. Abernathy recently returned to Wilkinson Barker Knauer LLP as special counsel. She was previously elected to the Board of Directors of Frontier Communications as an independent director in 2006 following her term as a Commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission from 2001 to 2005. In 2010 she joined the company as Chief Legal Officer and Executive Vice President, Regulatory and Governmental Affairs. Prior to her term as an FCC Commissioner, Ms. Abernathy worked for a number of different telecommunications companies and law firms. She has received numerous awards in recognition of her professional accomplishments and has taught as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center and Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law. She received her B.S. from Marquette University and her J.D. from Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law.
Associate Professor of Law, Center for Intellectual Property and Entrepreneurship, University of Missouri School of Law
Professor Lietzan researches, writes, and teaches primarily in the areas of food and drug regulation, intellectual property, and administrative law. Some of her recent scholarship has focused on the nature and purpose of the new drug approval system, federal regulation of fecal microbiota transplantation, federal regulation of products derived from cannabis, the political economy of the Hatch-Waxman (generic drug) statute, and incentives to study already approved drugs for new uses. She is an award-winning teacher, and she has been an elected member of the American Law Institute since 2006.
Professor Lietzan brings to her scholarship and teaching eighteen years of private practice experience, eight of them as a partner in the food and drug group at Covington & Burling in Washington, DC. In practice, she handled a wide range of complex legal problems and broader legislative and regulatory policy questions affecting FDA-regulated companies. This work included lifecycle management and strategy issues, regulatory strategy and advocacy, white collar defense, congressional investigations, briefing in products liability cases, and international regulatory policy work. She was involved in every major amendment to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) between 1997 and 2014 and was deeply immersed for more than a decade in the development of the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act of 2010. She has been consistently identified by her peers in private practice as a “Best Lawyer in America” in the categories of FDA law (since 2013) and Biotechnology Law (since 2007).
Professor Lietzan has held one leadership position or another at the Food and Drug Law Institute (FDLI) since 2004, including a stint on its Board of Directors from 2008 to 2012. She also held leadership positions in the American Bar Association’s Section of Science and Technology Law for fourteen years.
Professor Lietzan received a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina, where she graduated with honors in history. She holds a master’s degree in history from UCLA and a law degree with high honors from Duke Law School.
Vice President for Litigation & Strategy, Pacific Legal Foundation
Larry Salzman leads PLF’s litigation program and is responsible for shaping the organization’s overall legal strategy to advance the principles of individual rights and limited government. He oversees the Supreme Court docket at PLF and helps its nearly 75 litigating attorneys and support staff bring cases to secure enduring legal change for liberty.
Larry has been a public interest litigator for nearly two decades, focusing on property rights and economic freedom. Recent highlights include Sheetz v. County of El Dorado and Tyler v. Hennepin County at the Supreme Court. He has been with PLF for more than a decade. Previously, he was a judicial clerk at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and a litigator at the Institute for Justice.
Between 2007 and 2011, Larry took a hiatus from litigation to work as CEO of an e-commerce company he had co-founded and built while attending law school at night. He loves his current role at PLF because it provides the rare opportunity to continue expressing dual passions for litigation and entrepreneurial management.
Larry’s commitment to liberty crystallized during college by studying philosophy and free-market economics. He experienced the importance of property rights in a very personal way in the 1990s when his family’s auto-repair business was taken by eminent domain and turned over by the city to a private developer on the promise that a big-box store would generate more tax revenue.
He graduated from the University of San Diego School of Law (J.D. 2002), where he was assistant editor of the San Diego Law Review. Larry was inspired in law school to pursue a career in public interest litigation while working as a research assistant to the late Bernard Siegan, a pioneer in the movement to revive constitutional protection for property rights and economic liberty. He also serves on the Board of Directors for the Ayn Rand Institute. When not working, he enjoys travel, an annual pass to Disneyland with family, and learning and growing alongside his daughter.
Larry is a member of the bar only in the state of California.
Conservative Public-Interest Litigation in the Modern Era
2017 National Lawyers Convention
Washington, DCEthics CLE Teleforum 2017
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