Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Randy Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He has argued before the United States Supreme Court, tried murder cases to juries as a prosecutor in Chicago, and appeared as a prosecutor in the feature film Inalienable. He is the author of numerous books, including Restoring the Lost Constitution, The Structure of Liberty, Our Republican Constitution, and The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. He has published two memoirs, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, and Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago. He is currently working on a new book, Freedom and Flourishing: Libertarianism for the Real World.
Former Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, DC Circuit
Robert Heron Bork served as Solicitor General, acting Attorney General, and judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Judge Bork passed away in December 2012.
Tribute to Judge Robert Bork by John McGinnis - Event Audio/Video
Celebration of the Life of Robert Heron Bork 1927-2012
Judge Robert H. Bork: His Life and Legacy - Practice Group Podcast
A Conference Discussing the Contributions of Judge Robert H. Bork - June 26, 2007
Columbia Law School
E. Allan Farnsworth was a legal scholar whose writings on contract disputes have become a standard reference in courtrooms and law schools. A professor at Columbia University School of Law, Farnsworth was considered the country's foremost legal authority on contracts. He spent more than 50 years studying and explaining the legal underpinnings of contracts, whether written or oral, commercial or private, and wrote Farnsworth on Contracts, the most frequently cited reference work on contract law. He represented the US at diplomatic conferences on trade and on the UN Commission on International Trade Law.
Emeritus Professor of Law, UC Hastings College of Law
Professor Joseph Grodin, a native Californian, received his B.A. with honors from UC Berkeley in 1951 and his J.D. cum laude from Yale Law School in 1954. Upon graduation from law school he traveled to England on a Fulbright grant and earned a Ph.D. in labor law and labor relations from the London School of Economics.
Professor Grodin practiced law in San Francisco from 1955 to 1971, specializing in labor law and serving pro bono in a variety of civil rights and civil liberties matters. During portions of that period he taught as an adjunct professor at UC Hastings and a visiting professor at the University of Oregon Law School. Active in bar affairs, he served as chairman of the labor law section of the San Francisco Bar Association and as a member of the State Bar Committee on Legal Services.
From 1972 to 1979 Professor Grodin was a full-time professor at UC Hastings, teaching courses in labor law, employment discrimination, arbitration, and contracts. During portions of that period he served as a member of the first Agricultural Labor Relations Board, as foreman of the Alameda County Grand Jury, and as a visiting professor at Stanford Law School.
In 1979, Professor Grodin was appointed Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal; in 1981, he was elevated to presiding justice of that court, and in 1982 was appointed Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court, a position he held until January 1987. Upon leaving the court, Professor Grodin returned to the UC Hastings faculty. He retired from full-time teaching in May 2005. He continues to teach part-time and to do arbitration and mediation work.
Professor Grodin is the author of numerous scholarly books and articles. He is particularly proud, however, of a book on hiking trails in the Silver Lake area of the Sierra, which he coauthored with his daughter, Sharon.
Senior Fellow, Cato Institute
Walter Olson is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and is known for his writing on the American legal system. His books include The Rule of Lawyers, on mass litigation, The Excuse Factory, on lawsuits in the workplace, and most recently Schools for Misrule, on the state of the law schools. His first book, The Litigation Explosion, was one of the most widely discussed general-audience books on law of its time. It led the Washington Post to dub him “intellectual guru of tort reform.” Active on social media, he is known as the founder and principal writer of what is generally considered the oldest blog on law as well as one of the most popular, Overlawyered.com. He has advised many public officials from the White House to town councils and in 2015 was named by Gov. Larry Hogan to be co-chair of the Maryland Redistricting Reform Commission, which issued its report recommendations later that year to acclaim across the state.
Before joining Cato, Olson was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an editor at the magazine Regulation, then edited by future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Olson’s more than 400 broadcast appearances include all the major networks, NPR, the BBC, The Diane Rehm Show, and Oprah.
Alida graduated from Duke University with a degree in history and earned her J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center.
Senior Counsel, Schaerr Jaffe LLP
Ken Klukowski is senior counsel at the law firm Schaerr Jaffe, focusing on constitutional, administrative, and election law, and the federal courts. He has served in politically appointed positions in the U.S. government, including senior counsel in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and prior to that in the White House as special counsel in the Office of Management and Budget. He was also the constitutional rights advisor on the Presidential Transition Team of President Donald J. Trump. In the private sector, he has worked as a senior fellow of the American Constitutional Rights Union, senior counsel at First Liberty Institute, and a legal journalist. He litigates constitutional cases in the U.S. Supreme Court and lower federal courts, and contributes to media coverage of the nation’s highest court and legal issues. Earlier in his career, Klukowski served as special deputy attorney general of Indiana, and worked on faculty at Liberty University School of Law. His academic works have been published by journals such as the Federalist Society’s Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and his columns have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and other national publications. His amicus briefs and nine law review articles have been cited by various federal courts and top legal journals. He has participated in numerous Supreme Court cases, and lectured and debated at 100 law school events nationwide. Klukowski received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame, studied history at Arizona State University, earned his law degree from Scalia Law School at George Mason University, and served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Alice Batchelder on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Alida graduated from Duke University with a degree in history and earned her J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center.
Senior Counsel, Schaerr Jaffe LLP
Ken Klukowski is senior counsel at the law firm Schaerr Jaffe, focusing on constitutional, administrative, and election law, and the federal courts. He has served in politically appointed positions in the U.S. government, including senior counsel in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and prior to that in the White House as special counsel in the Office of Management and Budget. He was also the constitutional rights advisor on the Presidential Transition Team of President Donald J. Trump. In the private sector, he has worked as a senior fellow of the American Constitutional Rights Union, senior counsel at First Liberty Institute, and a legal journalist. He litigates constitutional cases in the U.S. Supreme Court and lower federal courts, and contributes to media coverage of the nation’s highest court and legal issues. Earlier in his career, Klukowski served as special deputy attorney general of Indiana, and worked on faculty at Liberty University School of Law. His academic works have been published by journals such as the Federalist Society’s Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and his columns have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and other national publications. His amicus briefs and nine law review articles have been cited by various federal courts and top legal journals. He has participated in numerous Supreme Court cases, and lectured and debated at 100 law school events nationwide. Klukowski received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame, studied history at Arizona State University, earned his law degree from Scalia Law School at George Mason University, and served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Alice Batchelder on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Administration and Strategic Initiatives, Chicago-Kent College of Law
Carolyn Shapiro is a Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Administration and Strategic Initiatives at Chicago-Kent College of Law, where she is also the founder and co-director of Chicago-Kent's Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States (ISCOTUS), and the faculty director of the Constitutional Democracy Project, a civic education initiative. Professor Shapiro’s scholarship is largely focused on the Supreme Court, its relationship to other courts and institutions, and its role in our constitutional democracy, as well as on other structural constitutional matters. She teaches classes in constitutional law, legislation and statutory interpretation, and public interest law and policy, and she directs the Chicago-Kent Public Interest Certificate Program.
Professor Shapiro attended the University of Chicago Law School. After graduating, she served as a law clerk for Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and for Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the United States Supreme Court. Before joining the faculty at Chicago-Kent in 2003, she held a Skadden Fellowship at the Shriver National Center on Poverty Law and worked in private practice at a plaintiff’s side civil rights firm. From 2014 through mid-2016, she took a leave of absence from Chicago-Kent to serve as Illinois Solicitor General in the office of Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan. Professor Shapiro maintains a small appellate practice and is Of Counsel to Schnapper-Casteras PLLC.
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.
Welpton & Wise Professor of Law, University of Nebraska College of Law
Professor Rick Duncan is the Welpton & Wise Professor of Law at the University Of Nebraska College Of Law. He is a graduate of the Cornell Law School and served as an editor of the Cornell Law Review. He teaches Constitutional Law with a special emphasis on the law of religious freedom, free speech, and federalism. Duncan has written numerous books, articles, and commentaries on a wide variety of legal topics. His recent publications include an article on Justice Scalia’s legacy, another on Kermit Gosnell and Roe v. Wade, a piece on the Electoral College and Federalism, a 2019 piece on Masterpiece Cakeshop and the First Amendment, and three recent articles on the “no compelled speech” doctrine as a First Amendment defense against authoritarianism and tyranny. His most recent article, on School Choice and the First Amendment, will be published in 2023 in Case Western Law Review. He is also the co-author of a book on Secured Transactions under Article 9 of the UCC. He served as Chairman of the Nebraska Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights during the Reagan Administration. He also loves to speak at Federalist Society meetings around the country on life, liberty, and the pursuit of federalism.
Duncan has five children, five grandchildren, and a wonderful wife who help him pursue happiness. He loves lifting weights (particularly going heavy on the incline bench press), attending Broadway musicals and plays, including Hamilton: An American Musical which he has seen 12 times (possibly a Nebraska record). He regularly reads both the Bible and the New York Times because it is important to keep up with what both sides have to say. He loves following major league baseball, especially the San Diego Padres. And his favorite legal aphorism is “first come rights then comes government to secure those rights.”
President, The Ethics and Public Policy Center
Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., is the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. In May 2025, Anderson was appointed by President Trump to the Religious Liberty Commission.
He is the author or co-author of five books, including the just-released Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing. Previous books include When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, and Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination. He is the co-editor of A Liberalism Safe for Catholicism? Perspectives from “The Review of Politics.”
Anderson’s research has been cited by two U.S. Supreme Court justices, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, in two Supreme Court cases.
He received his bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, and he received his doctoral degree in political philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. His dissertation was titled: “Neither Liberal Nor Libertarian: A Natural Law Approach to Social Justice and Economic Rights.”
Anderson has made appearances on ABC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, and Fox News. His work has been published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the Harvard Health Policy Review, the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, First Things, the Claremont Review of Books, and National Review.
He is the John Paul II Teaching Fellow in Social Thought at the University of Dallas, a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University, and a Fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, as well as the Founding Editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey.
For 9 years he was the William E. Simon senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and has served as an adjunct professor of philosophy and political science at Christendom College, and a Visiting Fellow at the Veritas Center at Franciscan University. He has also served as an assistant editor of First Things.
Associate Dean & Principle Lecturer, Regent University School of Law
Professor Jacob has been a law professor at Regent University since January 2001. Prior to coming to Regent, his career began in a big-firm law practice and included years as a religious liberty lawyer, in Christian ministry leadership, and in Christian higher education.
Most of his teaching and scholarship is in the area of constitutional law. His published articles include"Griswold and the Defense of Traditional Marriage” in the North Dakota Law Review; “Will the Real Constitutional Originalist Please Stand Up?” in the Creighton Law Review; “Back to Basics: Constitutional Meaning and ‘Tradition,’” in the Texas Tech Law Review; and “Free Exercise in the ‘Lobbying Nineties,’” in the Nebraska Law Review.
Former Solicitor General of Texas
Jonathan F. Mitchell is Principal at Mitchell Law PLLC. He received his law degree with high honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was an articles editor of The University of Chicago Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif.
After graduating from law school, Mr. Mitchell clerked for Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and for Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States. He then served as an Attorney-Adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice from 2003 through 2006. After leaving the Department of Justice, Mr. Mitchell served as a Visiting Researcher at Georgetown University Law Center, a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Law School from 2006 through 2008, and an Assistant Professor of Law at George Mason University from 2008 through 2010.
In 2010, Mr. Mitchell was appointed Solicitor General of Texas, a position he held until January 2015. After leaving the Texas Solicitor General’s office, Mr. Mitchell served as the Searle Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law before joining the Hoover Institution as a Visiting Fellow from 2015 to 2016. Mr. Mitchell also served as a Visiting Professor of Law at Stanford Law School before opening his own law firm in 2018.
Mr. Mitchell has published numerous works of scholarship in top-10 law journals, and he has written articles on textualism, national-security law, criminal law and procedure, judicial review and judicial federalism, and the legality of stare decisis in constitutional adjudication.
Mr. Mitchell has argued eight times before the Supreme Court of the United States, and more than 20 times in the federal courts of appeals. He has also argued before Supreme Court of Texas and in numerous trial courts. Mr. Mitchell has authored the principal merits brief in 11 Supreme Court cases, and has written and submitted more than 20 amicus curiae briefs in the Supreme Court.
Mr. Mitchell devised the novel enforcement mechanism in the Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as Senate Bill 8, which avoids pre-enforcement judicial review by prohibiting government officials from enforcing the statute and empowering private citizens to bring lawsuits against those who violate it. This produced an end-run around Roe v. Wade and allowed Texas and other states to impose pre-viability abortion bans despite the continued existence of Roe.
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