Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court
The Honorable Amy Coney Barrett is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Donald Trump and was confirmed on October 27, 2020. She is the fifth woman to serve on the Court.
Justice Barrett earned her J.D., summa cum laude, from Notre Dame, where she was a Kiley Fellow, earned the Hoynes Prize, the Law School’s highest honor, and served as executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review. She clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court. As an associate at Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin in Washington, D.C., she litigated constitutional, criminal, and commercial cases in both trial and appellate courts.
In 2002, Justice Barrett joined the faculty of Notre Dame Law School. She continued to teach following her appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in November 2017. Justice Barrett also served by appointment of the Chief Justice on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure from 2010 to 2016.
Justice Barrett has published widely in the areas of federal courts, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation. Her scholarship in these fields has been published in leading journals, including the Columbia, Virginia, and Texas Law Reviews.
Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law, Cornell Law School
Michael C. Dorf, the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, has been teaching law since 1992. He has authored or co-authored six books and over one hundred scholarly articles and essays for law journals and peer-reviewed science and social science journals. He also frequently writes for non-lawyers. In addition to occasional contributions to The New York Times, USA Today, CNN.com, The Los Angeles Times, and other wide-circulation publications, Professor Dorf has been writing a bi-weekly column since 2000 and publishes a popular blog, Dorf on Law. He received his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. After law school, Dorf served as a law clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court. He has worked with several law firms and maintains an active pro bono practice mostly consisting of writing Supreme Court briefs. Before joining the Cornell faculty, Professor Dorf taught at Rutgers-Camden Law School for three years and at Columbia Law School for thirteen years.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit
Judge Hardiman was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on January 9, 2007 and was confirmed by the Senate (95-0) on March 15, 2007. Prior to becoming an appellate judge, Judge Hardiman served as a trial judge on the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania as of November 1, 2003. In 2008, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Judge Hardiman to the Information Technology Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States. Judge Hardiman was appointed Chairman of the IT Committee in 2013 and served in that capacity until September 2021. In 2021 he was appointed by the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts to serve as Chair of the Judiciary IT Security Task Force, which completed its work in fall 2023. Chief Justice Roberts appointed Judge Hardiman to the Board of the Federal Judicial Center to serve from March 2020 until March 2024. As part of his work with the Center, Judge Hardiman now serves as Editor in Chief for the Manual for Complex Civil Litigation, Fifth.
Before entering judicial service, Judge Hardiman handled a wide variety of litigation matters in state and federal trial and appellate courts as a partner at Reed Smith LLP (1999-2003), a partner at Titus & McConomy LLP (1996-1999), and as an associate with its predecessor firm, Cindrich & Titus (1992-1996). Judge Hardiman began his legal career as an associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom (1990-1992).
A 1987 honors graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Judge Hardiman received his law degree in 1990 from the Georgetown University Law Center, where he served as a Notes and Comments Editor on the Georgetown Law Journal. In 2012, Judge Hardiman was elected as a member of the American Law Institute and was elected to its Council in 2019 and its Executive Committee in 2025. Judge Hardiman regularly teaches a seminar on Advanced Constitutional Law at Duquesne University School of Law and a one-week course entitled “Constitutional Law: the First and Second Amendments” at Georgetown University Law Center.
A native of Waltham, Massachusetts, Judge Hardiman has chambers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He and his wife Lori married in 1992 and have three children.
Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law, New York University School of Law
Richard H. Pildes is one of the nation’s leading scholars of constitutional law and a specialist in legal issues affecting democracy. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute, and has received recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow and a Carnegie Scholar. His acclaimed casebook, The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process (now in its fourth edition), helped create an entirely new field of study in the law schools. The Law of Democracy systematically explores legal and policy issues concerning the structure of democratic elections and institutions, such as the role of money in politics, the design of election districts, the regulation of political parties, the design of voting systems, the representation of minority interests in democratic institutions, and similar issues. He has written extensively on the rise of political polarization in the United States, the Voting Rights Act, the dysfunction of America’s political processes, the role of the Supreme Court in overseeing American democracy, the powers of the American President and Congress, and he has criticized excessively “romantic” understandings of democracy. In addition to his scholarship on these issues, he has written on national-security law, the design of the regulatory state, and American constitutional history and theory.
Respect for his expertise in these areas is reflected in frequent citations of his work in U.S. Supreme Court opinions, the translation of his work into many languages, and his frequent public lectures and appearances around the world, including his nomination with the NBC News Team for an Emmy Award for coverage of the 2000 Presidential election litigation.
His work has been translated and published in Chinese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. In addition to his scholarship, Professor Pildes plays an active role litigating in these areas. He has won two cases before the United States Supreme Court, including a 2015 victory in Alabama Democratic Conference v. Alabama, a case involving race and redistricting. He served as counsel to a group of former chairmen of the Securities and Exchange Commission in litigation defending the constitutionality of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; as counsel in election litigation to the Puerto Rico Electoral Commission; as counsel to the government of Puerto Rico; as a federal court-appointed independent expert on voting rights litigation; and as counsel in successful Supreme Court litigation that challenged the way the United States Tax Court operated. He was also a senior legal advisor to the 2008 and 2012 campaigns of President Obama.
Pildes received his A.B. in physical chemistry summa cum laude from Princeton, and his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard, where he served as Supreme Court Note Editor on the Harvard Law Review. He clerked for Judge Abner J. Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court. After practicing law in Boston, he began his academic career at the University of Michigan Law School, before joining the NYU School of Law in 2001.
James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and Albert Clark Tate, Jr., Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Professor Saikrishna Prakash’s scholarship focuses on separation of powers, particularly executive powers. He teaches Constitutional Law, Foreign Relations Law and Presidential Powers at the Law School.
Prakash’s most recent book, “The Living Presidency: An Originalist Argument Against Its Ever-Expanding Powers,” was published by Harvard Belknap Press in 2020. He also authored “Imperial from the Beginning: The Constitution of the Original Executive” (Yale University Press, 2015). The former book focuses on the modern presidency while the latter considers the presidency of the Founders.
Prakash has authored over 75 law review articles. Among them are “Of Synchronicity and Supreme Law” in the Harvard Law Review, “The Indefensible Duty to Defend” in the Columbia Law Review, and “50 States, 50 Attorneys General and 50 Approaches to the Duty to Defend” and “The Executive Power Over Foreign Affairs” in the Yale Law Journal.
Prakash has published op-eds in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. At the request of Democrats and Republicans, he has testified before Congress on matters of presidential removal, the Mueller Report and how Congress might better check the presidency. He is currently a Miller Center Senior Fellow. In 2015, he received the Roger Traynor award for faculty scholarship. In the same year, he received an honorable mention from the American Society of Legal Writers for his book “Imperial from the Beginning.” He has given named lectures at William & Mary Law School, Princeton University and Toledo Law School, and keynote addresses at several conferences.
Prakash majored in economics and political science at Stanford University. At Yale Law School, he served as senior editor of the Yale Law Journal and received the John M. Olin Fellowship in Law, Economics and Public Policy. He subsequently clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. After practicing in New York for two years, he served as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and as an associate professor at Boston University School of Law. He then spent several years at the University of San Diego School of Law as the Herzog Research Professor of Law. Prakash has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. He also has served as a James Madison Fellow at Princeton University and Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution of War & Peace at Stanford University.
Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court
The Honorable Amy Coney Barrett is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Donald Trump and was confirmed on October 27, 2020. She is the fifth woman to serve on the Court.
Justice Barrett earned her J.D., summa cum laude, from Notre Dame, where she was a Kiley Fellow, earned the Hoynes Prize, the Law School’s highest honor, and served as executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review. She clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court. As an associate at Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin in Washington, D.C., she litigated constitutional, criminal, and commercial cases in both trial and appellate courts.
In 2002, Justice Barrett joined the faculty of Notre Dame Law School. She continued to teach following her appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in November 2017. Justice Barrett also served by appointment of the Chief Justice on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure from 2010 to 2016.
Justice Barrett has published widely in the areas of federal courts, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation. Her scholarship in these fields has been published in leading journals, including the Columbia, Virginia, and Texas Law Reviews.
Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law, Cornell Law School
Michael C. Dorf, the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, has been teaching law since 1992. He has authored or co-authored six books and over one hundred scholarly articles and essays for law journals and peer-reviewed science and social science journals. He also frequently writes for non-lawyers. In addition to occasional contributions to The New York Times, USA Today, CNN.com, The Los Angeles Times, and other wide-circulation publications, Professor Dorf has been writing a bi-weekly column since 2000 and publishes a popular blog, Dorf on Law. He received his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. After law school, Dorf served as a law clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court. He has worked with several law firms and maintains an active pro bono practice mostly consisting of writing Supreme Court briefs. Before joining the Cornell faculty, Professor Dorf taught at Rutgers-Camden Law School for three years and at Columbia Law School for thirteen years.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit
Judge Hardiman was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on January 9, 2007 and was confirmed by the Senate (95-0) on March 15, 2007. Prior to becoming an appellate judge, Judge Hardiman served as a trial judge on the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania as of November 1, 2003. In 2008, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Judge Hardiman to the Information Technology Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States. Judge Hardiman was appointed Chairman of the IT Committee in 2013 and served in that capacity until September 2021. In 2021 he was appointed by the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts to serve as Chair of the Judiciary IT Security Task Force, which completed its work in fall 2023. Chief Justice Roberts appointed Judge Hardiman to the Board of the Federal Judicial Center to serve from March 2020 until March 2024. As part of his work with the Center, Judge Hardiman now serves as Editor in Chief for the Manual for Complex Civil Litigation, Fifth.
Before entering judicial service, Judge Hardiman handled a wide variety of litigation matters in state and federal trial and appellate courts as a partner at Reed Smith LLP (1999-2003), a partner at Titus & McConomy LLP (1996-1999), and as an associate with its predecessor firm, Cindrich & Titus (1992-1996). Judge Hardiman began his legal career as an associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom (1990-1992).
A 1987 honors graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Judge Hardiman received his law degree in 1990 from the Georgetown University Law Center, where he served as a Notes and Comments Editor on the Georgetown Law Journal. In 2012, Judge Hardiman was elected as a member of the American Law Institute and was elected to its Council in 2019 and its Executive Committee in 2025. Judge Hardiman regularly teaches a seminar on Advanced Constitutional Law at Duquesne University School of Law and a one-week course entitled “Constitutional Law: the First and Second Amendments” at Georgetown University Law Center.
A native of Waltham, Massachusetts, Judge Hardiman has chambers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He and his wife Lori married in 1992 and have three children.
Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law, New York University School of Law
Richard H. Pildes is one of the nation’s leading scholars of constitutional law and a specialist in legal issues affecting democracy. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute, and has received recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow and a Carnegie Scholar. His acclaimed casebook, The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process (now in its fourth edition), helped create an entirely new field of study in the law schools. The Law of Democracy systematically explores legal and policy issues concerning the structure of democratic elections and institutions, such as the role of money in politics, the design of election districts, the regulation of political parties, the design of voting systems, the representation of minority interests in democratic institutions, and similar issues. He has written extensively on the rise of political polarization in the United States, the Voting Rights Act, the dysfunction of America’s political processes, the role of the Supreme Court in overseeing American democracy, the powers of the American President and Congress, and he has criticized excessively “romantic” understandings of democracy. In addition to his scholarship on these issues, he has written on national-security law, the design of the regulatory state, and American constitutional history and theory.
Respect for his expertise in these areas is reflected in frequent citations of his work in U.S. Supreme Court opinions, the translation of his work into many languages, and his frequent public lectures and appearances around the world, including his nomination with the NBC News Team for an Emmy Award for coverage of the 2000 Presidential election litigation.
His work has been translated and published in Chinese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. In addition to his scholarship, Professor Pildes plays an active role litigating in these areas. He has won two cases before the United States Supreme Court, including a 2015 victory in Alabama Democratic Conference v. Alabama, a case involving race and redistricting. He served as counsel to a group of former chairmen of the Securities and Exchange Commission in litigation defending the constitutionality of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; as counsel in election litigation to the Puerto Rico Electoral Commission; as counsel to the government of Puerto Rico; as a federal court-appointed independent expert on voting rights litigation; and as counsel in successful Supreme Court litigation that challenged the way the United States Tax Court operated. He was also a senior legal advisor to the 2008 and 2012 campaigns of President Obama.
Pildes received his A.B. in physical chemistry summa cum laude from Princeton, and his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard, where he served as Supreme Court Note Editor on the Harvard Law Review. He clerked for Judge Abner J. Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court. After practicing law in Boston, he began his academic career at the University of Michigan Law School, before joining the NYU School of Law in 2001.
James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and Albert Clark Tate, Jr., Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Professor Saikrishna Prakash’s scholarship focuses on separation of powers, particularly executive powers. He teaches Constitutional Law, Foreign Relations Law and Presidential Powers at the Law School.
Prakash’s most recent book, “The Living Presidency: An Originalist Argument Against Its Ever-Expanding Powers,” was published by Harvard Belknap Press in 2020. He also authored “Imperial from the Beginning: The Constitution of the Original Executive” (Yale University Press, 2015). The former book focuses on the modern presidency while the latter considers the presidency of the Founders.
Prakash has authored over 75 law review articles. Among them are “Of Synchronicity and Supreme Law” in the Harvard Law Review, “The Indefensible Duty to Defend” in the Columbia Law Review, and “50 States, 50 Attorneys General and 50 Approaches to the Duty to Defend” and “The Executive Power Over Foreign Affairs” in the Yale Law Journal.
Prakash has published op-eds in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. At the request of Democrats and Republicans, he has testified before Congress on matters of presidential removal, the Mueller Report and how Congress might better check the presidency. He is currently a Miller Center Senior Fellow. In 2015, he received the Roger Traynor award for faculty scholarship. In the same year, he received an honorable mention from the American Society of Legal Writers for his book “Imperial from the Beginning.” He has given named lectures at William & Mary Law School, Princeton University and Toledo Law School, and keynote addresses at several conferences.
Prakash majored in economics and political science at Stanford University. At Yale Law School, he served as senior editor of the Yale Law Journal and received the John M. Olin Fellowship in Law, Economics and Public Policy. He subsequently clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. After practicing in New York for two years, he served as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and as an associate professor at Boston University School of Law. He then spent several years at the University of San Diego School of Law as the Herzog Research Professor of Law. Prakash has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. He also has served as a James Madison Fellow at Princeton University and Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution of War & Peace at Stanford University.
Deputy General Counsel, First Liberty Institute
Justin Butterfield is Deputy General Counsel at First Liberty Institute, to which Justin returned after serving for two years as Senior Advisor for Conscience and Religious Freedom at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In his role at HHS, Justin launched a new division of the HHS Office for Civil Rights under Roger Severino dedicated to protecting Americans’ rights of conscience and religious freedom in health care. Prior to his work at HHS, Justin had been with First Liberty Institute for over seven years, during which time he litigated numerous religious freedom cases and wrote several scholarly articles on religion and the law. Justin received his J.D. from Harvard Law School and his bachelor of science summa cum laude in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso, where Justin is originally from.
Vice President and Senior Counsel, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
Eric Rassbach is Vice President and Senior Counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where he has served since 2003. He has briefed over 90 cases at the United States Supreme Court and has led or been a part of Becket litigation teams in each of Becket’s pathbreaking victories there, including Hosanna-Tabor, Hobby Lobby, Holt v. Hobbs, Zubik v. Burwell, Agudath Israel of America v. Cuomo, and Fulton v. Philadelphia. In 2020, Eric argued Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru to the Supreme Court, garnering a 7-2 win for his Catholic school clients. Eric has also briefed and argued cases in federal appeals courts and state supreme courts across the nation. Eric has also represented clients in appeals to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France and in the highest courts of several other countries.
Eric believes passionately in the right of all people to the full measure of religious liberty and has represented members of almost every religious group present in the United States, including Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, Santeros, and Sikhs, as well as many governmental entities targeted for accommodating religion.
Eric frequently comments on church-state issues in the media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other major press outlets. He has published legal scholarship in the Harvard Law Review Forum, the Tennessee Law Review, the Illinois Law Review, the Cato Supreme Court Review, and other legal journals, and often speaks to law school audiences.
Before joining Becket, Eric worked at Baker Botts LLP in Houston, where he worked in international project finance. He also served as a law clerk to United States District Court Judge Lee Rosenthal in Houston, Texas.
Eric graduated from Haverford College with a degree in Comparative Literature, is a member of Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School. Eric was a 2012-2013 Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School. He is Visiting Professor and Executive Director of The Hugh and Hazel Darling Foundation Religious Liberty Clinic at Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law in Malibu, where he leads students in litigating cases in American courts. He is also an Associated Scholar with the Centre for Religious Freedom at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Eric is admitted in Texas, DC, California, and Ireland.
President and CEO, First Liberty Institute
Kelly Shackelford, Esq., is President and CEO of First Liberty Institute, the largest legal firm in the nation dedicated exclusively to protecting religious freedom for all Americans. He has served in this role since 1997, leading First Liberty’s efforts to defend religious freedom in the courts and in the public arena. Under his leadership, First Liberty’s legal team has participated in cases before the United States Supreme Court, federal courts of appeals, federal district courts and various state courts, where they have won more than 90 percent of their cases.
Shackelford is a constitutional scholar who has argued before the United States Supreme Court, testified before the U.S. House and Senate, and has won a number of landmark First Amendment and religious liberty cases.
He was recently named one of the 25 greatest Texas lawyers of the past quarter-century by Texas Lawyer and is the recipient of the prestigious William Bentley Ball Award for Life and Religious Freedom Defense for pioneering work protecting religious freedom.
Shackelford is a highly sought-after speaker and frequent guest on national news and talk shows including Good Morning America, The Today Show, The O’Reilly Factor, CNN, Fox and Friends, MSNBC, and Hannity. He also has been featured in the National Law Journal, Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Times, The Washington Post, and The L.A. Times, and many others.
Shackelford is on the Board of Trustees of the United States Supreme Court Historical Society and earned his law degree from Baylor University.
Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School
Professor Tebbe teaches courses on constitutional law, religious freedom, legal theory, and professional responsibility. His scholarship focuses on the relationship between religious traditions and constitutional law, both in the United States and abroad. His articles have appeared in Georgetown Law Journal, Journal of Religion, Michigan Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and, most recently, Virginia Law Review. He is a past Chair of the Law and Religion Section of the Association of American Law Schools and he is co-organizer of the Annual Law and Religion Roundtable. He is regularly called on by media outlets to discuss questions of religious freedom and general constitutional law.
Professor Tebbe served as a Visiting Professor of Law at Cornell Law School during the fall of 2012. He joined Brooklyn Law School from St. John's University School of Law, where he received a Dean's Teaching Award. Before teaching, he clerked for Judge John M. Walker Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and practiced law at the American Civil Liberties Union and at Davis Polk & Wardwell. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Cape Town.
Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
Don Willett serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Before joining the federal bench, Judge Willett served 13 years on the Supreme Court
of Texas. His career spans decades of public service, including roles as legal counsel to
a Texas Attorney General, a Texas Governor, a U.S. Attorney General, and the
President of the United States.
Raised by a heroic widowed mom in a doublewide trailer in a town of 32, Judge
Willett is his family’s first college graduate. He earned a triple-major B.B.A. from Baylor
University—where he serves on the Board of Regents—and three degrees from Duke
University—where he serves on the Board of Visitors: a J.D. with honors, an A.M. in
political science, and an LL.M. in judicial studies. After law school, he clerked on the
Fifth Circuit and practiced at Haynes and Boone before entering public service.
Judge Willett publishes widely in both leading law reviews and national media, including
The Yale Law Journal, The University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Wall Street
Journal. The longtime editor-in-chief of Judicature—the Scholarly Journal for Judges, he
holds academic appointments at various law schools and has received more than a
dozen Green Bag honors for “exemplary legal writing.” He was named Distinguished
Jurist of the Year by the Texas Review of Law & Politics, and he is a member of the
American Law Institute and a Life Fellow of the American, Texas, and Austin Bar
Foundations.
A onetime bull rider and professional drummer, Judge Willett was named “Tweeter
Laureate of Texas” in 2015. He is the namesake of Don R. Willett Elementary
School—home of mighty Willett Wranglers—located just a mile from where he grew up.
He and his radiant wife, Tiffany have three children—Jacob, Shane-David, and
Geneviève—plus the family pup, Amicus.
Deputy General Counsel, First Liberty Institute
Justin Butterfield is Deputy General Counsel at First Liberty Institute, to which Justin returned after serving for two years as Senior Advisor for Conscience and Religious Freedom at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In his role at HHS, Justin launched a new division of the HHS Office for Civil Rights under Roger Severino dedicated to protecting Americans’ rights of conscience and religious freedom in health care. Prior to his work at HHS, Justin had been with First Liberty Institute for over seven years, during which time he litigated numerous religious freedom cases and wrote several scholarly articles on religion and the law. Justin received his J.D. from Harvard Law School and his bachelor of science summa cum laude in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso, where Justin is originally from.
Vice President and Senior Counsel, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
Eric Rassbach is Vice President and Senior Counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where he has served since 2003. He has briefed over 90 cases at the United States Supreme Court and has led or been a part of Becket litigation teams in each of Becket’s pathbreaking victories there, including Hosanna-Tabor, Hobby Lobby, Holt v. Hobbs, Zubik v. Burwell, Agudath Israel of America v. Cuomo, and Fulton v. Philadelphia. In 2020, Eric argued Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru to the Supreme Court, garnering a 7-2 win for his Catholic school clients. Eric has also briefed and argued cases in federal appeals courts and state supreme courts across the nation. Eric has also represented clients in appeals to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France and in the highest courts of several other countries.
Eric believes passionately in the right of all people to the full measure of religious liberty and has represented members of almost every religious group present in the United States, including Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, Santeros, and Sikhs, as well as many governmental entities targeted for accommodating religion.
Eric frequently comments on church-state issues in the media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other major press outlets. He has published legal scholarship in the Harvard Law Review Forum, the Tennessee Law Review, the Illinois Law Review, the Cato Supreme Court Review, and other legal journals, and often speaks to law school audiences.
Before joining Becket, Eric worked at Baker Botts LLP in Houston, where he worked in international project finance. He also served as a law clerk to United States District Court Judge Lee Rosenthal in Houston, Texas.
Eric graduated from Haverford College with a degree in Comparative Literature, is a member of Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School. Eric was a 2012-2013 Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School. He is Visiting Professor and Executive Director of The Hugh and Hazel Darling Foundation Religious Liberty Clinic at Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law in Malibu, where he leads students in litigating cases in American courts. He is also an Associated Scholar with the Centre for Religious Freedom at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Eric is admitted in Texas, DC, California, and Ireland.
President and CEO, First Liberty Institute
Kelly Shackelford, Esq., is President and CEO of First Liberty Institute, the largest legal firm in the nation dedicated exclusively to protecting religious freedom for all Americans. He has served in this role since 1997, leading First Liberty’s efforts to defend religious freedom in the courts and in the public arena. Under his leadership, First Liberty’s legal team has participated in cases before the United States Supreme Court, federal courts of appeals, federal district courts and various state courts, where they have won more than 90 percent of their cases.
Shackelford is a constitutional scholar who has argued before the United States Supreme Court, testified before the U.S. House and Senate, and has won a number of landmark First Amendment and religious liberty cases.
He was recently named one of the 25 greatest Texas lawyers of the past quarter-century by Texas Lawyer and is the recipient of the prestigious William Bentley Ball Award for Life and Religious Freedom Defense for pioneering work protecting religious freedom.
Shackelford is a highly sought-after speaker and frequent guest on national news and talk shows including Good Morning America, The Today Show, The O’Reilly Factor, CNN, Fox and Friends, MSNBC, and Hannity. He also has been featured in the National Law Journal, Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Times, The Washington Post, and The L.A. Times, and many others.
Shackelford is on the Board of Trustees of the United States Supreme Court Historical Society and earned his law degree from Baylor University.
Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School
Professor Tebbe teaches courses on constitutional law, religious freedom, legal theory, and professional responsibility. His scholarship focuses on the relationship between religious traditions and constitutional law, both in the United States and abroad. His articles have appeared in Georgetown Law Journal, Journal of Religion, Michigan Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and, most recently, Virginia Law Review. He is a past Chair of the Law and Religion Section of the Association of American Law Schools and he is co-organizer of the Annual Law and Religion Roundtable. He is regularly called on by media outlets to discuss questions of religious freedom and general constitutional law.
Professor Tebbe served as a Visiting Professor of Law at Cornell Law School during the fall of 2012. He joined Brooklyn Law School from St. John's University School of Law, where he received a Dean's Teaching Award. Before teaching, he clerked for Judge John M. Walker Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and practiced law at the American Civil Liberties Union and at Davis Polk & Wardwell. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Cape Town.
Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
Don Willett serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Before joining the federal bench, Judge Willett served 13 years on the Supreme Court
of Texas. His career spans decades of public service, including roles as legal counsel to
a Texas Attorney General, a Texas Governor, a U.S. Attorney General, and the
President of the United States.
Raised by a heroic widowed mom in a doublewide trailer in a town of 32, Judge
Willett is his family’s first college graduate. He earned a triple-major B.B.A. from Baylor
University—where he serves on the Board of Regents—and three degrees from Duke
University—where he serves on the Board of Visitors: a J.D. with honors, an A.M. in
political science, and an LL.M. in judicial studies. After law school, he clerked on the
Fifth Circuit and practiced at Haynes and Boone before entering public service.
Judge Willett publishes widely in both leading law reviews and national media, including
The Yale Law Journal, The University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Wall Street
Journal. The longtime editor-in-chief of Judicature—the Scholarly Journal for Judges, he
holds academic appointments at various law schools and has received more than a
dozen Green Bag honors for “exemplary legal writing.” He was named Distinguished
Jurist of the Year by the Texas Review of Law & Politics, and he is a member of the
American Law Institute and a Life Fellow of the American, Texas, and Austin Bar
Foundations.
A onetime bull rider and professional drummer, Judge Willett was named “Tweeter
Laureate of Texas” in 2015. He is the namesake of Don R. Willett Elementary
School—home of mighty Willett Wranglers—located just a mile from where he grew up.
He and his radiant wife, Tiffany have three children—Jacob, Shane-David, and
Geneviève—plus the family pup, Amicus.
Founder, Quell Strategies
Machalagh Carr is a trusted and strategic counselor with decades of private sector and government experience. She has nimbly navigated the intersection of congressional investigations and oversight, law, geopolitics, and policy, most recently as the top staffer in Article I as Chief of Staff to Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.
Prior to her role as Chief of Staff, she served as General Counsel for the Speaker and Office of the Republican Leader at the U.S. House of Representatives. Previously, she served as General Counsel & Parliamentarian for the Committee on Ways and Means, where she handled all legal and procedural issues for the Committee. Before that, she was the Oversight Staff Director at the Committee where she led the investigations and oversight of all issues within the Committee’s jurisdiction. Prior to joining Ways and Means, she served as the Director of Oversight and Investigations for the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and as Senior Oversight Counsel at the Committee on Natural Resources.
Previously, Machalagh served in the Office of Global Compliance of an international energy company where she conducted internal anti-corruption investigations, audits, and compliance reviews for the company. Before her in-house experience she practiced in the Litigation, White Collar, and Government Investigations Group at Sonnenschein Nath and Rosenthal LLP (now Dentons). Directly after law school, Machalagh clerked for the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.
She taught Trial Practice at Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law and lives in Virginia with her husband and three sons.
Trustee Professor of Law, New York Law School
From 1972-79, Schoenbrod served as one of the leaders of the Natural Resources Defense Council, where he campaigned to reduce lead in gasoline, resurrect the then-decrepit New York City subway, and protect the environment of Puerto Rico. Previously, he was Director of Program Development at the community development project that Senator Robert Kennedy established in Bedford Stuyvesant. He has also been a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.
His books include
D.C. Confidential: Inside the Five Tricks of Washington (Encounter Books, 2017) with forewords by Governor Howard Dean and Senator Mike Lee;
Breaking the Logjam: Environmental Protection That Will Work (Yale University Press, 2010)(with Richard B. Stewart and Katrina M. Wyman);
Saving Our Environment from Washington: How Congress Grabs Power, Shirks Responsibility, and Shortchanges the People (Yale University Press, 2005);
Democracy by Decree: What Happens When Courts Run Government (Yale University Press, 2003) (with Ross Sandler); and
Power Without Responsibility: How Congress Abuses the People Through Delegation (Yale University Press, 1993).
In addition to writing scholarly articles, he has frequently contributed opinion pieces to the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, the New York Times, and other publications.
He has an undergraduate degree from Yale College, a graduate degree in economics from Oxford University, which he attended as a Marshall Scholar, and a law degree from Yale Law School.
President, Hoppe Strategies
After serving 29 years on Capitol Hill, Dave Hoppe returned to the private sector as president of Hoppe Strategies, a strategic planning, lobbying and political consulting firm.
Hoppe brings a wealth of experience to this job, having dealt with legislative development and strategy at the highest levels on Capitol Hill. He directed Whip offices in both the House and Senate, and led the Senate Majority Leader’s office during the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations. Both positions oversaw and coordinated the flow of legislation through Congress, and both required working with political personalities on both sides of the aisle as well as the White House, to achieve passage for each bill. Hoppe recently reprised this role for Sen. Jon Kyl in the Senate Whip Office.
Additionally, Hoppe was the lead staff member on such historic Constitutional and structural events as the power shift in the Senate (when one Senator changed his party affiliation, throwing into chaos the entire Senate committee structure and requiring extensive negotiations between both parties), and the Senate impeachment trial of President Clinton. These events give him a unique perspective on the interaction of political agendas with legislative outcomes.
Other Hill positions held by Hoppe include Chief of Staff to Rep. Jack Kemp during his presidential bid, and Chief of Staff to Sen. Dan Coats who was appointed to replace former Senator Dan Quayle. Sen. Coats was required to conduct two statewide campaigns in a 4-year period in order to confirm his Senate appointment and then to retain the seat, unusual demands which impacted the work of his Senate office. Early in his Hill career, Hoppe served as energy and environmental policy analyst for the Republican Study Committee.
Among the highlights of Hoppe’s years on House leadership staff were the passage of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 and the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, both key elements of the first Reagan administration. During his tenure with Rep. Jack Kemp, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was passed and signed into law. He was also involved with the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1997, and numerous other issues including welfare reform, tax policies and education reform.
In 2003, Hoppe left the Hill to work for the public affairs firm Quinn Gillespie & Associates, serving as President of QGA 2007-2011, when he returned briefly to the Senate to direct the Whip office for Sen. Kyl. Currently Hoppe is a Senior Policy Advisor at Squire Patton Boggs, he also serves as a Senior Advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center, and is an advisor to the Jack Kemp Foundation. He is an emeritus member of the Board for Easter Seals of DC, Maryland and Northern Virginia, was Chairman of the Government Affairs Committee for the National Down Syndrome Society, and serves on the national board of SourceAmerica and of the Coalition to Promote Self Determination, a group of organizations working to empower disabled individuals to achieve greater independence.
He holds a B.A. in Government from the University of Notre Dame, and an M.A. in International Relations from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is married and has three children.
Professor of Law, Cornell Law School
Josh Chafetz received his B.A. from Yale University, his doctorate in Politics from Oxford (where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar), and his J.D. from Yale Law School. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
His research interests include structural constitutional law, American and British constitutional history, legislation and legislative procedure, American political development, and the intersection of law and politics. His second book, Congress's Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers, was published by Yale University Press in 2017. He is also the author of Democracy's Privileged Few: Legislative Privilege and Democratic Norms in the British and American Constitutions (Yale University Press, 2007) and is a co-editor (along with William N. Eskridge, Jr., Elizabeth Garrett, and James Brudney) of the leading casebook in Legislation, Cases and Materials on Legislation and Regulation: Statutes and the Creation of Public Policy, published by West.
His scholarship has been published in a number of top law reviews, including the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Notre Dame Law Review, and Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, among others. He has also written for a number of popular press outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, Slate, and the New Republic. He is currently a Contributing Writer for the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill.
Founder, Quell Strategies
Machalagh Carr is a trusted and strategic counselor with decades of private sector and government experience. She has nimbly navigated the intersection of congressional investigations and oversight, law, geopolitics, and policy, most recently as the top staffer in Article I as Chief of Staff to Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.
Prior to her role as Chief of Staff, she served as General Counsel for the Speaker and Office of the Republican Leader at the U.S. House of Representatives. Previously, she served as General Counsel & Parliamentarian for the Committee on Ways and Means, where she handled all legal and procedural issues for the Committee. Before that, she was the Oversight Staff Director at the Committee where she led the investigations and oversight of all issues within the Committee’s jurisdiction. Prior to joining Ways and Means, she served as the Director of Oversight and Investigations for the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and as Senior Oversight Counsel at the Committee on Natural Resources.
Previously, Machalagh served in the Office of Global Compliance of an international energy company where she conducted internal anti-corruption investigations, audits, and compliance reviews for the company. Before her in-house experience she practiced in the Litigation, White Collar, and Government Investigations Group at Sonnenschein Nath and Rosenthal LLP (now Dentons). Directly after law school, Machalagh clerked for the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.
She taught Trial Practice at Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law and lives in Virginia with her husband and three sons.
President, Hoppe Strategies
After serving 29 years on Capitol Hill, Dave Hoppe returned to the private sector as president of Hoppe Strategies, a strategic planning, lobbying and political consulting firm.
Hoppe brings a wealth of experience to this job, having dealt with legislative development and strategy at the highest levels on Capitol Hill. He directed Whip offices in both the House and Senate, and led the Senate Majority Leader’s office during the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations. Both positions oversaw and coordinated the flow of legislation through Congress, and both required working with political personalities on both sides of the aisle as well as the White House, to achieve passage for each bill. Hoppe recently reprised this role for Sen. Jon Kyl in the Senate Whip Office.
Additionally, Hoppe was the lead staff member on such historic Constitutional and structural events as the power shift in the Senate (when one Senator changed his party affiliation, throwing into chaos the entire Senate committee structure and requiring extensive negotiations between both parties), and the Senate impeachment trial of President Clinton. These events give him a unique perspective on the interaction of political agendas with legislative outcomes.
Other Hill positions held by Hoppe include Chief of Staff to Rep. Jack Kemp during his presidential bid, and Chief of Staff to Sen. Dan Coats who was appointed to replace former Senator Dan Quayle. Sen. Coats was required to conduct two statewide campaigns in a 4-year period in order to confirm his Senate appointment and then to retain the seat, unusual demands which impacted the work of his Senate office. Early in his Hill career, Hoppe served as energy and environmental policy analyst for the Republican Study Committee.
Among the highlights of Hoppe’s years on House leadership staff were the passage of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 and the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, both key elements of the first Reagan administration. During his tenure with Rep. Jack Kemp, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was passed and signed into law. He was also involved with the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1997, and numerous other issues including welfare reform, tax policies and education reform.
In 2003, Hoppe left the Hill to work for the public affairs firm Quinn Gillespie & Associates, serving as President of QGA 2007-2011, when he returned briefly to the Senate to direct the Whip office for Sen. Kyl. Currently Hoppe is a Senior Policy Advisor at Squire Patton Boggs, he also serves as a Senior Advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center, and is an advisor to the Jack Kemp Foundation. He is an emeritus member of the Board for Easter Seals of DC, Maryland and Northern Virginia, was Chairman of the Government Affairs Committee for the National Down Syndrome Society, and serves on the national board of SourceAmerica and of the Coalition to Promote Self Determination, a group of organizations working to empower disabled individuals to achieve greater independence.
He holds a B.A. in Government from the University of Notre Dame, and an M.A. in International Relations from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is married and has three children.
Trustee Professor of Law, New York Law School
From 1972-79, Schoenbrod served as one of the leaders of the Natural Resources Defense Council, where he campaigned to reduce lead in gasoline, resurrect the then-decrepit New York City subway, and protect the environment of Puerto Rico. Previously, he was Director of Program Development at the community development project that Senator Robert Kennedy established in Bedford Stuyvesant. He has also been a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.
His books include
D.C. Confidential: Inside the Five Tricks of Washington (Encounter Books, 2017) with forewords by Governor Howard Dean and Senator Mike Lee;
Breaking the Logjam: Environmental Protection That Will Work (Yale University Press, 2010)(with Richard B. Stewart and Katrina M. Wyman);
Saving Our Environment from Washington: How Congress Grabs Power, Shirks Responsibility, and Shortchanges the People (Yale University Press, 2005);
Democracy by Decree: What Happens When Courts Run Government (Yale University Press, 2003) (with Ross Sandler); and
Power Without Responsibility: How Congress Abuses the People Through Delegation (Yale University Press, 1993).
In addition to writing scholarly articles, he has frequently contributed opinion pieces to the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, the New York Times, and other publications.
He has an undergraduate degree from Yale College, a graduate degree in economics from Oxford University, which he attended as a Marshall Scholar, and a law degree from Yale Law School.
Professor of Law, Cornell Law School
Josh Chafetz received his B.A. from Yale University, his doctorate in Politics from Oxford (where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar), and his J.D. from Yale Law School. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
His research interests include structural constitutional law, American and British constitutional history, legislation and legislative procedure, American political development, and the intersection of law and politics. His second book, Congress's Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers, was published by Yale University Press in 2017. He is also the author of Democracy's Privileged Few: Legislative Privilege and Democratic Norms in the British and American Constitutions (Yale University Press, 2007) and is a co-editor (along with William N. Eskridge, Jr., Elizabeth Garrett, and James Brudney) of the leading casebook in Legislation, Cases and Materials on Legislation and Regulation: Statutes and the Creation of Public Policy, published by West.
His scholarship has been published in a number of top law reviews, including the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Notre Dame Law Review, and Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, among others. He has also written for a number of popular press outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, Slate, and the New Republic. He is currently a Contributing Writer for the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill.
Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court
The Honorable Amy Coney Barrett is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Donald Trump and was confirmed on October 27, 2020. She is the fifth woman to serve on the Court.
Justice Barrett earned her J.D., summa cum laude, from Notre Dame, where she was a Kiley Fellow, earned the Hoynes Prize, the Law School’s highest honor, and served as executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review. She clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court. As an associate at Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin in Washington, D.C., she litigated constitutional, criminal, and commercial cases in both trial and appellate courts.
In 2002, Justice Barrett joined the faculty of Notre Dame Law School. She continued to teach following her appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in November 2017. Justice Barrett also served by appointment of the Chief Justice on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure from 2010 to 2016.
Justice Barrett has published widely in the areas of federal courts, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation. Her scholarship in these fields has been published in leading journals, including the Columbia, Virginia, and Texas Law Reviews.
Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law, Cornell Law School
Michael C. Dorf, the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, has been teaching law since 1992. He has authored or co-authored six books and over one hundred scholarly articles and essays for law journals and peer-reviewed science and social science journals. He also frequently writes for non-lawyers. In addition to occasional contributions to The New York Times, USA Today, CNN.com, The Los Angeles Times, and other wide-circulation publications, Professor Dorf has been writing a bi-weekly column since 2000 and publishes a popular blog, Dorf on Law. He received his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. After law school, Dorf served as a law clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court. He has worked with several law firms and maintains an active pro bono practice mostly consisting of writing Supreme Court briefs. Before joining the Cornell faculty, Professor Dorf taught at Rutgers-Camden Law School for three years and at Columbia Law School for thirteen years.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit
Judge Hardiman was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on January 9, 2007 and was confirmed by the Senate (95-0) on March 15, 2007. Prior to becoming an appellate judge, Judge Hardiman served as a trial judge on the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania as of November 1, 2003. In 2008, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Judge Hardiman to the Information Technology Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States. Judge Hardiman was appointed Chairman of the IT Committee in 2013 and served in that capacity until September 2021. In 2021 he was appointed by the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts to serve as Chair of the Judiciary IT Security Task Force, which completed its work in fall 2023. Chief Justice Roberts appointed Judge Hardiman to the Board of the Federal Judicial Center to serve from March 2020 until March 2024. As part of his work with the Center, Judge Hardiman now serves as Editor in Chief for the Manual for Complex Civil Litigation, Fifth.
Before entering judicial service, Judge Hardiman handled a wide variety of litigation matters in state and federal trial and appellate courts as a partner at Reed Smith LLP (1999-2003), a partner at Titus & McConomy LLP (1996-1999), and as an associate with its predecessor firm, Cindrich & Titus (1992-1996). Judge Hardiman began his legal career as an associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom (1990-1992).
A 1987 honors graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Judge Hardiman received his law degree in 1990 from the Georgetown University Law Center, where he served as a Notes and Comments Editor on the Georgetown Law Journal. In 2012, Judge Hardiman was elected as a member of the American Law Institute and was elected to its Council in 2019 and its Executive Committee in 2025. Judge Hardiman regularly teaches a seminar on Advanced Constitutional Law at Duquesne University School of Law and a one-week course entitled “Constitutional Law: the First and Second Amendments” at Georgetown University Law Center.
A native of Waltham, Massachusetts, Judge Hardiman has chambers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He and his wife Lori married in 1992 and have three children.
Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law, New York University School of Law
Richard H. Pildes is one of the nation’s leading scholars of constitutional law and a specialist in legal issues affecting democracy. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute, and has received recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow and a Carnegie Scholar. His acclaimed casebook, The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process (now in its fourth edition), helped create an entirely new field of study in the law schools. The Law of Democracy systematically explores legal and policy issues concerning the structure of democratic elections and institutions, such as the role of money in politics, the design of election districts, the regulation of political parties, the design of voting systems, the representation of minority interests in democratic institutions, and similar issues. He has written extensively on the rise of political polarization in the United States, the Voting Rights Act, the dysfunction of America’s political processes, the role of the Supreme Court in overseeing American democracy, the powers of the American President and Congress, and he has criticized excessively “romantic” understandings of democracy. In addition to his scholarship on these issues, he has written on national-security law, the design of the regulatory state, and American constitutional history and theory.
Respect for his expertise in these areas is reflected in frequent citations of his work in U.S. Supreme Court opinions, the translation of his work into many languages, and his frequent public lectures and appearances around the world, including his nomination with the NBC News Team for an Emmy Award for coverage of the 2000 Presidential election litigation.
His work has been translated and published in Chinese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. In addition to his scholarship, Professor Pildes plays an active role litigating in these areas. He has won two cases before the United States Supreme Court, including a 2015 victory in Alabama Democratic Conference v. Alabama, a case involving race and redistricting. He served as counsel to a group of former chairmen of the Securities and Exchange Commission in litigation defending the constitutionality of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; as counsel in election litigation to the Puerto Rico Electoral Commission; as counsel to the government of Puerto Rico; as a federal court-appointed independent expert on voting rights litigation; and as counsel in successful Supreme Court litigation that challenged the way the United States Tax Court operated. He was also a senior legal advisor to the 2008 and 2012 campaigns of President Obama.
Pildes received his A.B. in physical chemistry summa cum laude from Princeton, and his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard, where he served as Supreme Court Note Editor on the Harvard Law Review. He clerked for Judge Abner J. Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court. After practicing law in Boston, he began his academic career at the University of Michigan Law School, before joining the NYU School of Law in 2001.
James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and Albert Clark Tate, Jr., Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Professor Saikrishna Prakash’s scholarship focuses on separation of powers, particularly executive powers. He teaches Constitutional Law, Foreign Relations Law and Presidential Powers at the Law School.
Prakash’s most recent book, “The Living Presidency: An Originalist Argument Against Its Ever-Expanding Powers,” was published by Harvard Belknap Press in 2020. He also authored “Imperial from the Beginning: The Constitution of the Original Executive” (Yale University Press, 2015). The former book focuses on the modern presidency while the latter considers the presidency of the Founders.
Prakash has authored over 75 law review articles. Among them are “Of Synchronicity and Supreme Law” in the Harvard Law Review, “The Indefensible Duty to Defend” in the Columbia Law Review, and “50 States, 50 Attorneys General and 50 Approaches to the Duty to Defend” and “The Executive Power Over Foreign Affairs” in the Yale Law Journal.
Prakash has published op-eds in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. At the request of Democrats and Republicans, he has testified before Congress on matters of presidential removal, the Mueller Report and how Congress might better check the presidency. He is currently a Miller Center Senior Fellow. In 2015, he received the Roger Traynor award for faculty scholarship. In the same year, he received an honorable mention from the American Society of Legal Writers for his book “Imperial from the Beginning.” He has given named lectures at William & Mary Law School, Princeton University and Toledo Law School, and keynote addresses at several conferences.
Prakash majored in economics and political science at Stanford University. At Yale Law School, he served as senior editor of the Yale Law Journal and received the John M. Olin Fellowship in Law, Economics and Public Policy. He subsequently clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. After practicing in New York for two years, he served as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and as an associate professor at Boston University School of Law. He then spent several years at the University of San Diego School of Law as the Herzog Research Professor of Law. Prakash has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. He also has served as a James Madison Fellow at Princeton University and Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution of War & Peace at Stanford University.
Deputy General Counsel, First Liberty Institute
Justin Butterfield is Deputy General Counsel at First Liberty Institute, to which Justin returned after serving for two years as Senior Advisor for Conscience and Religious Freedom at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In his role at HHS, Justin launched a new division of the HHS Office for Civil Rights under Roger Severino dedicated to protecting Americans’ rights of conscience and religious freedom in health care. Prior to his work at HHS, Justin had been with First Liberty Institute for over seven years, during which time he litigated numerous religious freedom cases and wrote several scholarly articles on religion and the law. Justin received his J.D. from Harvard Law School and his bachelor of science summa cum laude in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso, where Justin is originally from.
Vice President and Senior Counsel, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
Eric Rassbach is Vice President and Senior Counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where he has served since 2003. He has briefed over 90 cases at the United States Supreme Court and has led or been a part of Becket litigation teams in each of Becket’s pathbreaking victories there, including Hosanna-Tabor, Hobby Lobby, Holt v. Hobbs, Zubik v. Burwell, Agudath Israel of America v. Cuomo, and Fulton v. Philadelphia. In 2020, Eric argued Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru to the Supreme Court, garnering a 7-2 win for his Catholic school clients. Eric has also briefed and argued cases in federal appeals courts and state supreme courts across the nation. Eric has also represented clients in appeals to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France and in the highest courts of several other countries.
Eric believes passionately in the right of all people to the full measure of religious liberty and has represented members of almost every religious group present in the United States, including Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, Santeros, and Sikhs, as well as many governmental entities targeted for accommodating religion.
Eric frequently comments on church-state issues in the media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other major press outlets. He has published legal scholarship in the Harvard Law Review Forum, the Tennessee Law Review, the Illinois Law Review, the Cato Supreme Court Review, and other legal journals, and often speaks to law school audiences.
Before joining Becket, Eric worked at Baker Botts LLP in Houston, where he worked in international project finance. He also served as a law clerk to United States District Court Judge Lee Rosenthal in Houston, Texas.
Eric graduated from Haverford College with a degree in Comparative Literature, is a member of Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School. Eric was a 2012-2013 Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School. He is Visiting Professor and Executive Director of The Hugh and Hazel Darling Foundation Religious Liberty Clinic at Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law in Malibu, where he leads students in litigating cases in American courts. He is also an Associated Scholar with the Centre for Religious Freedom at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Eric is admitted in Texas, DC, California, and Ireland.
President and CEO, First Liberty Institute
Kelly Shackelford, Esq., is President and CEO of First Liberty Institute, the largest legal firm in the nation dedicated exclusively to protecting religious freedom for all Americans. He has served in this role since 1997, leading First Liberty’s efforts to defend religious freedom in the courts and in the public arena. Under his leadership, First Liberty’s legal team has participated in cases before the United States Supreme Court, federal courts of appeals, federal district courts and various state courts, where they have won more than 90 percent of their cases.
Shackelford is a constitutional scholar who has argued before the United States Supreme Court, testified before the U.S. House and Senate, and has won a number of landmark First Amendment and religious liberty cases.
He was recently named one of the 25 greatest Texas lawyers of the past quarter-century by Texas Lawyer and is the recipient of the prestigious William Bentley Ball Award for Life and Religious Freedom Defense for pioneering work protecting religious freedom.
Shackelford is a highly sought-after speaker and frequent guest on national news and talk shows including Good Morning America, The Today Show, The O’Reilly Factor, CNN, Fox and Friends, MSNBC, and Hannity. He also has been featured in the National Law Journal, Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Times, The Washington Post, and The L.A. Times, and many others.
Shackelford is on the Board of Trustees of the United States Supreme Court Historical Society and earned his law degree from Baylor University.
Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School
Professor Tebbe teaches courses on constitutional law, religious freedom, legal theory, and professional responsibility. His scholarship focuses on the relationship between religious traditions and constitutional law, both in the United States and abroad. His articles have appeared in Georgetown Law Journal, Journal of Religion, Michigan Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and, most recently, Virginia Law Review. He is a past Chair of the Law and Religion Section of the Association of American Law Schools and he is co-organizer of the Annual Law and Religion Roundtable. He is regularly called on by media outlets to discuss questions of religious freedom and general constitutional law.
Professor Tebbe served as a Visiting Professor of Law at Cornell Law School during the fall of 2012. He joined Brooklyn Law School from St. John's University School of Law, where he received a Dean's Teaching Award. Before teaching, he clerked for Judge John M. Walker Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and practiced law at the American Civil Liberties Union and at Davis Polk & Wardwell. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Cape Town.
Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
Don Willett serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Before joining the federal bench, Judge Willett served 13 years on the Supreme Court
of Texas. His career spans decades of public service, including roles as legal counsel to
a Texas Attorney General, a Texas Governor, a U.S. Attorney General, and the
President of the United States.
Raised by a heroic widowed mom in a doublewide trailer in a town of 32, Judge
Willett is his family’s first college graduate. He earned a triple-major B.B.A. from Baylor
University—where he serves on the Board of Regents—and three degrees from Duke
University—where he serves on the Board of Visitors: a J.D. with honors, an A.M. in
political science, and an LL.M. in judicial studies. After law school, he clerked on the
Fifth Circuit and practiced at Haynes and Boone before entering public service.
Judge Willett publishes widely in both leading law reviews and national media, including
The Yale Law Journal, The University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Wall Street
Journal. The longtime editor-in-chief of Judicature—the Scholarly Journal for Judges, he
holds academic appointments at various law schools and has received more than a
dozen Green Bag honors for “exemplary legal writing.” He was named Distinguished
Jurist of the Year by the Texas Review of Law & Politics, and he is a member of the
American Law Institute and a Life Fellow of the American, Texas, and Austin Bar
Foundations.
A onetime bull rider and professional drummer, Judge Willett was named “Tweeter
Laureate of Texas” in 2015. He is the namesake of Don R. Willett Elementary
School—home of mighty Willett Wranglers—located just a mile from where he grew up.
He and his radiant wife, Tiffany have three children—Jacob, Shane-David, and
Geneviève—plus the family pup, Amicus.
Founder, Quell Strategies
Machalagh Carr is a trusted and strategic counselor with decades of private sector and government experience. She has nimbly navigated the intersection of congressional investigations and oversight, law, geopolitics, and policy, most recently as the top staffer in Article I as Chief of Staff to Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.
Prior to her role as Chief of Staff, she served as General Counsel for the Speaker and Office of the Republican Leader at the U.S. House of Representatives. Previously, she served as General Counsel & Parliamentarian for the Committee on Ways and Means, where she handled all legal and procedural issues for the Committee. Before that, she was the Oversight Staff Director at the Committee where she led the investigations and oversight of all issues within the Committee’s jurisdiction. Prior to joining Ways and Means, she served as the Director of Oversight and Investigations for the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and as Senior Oversight Counsel at the Committee on Natural Resources.
Previously, Machalagh served in the Office of Global Compliance of an international energy company where she conducted internal anti-corruption investigations, audits, and compliance reviews for the company. Before her in-house experience she practiced in the Litigation, White Collar, and Government Investigations Group at Sonnenschein Nath and Rosenthal LLP (now Dentons). Directly after law school, Machalagh clerked for the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.
She taught Trial Practice at Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law and lives in Virginia with her husband and three sons.
Professor of Law, Cornell Law School
Josh Chafetz received his B.A. from Yale University, his doctorate in Politics from Oxford (where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar), and his J.D. from Yale Law School. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
His research interests include structural constitutional law, American and British constitutional history, legislation and legislative procedure, American political development, and the intersection of law and politics. His second book, Congress's Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers, was published by Yale University Press in 2017. He is also the author of Democracy's Privileged Few: Legislative Privilege and Democratic Norms in the British and American Constitutions (Yale University Press, 2007) and is a co-editor (along with William N. Eskridge, Jr., Elizabeth Garrett, and James Brudney) of the leading casebook in Legislation, Cases and Materials on Legislation and Regulation: Statutes and the Creation of Public Policy, published by West.
His scholarship has been published in a number of top law reviews, including the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Notre Dame Law Review, and Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, among others. He has also written for a number of popular press outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, Slate, and the New Republic. He is currently a Contributing Writer for the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill.
President, Hoppe Strategies
After serving 29 years on Capitol Hill, Dave Hoppe returned to the private sector as president of Hoppe Strategies, a strategic planning, lobbying and political consulting firm.
Hoppe brings a wealth of experience to this job, having dealt with legislative development and strategy at the highest levels on Capitol Hill. He directed Whip offices in both the House and Senate, and led the Senate Majority Leader’s office during the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations. Both positions oversaw and coordinated the flow of legislation through Congress, and both required working with political personalities on both sides of the aisle as well as the White House, to achieve passage for each bill. Hoppe recently reprised this role for Sen. Jon Kyl in the Senate Whip Office.
Additionally, Hoppe was the lead staff member on such historic Constitutional and structural events as the power shift in the Senate (when one Senator changed his party affiliation, throwing into chaos the entire Senate committee structure and requiring extensive negotiations between both parties), and the Senate impeachment trial of President Clinton. These events give him a unique perspective on the interaction of political agendas with legislative outcomes.
Other Hill positions held by Hoppe include Chief of Staff to Rep. Jack Kemp during his presidential bid, and Chief of Staff to Sen. Dan Coats who was appointed to replace former Senator Dan Quayle. Sen. Coats was required to conduct two statewide campaigns in a 4-year period in order to confirm his Senate appointment and then to retain the seat, unusual demands which impacted the work of his Senate office. Early in his Hill career, Hoppe served as energy and environmental policy analyst for the Republican Study Committee.
Among the highlights of Hoppe’s years on House leadership staff were the passage of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 and the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, both key elements of the first Reagan administration. During his tenure with Rep. Jack Kemp, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was passed and signed into law. He was also involved with the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1997, and numerous other issues including welfare reform, tax policies and education reform.
In 2003, Hoppe left the Hill to work for the public affairs firm Quinn Gillespie & Associates, serving as President of QGA 2007-2011, when he returned briefly to the Senate to direct the Whip office for Sen. Kyl. Currently Hoppe is a Senior Policy Advisor at Squire Patton Boggs, he also serves as a Senior Advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center, and is an advisor to the Jack Kemp Foundation. He is an emeritus member of the Board for Easter Seals of DC, Maryland and Northern Virginia, was Chairman of the Government Affairs Committee for the National Down Syndrome Society, and serves on the national board of SourceAmerica and of the Coalition to Promote Self Determination, a group of organizations working to empower disabled individuals to achieve greater independence.
He holds a B.A. in Government from the University of Notre Dame, and an M.A. in International Relations from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is married and has three children.
Trustee Professor of Law, New York Law School
From 1972-79, Schoenbrod served as one of the leaders of the Natural Resources Defense Council, where he campaigned to reduce lead in gasoline, resurrect the then-decrepit New York City subway, and protect the environment of Puerto Rico. Previously, he was Director of Program Development at the community development project that Senator Robert Kennedy established in Bedford Stuyvesant. He has also been a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.
His books include
D.C. Confidential: Inside the Five Tricks of Washington (Encounter Books, 2017) with forewords by Governor Howard Dean and Senator Mike Lee;
Breaking the Logjam: Environmental Protection That Will Work (Yale University Press, 2010)(with Richard B. Stewart and Katrina M. Wyman);
Saving Our Environment from Washington: How Congress Grabs Power, Shirks Responsibility, and Shortchanges the People (Yale University Press, 2005);
Democracy by Decree: What Happens When Courts Run Government (Yale University Press, 2003) (with Ross Sandler); and
Power Without Responsibility: How Congress Abuses the People Through Delegation (Yale University Press, 1993).
In addition to writing scholarly articles, he has frequently contributed opinion pieces to the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, the New York Times, and other publications.
He has an undergraduate degree from Yale College, a graduate degree in economics from Oxford University, which he attended as a Marshall Scholar, and a law degree from Yale Law School.
Showcase Panel II: Why, or Why Not, Be an Originalist?
Amy Coney Barrett, Michael C. Dorf, Thomas M. Hardiman, Richard H. Pildes, Saikrishna Prakash
On November 15, 2019, the Federalist Society hosted the second showcase panel of the 2019...
Showcase Panel II: Why, or Why Not, Be an Originalist?
Amy Coney Barrett, Michael C. Dorf, Thomas M. Hardiman, Richard H. Pildes, Saikrishna Prakash
On November 15, 2019, the Federalist Society hosted the second showcase panel of the 2019...
Showcase Panel II: Why, or Why Not, Be an Originalist?
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Justin Edward Butterfield, Eric Rassbach, Kelly Shackelford, Nelson Tebbe, Don R. Willett
On September 7-8, 2018, the Federalist Society's Fort Worth Lawyers Chapter hosted the fourth annual...
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The final episode of our six part series highlighting panels and speeches from our March Conference...
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Click here to watch our conference videos on YouTube. Click on the titles below for direct...
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In both the House and the Senate, it has become extremely difficult to build consensus,...
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