Former President & CEO, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Eugene B. Meyer, former President and CEO of the Federalist Society, has served as Executive Director, CEO, and/or President of the organization for more than 40 years. He is responsible for shepherding the organization from a small group of law students to a community of 90,000 lawyers, law students, academics, judges, and others interested in the rule of law. The Society now includes a Student Chapter at nearly every ABA-accredited law school in the country and Lawyers Chapters in 220 major cities across the nation. Gene earned his B.A. in history at Yale in 1975 and his M.A. in political science from the London School of Economics in 1976. Gene currently serves on the boards of the U.S. Chess Center, the Holman Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the advisory board of the Adam Smith Society. He holds the title of International Chess Master.
Nonresident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Ajit Pai, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), is a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on issues pertaining to technology and innovation, telecommunications regulatory policy, and market-based incentives for investment in broadband deployment. Concurrently, he is a partner at Searchlight Capital Partners, a global investment firm.
Mr. Pai’s distinguished career at the FCC includes two leadership roles following presidential appointments. He was appointed commissioner by President Barack Obama in 2012, designated chairman by President Donald Trump in 2017, and twice confirmed by the US Senate. While at the helm of the FCC, Mr. Pai had a transformative impact on the future of US technology and communications policy, implementing major initiatives to help close the digital divide; advance US leadership in 5G and other wireless technologies; promote innovation; protect consumers, public safety, and national security; and make the agency itself more open, transparent, and data-driven.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Pai served in various public-sector positions in the FCC’s Office of General Counsel, the US Department of Justice, the US Senate Judiciary Committee, and the US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. He also worked as a partner at Jenner & Block and associate general counsel at Verizon Communications.
Mr. Pai graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he received a bachelor’s degree, and from the University of Chicago Law School, where he received a law degree and was an editor on the University of Chicago Law Review.
William K. Townsend Professor of Law, Yale Law School
Ian Ayres is a lawyer and an economist. He is the William K. Townsend Professor at Yale Law School, the Anne Urowsky Professorial Fellow in Law, and a Professor at Yale’s School of Management.
Professor Ayres has been a columnist for Forbes magazine, a commentator on public radio’s Marketplace, and a contributor to the New York Times’ Freakonomics Blog. His research has been featured on PrimeTime Live, Oprah and Good Morning America and in Time and Vogue magazines. Ian is a co-founder of stickK.com, a web site that helps you stick to your goals. In an Illinois post-conviction proceeding, Ayres helped convince a court to vacate his client’s death sentence.
In 2020, Harvard University Press will publish Ian’s twelfth book, “Disarmed By Choice: Liberating Individuals to Reduce Gun Violence” (with Fredrick Vars). Ian has also published over 100 articles on a wide range of topics including several empirical studies.
In 2006, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book with Greg Klass, Insincere Promises: The Law of Misrepresented Intent, won the 2006 Scribes book award “for the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year.” Professor Ayres has been ranked as one of the most prolific and most-cited law professors of his generation. (See James Lindgren & Daniel Seltzer, The Most Prolific Law Professors and Faculties, 71 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 781 (1996); Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Legal Scholars, 29 J. LEGAL STUD. 409 (2000).) The Chronicle of Higher Education referred to Ayres as “a law-and-economics guru.”
He was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, received his B.A. (majoring in Russian studies and economics) and J.D. from Yale and his Ph.D in economics from M.I.T. Professor Ayres and clerked for the Honorable James K. Logan of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. He has previously taught at Harvard, Illinois, Northwestern, Stanford and Virginia law schools and has been a research fellow of the American Bar Foundation and Columbia. From 2002 to 2009, he was the editor of the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization.
His two most cited law review articles are Fair Driving: Gender and Race Discrimination in Retail Car Negotiations, 104 Harvard Law Review 817 (1991) and Filling Gaps in Incomplete Contracts: An Economic Theory of Default Rules, 99 Yale Law Journal 87 (1989) (with Robert Gertner).
Excerpts of his publications as well as audio and video clips can be found on the internet at: www.ianayres.com.
Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Health Law & Policy, Georgetown University
David A. Hyman, M.D., J.D., is the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Health Law & Policy at Georgetown University. Professor Hyman focuses his research and writing on the regulation and financing of health care. He teaches or has taught health care regulation, civil procedure, insurance, medical malpractice, law & economics, professional responsibility, and tax policy.
While serving as Special Counsel to the Federal Trade Commission, Professor Hyman was principal author and project leader for the first joint report ever issued by the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice, “Improving Health Care: A Dose of Competition” (2004). He is also the author of Medicare Meets Mephistopheles, which was selected by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce/National Chamber Foundation as one of the top ten books of 2007, and the co-author (with Charles Silver) of Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care (2018). He has published widely in student-edited law reviews and peer-reviewed medical, health policy, law, and economics journals.
Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation Professor of Law; Armistead M. Dobie Professor of Law; and Director, John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics, University of Virginia School of Law
Law and economics expert Jason Scott Johnston joined the Virginia Law faculty in 2010 and serves as the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation Professor of Law. He formerly served as the Nicholas E. Chimicles Research Professor in Business Law and Regulation at Virginia Law, and the Robert G. Fuller, Jr. Professor of Law and director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Johnston’s scholarship has examined subjects ranging from natural resources law to torts and contracts. He has published dozens of articles in law journals, such as the Yale Law Journal, and in peer-reviewed economics journals, such as the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization. He is currently working on a book that critically analyzes the foundations of global warming law and policy, a series of articles on the economics of regulatory science and another series of articles on various aspects of the law and economics of consumer protection. He has served on the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association, on the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Science grant review panel, and on the Board of the Searle Civil Justice Institute. He won Penn Law’s Robert A. Gorman Award for Teaching Excellence in 2003.
After earning his A.B. from Dartmouth College and both his J.D. and Ph.D. (economics) from the University of Michigan, Johnston clerked for Judge Gilbert S. Merritt on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He then taught at Vermont Law School and Vanderbilt Law School before joining Penn’s faculty. He has been a visiting professor or held fellowship appointments at Yale Law School, the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, the American Academy in Berlin and the Property and Environment Research Center.
Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School
Anup Malani is the Lee and Brena Freeman Professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a Professor at the Pritzker School of Medicine. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Boston, a Senior Fellow at the Schaeffer Center at the University of Southern California, and an editor at the Journal of Law and Economics.
Malani is the co-founder and Faculty Director of the International Innovation Corps, a social service program that sends teams of University of Chicago and foreign university graduates to work on innovative development projects with government officials in India and Brazil.
Malani has a PhD in economics and a JD, both from University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Stephen Williams on the US Court of Appeals for District of Columbia and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the US Supreme Court.
Malani conducts research in law and economics, health economics and development economics. His law and economics research focuses on judicial behavior, measuring the welfare impact of laws, and, recently legal implications of blockchain. His health economics research focuses on the value of medical innovation and health care insurance, control of infectious diseases, placebo effects, and conflicts of interest in medicine. Malani’s development economics work focuses on health care supply and financing in India and the growth of and quality of life in urban slums. He is the principal investigator on the Indian Health Insurance Experiment, an 11,000 household randomized controlled trial of health insurance in Karnataka, India, and on a large-scale impact evaluation of Mission Kakatiya, a major effort to expand rainfall capture as means of irrigation in Telangana, India. Malani’s research has been published in leading journals in a number of different fields, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Econometrics, the Harvard Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Archives of Internal Medicine, and Theoretical Population Biology. Malani teaches courses in commercial law, health law, the canons of American legal thought, law and economics and law and development in the Law School and a PhD course in law and economics in the Economics Department.
Former President & CEO, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Eugene B. Meyer, former President and CEO of the Federalist Society, has served as Executive Director, CEO, and/or President of the organization for more than 40 years. He is responsible for shepherding the organization from a small group of law students to a community of 90,000 lawyers, law students, academics, judges, and others interested in the rule of law. The Society now includes a Student Chapter at nearly every ABA-accredited law school in the country and Lawyers Chapters in 220 major cities across the nation. Gene earned his B.A. in history at Yale in 1975 and his M.A. in political science from the London School of Economics in 1976. Gene currently serves on the boards of the U.S. Chess Center, the Holman Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the advisory board of the Adam Smith Society. He holds the title of International Chess Master.
Professor of Law and Journalism, University of Florida
Professor Jane Bambauer is the Brechner Eminent Scholar at the Levin College of Law and at the College of Journalism and Communications. She teaches Torts, First Amendment, Media Law, Criminal Procedure, and Privacy Law.
Professor Bambauer’s research assesses the social costs and benefits of Big Data, AI, and predictive algorithms. Her work analyzes how the regulation of these new information technologies will affect free speech, privacy, law enforcement, health and safety, competitive markets, and government accountability. Professor Bambauer’s research has been featured in over 20 scholarly publications, including the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. Her work has also been featured in media outlets, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, Fox News, and Lawfare, where she is a contributing editor.
Professor Bambauer currently serves as the Chair of the National AI Advisory Committee Subcommittee on Law Enforcement, and she has previously served as the deputy director of the Center for Quantum Networks, a multi-institutional engineering research center funded by the National Science Foundation. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School.
Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA School of Law
Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), as well as the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA School of Law. He recently retired from teaching at UCLA, after 30 years there, and is now focusing on research.
Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (8th ed. 2023), and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed. 2016), as well as over 100 academic law journal articles, mostly on First Amendment law. He is a member of The American Law Institute; the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Free Speech Law; and the creator and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a leading legal blog founded in 2002 (hosted at the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017 and now at Reason Magazine).
Stevenson Bernard Professor, George Washington University Law School
The Honorable F. Scott Kieff is the Stevenson Bernard Professor at George Washington University Law School and a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
He served as Commissioner of the U.S. International Trade Commission from 2013-2017. He also served during the Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations in the part-time leadership of the national security defense-intelligence community.
He was previously a professor of law and medicine at Washington University in Saint Louis and a Senior Fellow at Hoover. A former law clerk to U.S. Circuit Judge Giles S. Rich, he is a graduate of Penn Law School and MIT, where he studied molecular biology and microeconomics. He was elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2012 and the Academia Europaea in 2024.
His private sector work through Kieff Strategies LLC (www.kieffstrategies.com) provides neutral services including mediation and compliance, and expert services including crisis management, advising, and testimony.
Founder, Libertas-West Project
Karen Lugo is a constitutional law consultant and national security analyst. She was Director of the Center for Tenth Amendment at Texas Public Policy Foundation from 2013 to 2015. When living in California, she was Co-Director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence Center. From 2005 – 2012, she was a clinical visiting and adjunct professor at Chapman University School of Law where she co-taught the advanced Constitutional Law Clinic. Karen has co-authored and written circuit-level and Supreme Court amicus briefs on such issues as FISA Surveillance, Healthcare Reform, Arizona’s Border Security, Gay Marriage, The Ten Commandments, Eminent Domain, Christian Clubs on University Campuses, and Material Support for Terrorists.
Karen is the founder of the Libertas-West Project, a center for study Islamic integration and radicalization issues. In this capacity, she consulted with the Center for Security Policy to write a book on local over-watch of mosque construction and community engagement called: Mosques in America: A Guide to Accountable Permit Hearings and Continuing Citizen Oversight.
Karen writes and speaks for European and American groups on the importance of basing assimilation efforts on principles of Western exceptionalism. She presented a policy brief to the French Conseil d’Etat analyzing the legal implications of banning the burqa. Ms. Lugo has written one of the most comprehensive overviews of sharia law in American courts, American Family Law and Sharia-Compliant Marriages, for the Federalist Society law journal, Engage. She has written several white papers on the American Law for American Courts legislation and sharia tribunals in America.
Ms. Lugo was an appointee to the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She also taught a Human Rights law course on the contrast between French and English Enlightenment theories in Strasbourg, France.
Until moving from California, Ms. Lugo was a member of the David Horowitz Freedom Center Board of Directors. She was also a regular guest on the Orange County PBS local issues debate program, Inside OC, and she is a contributor to Pajamas Media, National Review Online, City Journal, American Spectator, American Greatness, Townhall.com, American Thinker, Daily Caller, and Family Security Matters. She has been interviewed by dozens of radio hosts and has spoken for civic groups on constitutional and cultural concerns.
Attorney, Berman Law Group
A resident of Los Angeles, Matthew was born and raised outside of Boston. Growing up in a family of lawyers, he swore he would never be one. After receiving his bachelor's degree and graduating with distinction in his major from Trinity College (Hartford, CT), he was first an entrepreneur in Boston before moving to Los Angeles, where he became a management and marketing executive. He has produced TV commercials and digital media; built domestic and international sales channels for publishing and entertainment products; and developed e-commerce strategies for a variety of consumer products and services. One day he found himself in the middle of an LGBT focused hate crime, and in the process of helping the victim seek justice, discovered a passion for the law and advocacy – and realized you should never say “never.”
A series of subsequent events brought him to law school in South Florida, where he graduated number one in his class and summa cum laude from the Shepard Broad College of Law at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale in 2009. Along the way he was editor in chief of the Nova Law Review and received the Student Bar Association’s Award for Academic Excellence, an honor chosen by his fellow students.
Since being admitted to the Florida Bar his career has focused on mass torts, class actions, catastrophic injury, and products liability as a plaintiff’s attorney. Notably, Matthew was a key part of helping to shape and draft the litigation that became In re: Checking Account Overdraft Litigation, which resulted in over $1.3 billion in settlements from dozens of U.S. banks that charged customers unjustified overdraft fees. He was also a key part of shaping and drafting the Florida litigation that became In re: Chinese Manufactured Drywall Product Liability Litigation, which resulted in a $1 billion settlement for thousands of homeowners who unwittingly had defective drywall installed in their homes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the mid-2000’s building boom. In 2014, he was appointed co-class counsel in the Red Bull false advertising class action in the Southern District of New York and led the oral argument for the approval of an innovative settlement that provided an option for reimbursement or 4-packs of Red Bull shipped directly to class members.
In 2018 Matthew moved back to Los Angeles, became a member of the California Bar, and subsequently joined Berman Law Group to oversee their complex litigation and west coast operations.
Associate, Wiley Rein LLP
Tatiana Sainati's practice covers complex commercial litigation, arbitration, and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). She represents corporate clients involved in commercial and international litigations and arbitrations, including government contracts, healthcare, intellectual property, personal injury and other contract and tort disputes positioned in domestic and international courts and tribunals.
Prior to joining Wiley, Tatiana served as a Legal Adviser to Judge Rosemary Barkett on the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal in the Hague, advising on complex, politically sensitive state-to-state cases, and as a law clerk to the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
David Boies Professor of Law, Yale Law School
Director, Global Engagement; Vincent de Paul Professor of Law, DePaul University College of Law
Before joining DePaul, Dr. Alberto R. Coll served for five years as dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies, the U.S. Navy’s foremost strategic research center. A cum laude graduate from Princeton University in history, he earned his JD and PhD in government and foreign affairs from the University of Virginia. In 1982, Professor Coll joined the faculty at Georgetown University, and in 1986 was appointed secretary of the Navy Senior Research Fellow at the Naval War College. In 1989, he became the youngest holder of the Charles H. Stockton Chair of International Law, the college’s oldest chair. From 1990 to 1993, Professor Coll was principal deputy assistant secretary of defense, serving in the Pentagon office that oversaw the Defense Department’s policy, strategy and $3 billion budget for special operations forces and “low-intensity” conflict, including counterterrorism. For his work, he received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service. Professor Coll is the author of The Wisdom of Statecraft and editor of several other books on international relations and law. He is the author of prize-winning articles in the American Journal of International Law and the Naval War College Review, as well as articles in Foreign Policy, Washington Quarterly, Harvard Journal of International Law, the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, and the UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs. In 2004, Professor Coll received the Antonio Jose Irisarri Medal for his contribution to strengthening the rule of law and civilian control over the military in Guatemala. He has served as consultant to the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, the Rand Corp., the United States Information Agency, and numerous defense and intelligence organizations. He is a frequent commentator on American foreign policy, U.S. relations with Cuba and Latin America, and international legal and political issues. Over the past 28 years he has lectured at more than 120 universities, think tanks, government agencies, and public forums in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia and South Africa. Professor Coll is a member of the Virginia Bar, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Instituto de Estudios Juridicos y Politicos at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. At DePaul, he teaches courses on international law, international human rights, U.S. foreign relations, terrorism, international trade and Latin America.
George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
John O. McGinnis is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He also has an MA degree from Balliol College, Oxford, in philosophy and theology. Professor McGinnis clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. From 1987 to 1991, he was deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. He is the author of Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Government Through Technology (Princeton 2013) and Originalism and the Good Constitution (Harvard 2013) (with M. Rappaport). He is a past winner of the Paul Bator award given by the Federalist Society to an outstanding academic under 40. He has been listed by the United States on the roster of panelists who may be called upon to decide World Trade Organization Disputes.
Professor of Law, University of San Diego School of Law
Maimon Schwarzschild is Professor of Law at the University of San Diego, where he has taught
since 1982. He has published extensively on constitutional law, jurisprudence, law and religion,
and civil rights. He is an English barrister and an American lawyer: he was an attorney in the
Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice from 1976 to 1981 and practised as a
barrister in London in the 1980s. He was a visiting professor at the Sorbonne for several years,
and has been a visiting professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is a Director of the
Institute of Law and Religion at the University of San Diego and a member of the editorial board
of Law and Philosophy. With Gail Heriot he recently co-edited a volume entitled “A Dubious
Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education”, published by Encounter Books.
President, Harned Strategies LLC
Karen Harned is President at Harned Strategies LLC. Previously, she served as Executive Director of the National Federation of Independent Business Small Business Legal Center, a post she held from 2002-2022. Prior to joining the Legal Center, Ms. Harned was an attorney at a Washington, D.C. law firm specializing in food and drug law, where she represented several small and large businesses and their respective trade associations before Congress and federal agencies. She also served as Assistant Press Secretary to U.S. Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma from August of 1989 to March of 1993. Ms. Harned received her B.A. from the University of Oklahoma in 1989 and her J.D. from The George Washington University National Law Center in 1995. She is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia.
As Executive Director of the NFIB Small Business Legal Center, Ms. Harned commented regularly on small business cases before federal and state courts, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court. She has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business, NBC Nightly News, CNN, CNBC and MSNBC, as well as National Public Radio, CBS Radio, and radio outlets across the country. Her opinion editorials and articles regarding healthcare, lawsuit abuse, regulation, and other issues important to small business have been published in newspapers and other publications nationwide.
Ms. Harned has testified before Congress on the small business impact of regulation and the civil justice system. Additionally, she has conducted numerous webinars and legal compliance seminars for small business owners across the country on issues relating to employment law, including unionization and immigration.
Address by Ajit Pai
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