Clinical Professor, University of Texas at Austin School of Law
Steven T. Collis researches and teaches on religion and law and other First Amendment topics. He is the founding faculty director of the Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center and of Texas's Law & Religion Clinic. On the topic of religious freedom law, he is a sought-after speaker to academic and lay audiences across the United States, including foreign diplomats from countries in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and South America on behalf of the United States State Department. He has been interviewed by and quoted in various news and media outlets, including The Deseret News, Bloomberg, The Washington Times, Law360, The Salt Lake Tribune, PBS, The Denver Business Journal, Law Week Colorado, CBN News, and numerous podcasts and television shows. His scholarly work has appeared in The Michigan Law Review, The Nebraska Law Review, The University of Denver Law Review Online, and in his book Deep Conviction, which brings to life the history of free exercise law in the United States for lay audiences.
Prior to joining Texas, Steven was the Olin-Darling Research Fellow in the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School.
Earlier in his career, he was an equity partner at Holland & Hart LLP, where he chaired the firm’s nationwide religious institutions and First Amendment practice group and was a member of the firm's complex civil litigation and employment practice groups. He also taught religious liberty law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and clerked for Chief Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Steven graduated magna cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif and served as an editor on The Michigan Law Review and The Michigan Journal of Race and Law. He also holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he served as the associate editor of the literary journal Blackbird. He completed his undergraduate studies, with university honors, at Brigham Young University.
Partner, Gladstone Michel Weisberg Willner & Sloane
Arthur Willner is a partner at Gladstone Michel Weisberg Willner & Sloane in Los Angeles. His practice involves the representation of corporate clients in wrongful death, catastrophic injury and business litigation as well as college faculty and students in First Amendment and due process cases.
Senior Attorney, Pacific Legal Foundation
Brian Hodges is a Senior Attorney at PLF’s Pacific Northwest office in Bellevue, Washington. Brian focuses his practice on defending of the right of individuals to make reasonable use of their property, free of unnecessary and oppressive regulations.
In 2013, Brian second-chaired Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District before the U.S. Supreme Court, a case that placed constitutional limits on the government’s common practice of demanding that landowners fund unrelated public projects in exchange for a permit approval. And in the 2008 case, Citizens’ Alliance for Property Rights v. Sims, Brian successfully challenged a Seattle-area ordinance that required all rural property owners to dedicate at least half their land as conservation areas as a mandatory condition of any new development without any showing that rural development would impact the environment.
Brian graduated from Seattle University of Law in 2001 with honors. After which, he served as a judicial clerk at the Washington State Court of Appeals, then entered private practice where he focused on appellate advocacy for several years before joining PLF in 2006.
Brian came to the liberty movement by an uncommon route: the arts. Brian played guitar and keyboards in several Seattle-area bands before eventually studying music composition and literature at the University of Washington—earning two Bachelor’s Degrees and a Master of Arts. Through that experience, he came to firmly believe that the goal of art—indeed, the goal of any creative ambition—is to maximize individual freedom and expression, tempered by personal responsibility and ownership, rather than outside oversight or arbitrary restriction. Carrying that philosophy into law school naturally led him to fight for individual rights.
Legal Fellow, Center for the Separation of Powers, Pacific Legal Foundation
Alison Somin joined Pacific Legal Foundation in May 2020 as a legal fellow in the Center for the Separation of Powers and part of the equality before the law practice group.
Before joining the Pacific Legal Foundation team, Alison was a special assistant and counsel for over a decade to Gail Heriot, a member of the bipartisan United States Commission on Civil Rights. She also has deep roots in the liberty movement. Alison was a Koch Associate at the National Federation for Independent Business Legal Foundation and, during law school, completed summer clerkships at the Institute for Justice and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. She holds a J.D. from Emory University School of Law and an A.B. in history from Dartmouth College.
Her work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Daily Journal, Texas Journal of Law and Politics, and The Federalist Society’s Engage magazine and blog.
She lives in northern Virginia with her husband Ilya; two children; and golden retriever Willow. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, baking and cooking, children’s art projects, and training and exercising Willow.
Retired
Tom Gede retired in 2023 as a principal in Morgan Lewis Consulting LLC and of counsel to the firm. He currently consults on a variety of legal and policy matters for both public and private clients. Tom has a national reputation and distinguished background in federal Indian law. Prior to retirement, he represented clients in complex governmental matters in litigation, administrative and regulatory proceedings, including high-profile matters involving state governments. A former senior deputy in the California Attorney General’s office, Tom was amicus coordinator and Supreme Court counsel, and argued cases in the US Supreme Court, the California Supreme Court, and numerous state and federal appellate courts.
Tom also served as executive director of the Conference of Western Attorneys General (CWAG), coordinating activities on key legal and policy issues, such as federal Indian law, energy, environmental, public lands, financial services, and telecommunications, for the attorneys general of 18 western states and territories. In 2016, Tom was elected as a Member of the American Law Institute (ALI), and served as an Adviser on the Restatement of the Law Third - The Law of American Indians. Tom also taught federal Indian law as an adjunct law professor at the University of the Pacific - McGeorge School of Law. He served as an assistant editor for and the author of the Indian gaming chapter in CWAG’s American Indian Law Deskbook (2d & 3d eds.). He has been engaged in Indian gaming and Indian law matters for more than three decades, having focused on the gaming compacts with Indian tribes, as well as complex civil and criminal jurisdiction, land, natural resources, water and law enforcement issues in Indian country. He has testified before Congress on American Indian and Native Alaskan issues. In 2012 he was appointed by Speaker John Boehner to serve on the United States Indian Law and Order Commission, where he examined criminal justice issues in Indian country and Alaska, resulting in the issuance of an important report to the President and Congress.
Louis and Harriet Ancel Professor of Law and Public Policy, Northwestern University School of Law
Martin H. Redish, the Louis and Harriet Ancel Professor of Law and Public Policy at Northwestern University School of Law, teaches and writes on the subjects of federal jurisdiction, civil procedure, freedom of expression and constitutional law. In addition, he is Senior Counsel to the law firm of Sidley Austin LLP.
Professor Redish received his AB with highest honors in political science from the University of Pennsylvania and his JD magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.
Described in a review of his book, The Federal Courts in the Political Order, as "without a doubt the foremost scholar on issues of federal court jurisdiction in this generation," Professor Redish is the author or co-author of more than 80 articles and 15 books. Professor Redish's book entitled, The Logic of Persecution: Free Expression and the McCarthy Era, was published by Stanford University Press in the summer of 2005. His book entitled Wholesale Justice: Constitutional Democracy and the Problem of the Class Action Lawsuit, was published by Stanford University Press in 2009. Professor Redish was recently listed in a study conducted by William S. Hein & Company as the sixteenth most cited legal scholar of all time. He has also been consistently recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information for being among the most highly cited researchers worldwide. As a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School he won the L. Hart Wright Outstanding Teacher Award. He has also won the Robert Childress Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence, the Dean's Teaching Award, the First Year Course Professor Award, and the Student Bar Association Faculty Appreciation Award at Northwestern.
Professor Redish has appeared as an expert witness before numerous congressional committees. In addition, he has made frequent appearances in the national media, including the Today Show, ABC and NBC National News, CNN, Court TV, CSPAN and National Public Radio.
Wendell H. Ford Professor of Law, University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law
Paul E. Salamanca graduated from Dartmouth College in 1983 and Boston College Law School in 1989, where he was a note editor for the Boston College Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif.
Professor Salamanca served as a law clerk to Judge David H. Souter of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and subsequently clerked for Justice Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. He practiced law with the firm of Debevoise & Plimpton in New York from 1991 to 1994 and was a visiting assistant professor of law at Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans before joining the faculty at the University of Kentucky College of Law in June 1995.
Professor Salamanca writes in the areas of separation of powers, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and privacy. He has published articles on these subjects in the University of Cincinnati Law Review, the Missouri Law Review, the Georgia Law Review and the Kentucky Law Journal, among other places.
From 2019 until 2021, Professor Salamanca served as a Senior Counsel and then as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD) of the United States Department of Justice. His duties included supervision of the Natural Resources and Land Acquisition Sections of ENRD.
Stormans v. Wiesman: Paths to Strict Scrutiny in Religious Free Exercise Cases
Steven T. Collis
Note from the Editor: This article is about Stormans v. Wiesman, a case from the 9th...
Topics
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Next week, I will participate in the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention, in Washington, D.C.,...
Ninth Circuit Upholds Professor’s First Amendment Claim in Demers v. Austin
Arthur Willner
Note from the Editor: This article is about the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Demers v. Austin. ...
Conservative & Libertarian Legal Scholarship: Civil Procedure
[Return to Table of Contents] VIII. Civil Procedure The Role of the Federal Judge Charles...
If Corporations Don’t Have Souls, Why Does a Google Search for ‘Corporate Greed’ Yield 417,000 Hits?
BirminghamKoontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District and Its Implications for Takings Law
Brian T. Hodges
Note from the Editor: This article is about the Supreme Court's decision in Koontz v....
A Lady or a Tiger?: Thoughts on Fisher v. University of Texas and the Future of Race Preferences in America
Alison E. Somin
Note from the Editor: This article is about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher...
Supreme Court Round-Up
Birmingham, AlabamaCriminal Jurisdiction of Indian Tribes: Should Non-Indians Be Subject to Tribal Criminal Authority Under VAWA?
Thomas F. Gede
Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 1978 decision in Oliphant v. Suquamish Tribe,1...
Pleading, Discovery, and the Federal Rules: Exploring the Foundations of Modern Procedure
Martin Redish
Note from the Editor: In December 2010, the Federalist Society heard from a number of...