Chairman, Center for Equal Opportunity
Linda Chavez is Chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity. She has published opinions and columns in newspapers across the country and appears regularly on cable news. Chavez is the author of the three books: Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation, An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal, and Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics. She has been honored by the Library of Congress as a "Living Legend" and as nominee for Secretary of Labor by President George W. Bush.
Chavez has held many appointed positions and has served on numerous corporate and nonprofit boards. Among her appointed positions has been Chairman, National Commission on Migrant Education (1988-1992); White House Director of Public Liaison (1985); Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1983-1985); and member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (1984-1986). Chavez was also the Republican nominee for U.S. Senator from Maryland in 1986 and was elected by the United Nations' Human Rights Commission to serve a four-year term as U.S. Expert to the U.N. Sub-commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities.
Chavez earned her BA from the University of Colorado.
Professor of History, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center
KC Johnson is professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where he has taught since 1999. He has written 13 books on topics in U.S. political history, U.S. foreign policy, and legal and policy debates surrounding campus due process and civil liberties. His Duke lacrosse case blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, was named ABA Journal’s Best Ethics Blog in 2007; and he continues to blog on higher-ed matters at the blog Minding the Campus.
Freelance Journalist and Author
Stuart Taylor, Jr. is a Washington writer focusing on legal and policy issues and a National Journal contributing editor. He occasionally practices law.
Taylor has coauthored three books. All have been acclaimed by commentators across the ideological spectrum. In January 2017, KC Johnson and Taylor authored The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America's Universities. In 2012, Richard Sander and Taylor authored Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It. In 2007, Taylor and Johnson authored Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Fraud. Sander and Taylor have also filed amicus briefs in Supreme Court cases involving admissions preferences.
Since 1980, Taylor has done reporting and commentary about issues ranging from the biggest Supreme Court cases to race, voting rights, mindlessly excessive criminal penalties, guilt-presuming campus rape processes, journalistic bias, the death penalty, war powers, gerrymandering, guns, polarization, civil liberties, national security, torture, campaign finance, education, impeachment, and other issues. He has often been called one of the nation's best legal journalists and is known for challenging both liberal and conservative conventional wisdom.
Taylor was a reporter for The New York Times from 1980-1988, covering legal affairs and then the Supreme Court. He wrote commentaries and long features for The American Lawyer, Legal Times and their affiliates from 1989-1997, and for National Journal and Newsweek from 1998 through 2010. He has written (less often) on a freelance basis for numerous publications since 2010. He has written op-eds for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The New York Daily News and longer commentaries for RealClearPolitics, The Atlantic, The New Republic, the (late) Weekly Standard, National Review, Slate, The Daily Beast, Harper’s, Reader’s Digest, Time and other magazines. He has been interviewed on all major television and radio networks. He taught “Law and the News Media” at Stanford Law School in 2011 and 2012 and practices law on occasion.
Taylor graduated from Princeton University in 1970 with an A.B. in History. After working as a reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun and Sun from 1971-1974, he moved to Harvard Law School, was a Harvard Law Review note editor, and graduated in 1977 at the top of his class, with high honors. He also won a Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship and traveled around the world in 1977-1978 while studying freedom of the press in the United Kingdom and Kenya.
Taylor practiced law with Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, in Washington, D.C., from 1977-1980 before returning to journalism in 1980 by joining the Washington Bureau of The New York Times.
Taylor's journalism honors include the 2009 Northern California Innocence Project Media Award for his work on the Duke lacrosse rape fraud; a 2002 National Headliner Award for best special magazine column on one subject; and a share of The American Lawyer’s National Magazine Award for a March 1990 special issue on the drug war. He was a National Magazine Award finalist in 1993 and 1997 and was nominated by The New York Times for a Pulitzer Prize in 1988.
Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Rachel N. Morrison is an attorney and Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she directs EPPC’s Administrative State Accountability Project. Her legal and policy work focuses on religious liberty, health care rights of conscience, the right to life, nondiscrimination, and civil rights.
Before joining EPPC, Ms. Morrison served as an Attorney Advisor and Special Assistant to General Counsel Sharon Fast Gustafson at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), where she focused on religious discrimination issues and was a member of the General Counsel’s Religious Discrimination Work Group. Before that, she served as Litigation Counsel for Americans United for Life and as a Constitutional Law Fellow at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, defending the right to life and religious freedom for all. She also clerked on the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
Ms. Morrison’s legal analysis has been published in the Seton Hall Law Review, the Pepperdine Law Review, and the Ave Maria Law Review, as well as various other print media outlets.
Ms. Morrison earned her J.D., magna cum laude, from the Pepperdine University School of Law, where she was elected to the Order of the Coif and served as an editor for the Pepperdine Law Review and the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. She received her B.A. in Mathematics and Speech Communication, summa cum laude, from Whitworth University (Spokane, WA). She is a member of the District of Columbia and the Washington State bars.
Ms. Morrison lives with her husband and daughter in Virginia.
Professor of History, Western Connecticut State University
Kevin R. C. Gutzman is the New York Times best-selling author of five books, including the new Thomas Jefferson—Revolutionary: A Radical’s Struggle to Remake America, a History Book Club Selection. Gutzman is Professor and former Chairman in the Department of History at Western Connecticut State University and a faculty member at LibertyClassroom.com . He holds a bachelor's degree (With Honors and With Special Honors in History), a master of public affairs degree, and a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin, as well as an MA and a PhD in American history from the University of Virginia.
Dr. Gutzman's first book was the New York Times best-seller The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution, which was a Main Selection of the Conservative Book Club. It is the only Jeffersonian account of American constitutional history. His second book, Virginia’s American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776-1840, explores the issue what the Revolutionaries made of the Revolution in Thomas Jefferson’s home state. After that, he co-authored Who Killed the Constitution? The Federal Government vs. American Liberty from World War I to Barack Obama with New York Times best-selling author Thomas E. Woods, Jr. His fourth book, James Madison and the Making of America, a Main Selection of the History Book Club, received positive reviews from The Wall Street Journal, The Journal of Southern History, The Washington Times, and numerous other publications. His latest book, Thomas Jefferson—Revolutionary: A Radical’s Struggle to Remake America, published on January 31, 2017, was a Selection of the History Book Club.
Gutzman's essay “Lincoln as Jeffersonian: The Colonization Chimera” appeared in Lincoln Emancipated: The President and the Politics of Race, and his “James Madison and Ratification: A Triumph Over Adversity” appeared in A Companion to James Madison and James Monroe. His scholarly articles have appeared in The Journal of Southern History, The Journal of the Early Republic, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, The Review of Politics, and The Journal of the Historical Society, among other publications. He has written a hundred book reviews for outlets scholarly and popular, and he has contributed three dozen essays to historical encyclopedias. Gutzman has written for numerous popular magazines and newspapers, including Canada’s National Post, the San Antonio Express-News, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch, among others.
Kevin R. C. Gutzman has appeared on hundreds of radio programs, such as NPR’s “Backstory With the American History Guys” and many of the most prominent commercial programs, terrestrial and satellite, as well as on national television programs including C-SPAN 2's “BookTV,” CNN's “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” Fox News's “The Glenn Beck Program” (both with Beck and with Judge Andrew Napolitano), and NewsMax TV, besides on the BBC and several local television broadcasts. He has been interviewed by reporters from major outlets such as the AP, The Washington Times, The Philadelphia Enquirer, The Washington Post, The Hartford Business Journal, The Houston Chronicle online, Investor's Business Daily, Money Magazine, Connecticut Magazine, and The New York Times, among others.
Gutzman was a featured expert in the documentary movies “John Marshall: Citizen, Statesman, Jurist” and “Nullification: The Rightful Remedy.”
Professor of Law, American University Washington College of Law
Robert L. Tsai is Professor of Law at American University and a prize-winning essayist in constitutional law and history. Though he was born in Taiwan, he has always considered America his home. In fact, one of the proudest moments of his life was the day he was sworn in as a U.S. citizen. Tsai spent his formative years in the Pacific Northwest, working in his parents’ cafe in charming Port Townsend, Washington, and dreaming about the world beyond his small town. He left the area for college and earned a B.A. magna cum laude in History and Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received the Carey McWilliams Prize for his honors thesis on the political significance of early Christian teachings.
He then headed to Yale Law School, where he helped edit the Yale Law Journal, served on the Board of the Morris Tyler Moot Court, and was awarded Honorable Mention for Oral Advocacy as a Harlan Fiske Stone Prize Finalist. After graduating from law school, he learned the intricacies of America’s justice system by working as a law clerk for federal judges in New York and Boston: U.S. District Judge Denny Chin (later appointed by President Obama to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit) and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Hugh H. Bownes (a Carter appointee who passed away in 2003).
After two years of judicial tutelage, Tsai relocated to the South to become a civil rights lawyer in Georgia. Those exhilarating years working with students, clergy, protesters, prisoners, and the homeless left a lasting impression. His first teaching gig was at the University of Oregon Law School, where he earned tenure, along with awards for teaching and research from the law school and the university.
Tsai is the author of three books, Practical Equality: Forging Justice in a Divided Nation (W.W. Norton Feb. 19, 2019), America’s Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community (Harvard 2014), and Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture (Yale 2008). Practical Equality, which will be published by W.W. Norton in February 2019, is a call to arms to do the hard work of equality, brimming with historical lessons for how to make social progress in tough times. America’s Forgotten Constitutions, which explores how citizens have written a wide range of alternative constitutions to resist mainstream constitutional law, has been called “captivating,” “magisterial,” and “a remarkable feat of excavation.” Eloquence and Reason, his book on the development of America’s free speech values, has been described as “fresh,” “sophisticated,” and “compelling.”
Tsai’s research spans constitutional law, legal history, democratic theory, American political culture, social movements, criminal procedure, presidential leadership, and radical constitutionalism. He has written about the legal obstacles placed in the way of black civil rights activists, President Franklin Roosevelt and freedom of religion, the philosophy of John Brown and his followers, modern white supremacy and the militia movement, the Republic of New Afrika’s ideas about the Constitution, the historical treatment of migrants, early socialism in America, the rise and fall of the “one world” movement, President Obama’s reversal on same-sex marriage, and ideas of equality in the poetry and fiction of Langston Hughes.
His work has been published by the Journal of American History, Contemporary Political Theory, Constitutional Commentary, Perspectives on Politics, Yale Law Journal, Michigan Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Washington University Law Review, and Boston University Law Review. His popular essays have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Politico, Boston Review, and Slate. He has been interviewed by the New York Times, NPR, and CNN. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C.
Communications Director, Tenth Amendment Center
Michael Maharrey serves as the national communications director for the Tenth Amendment Center and the managing editor of the SchiffGold blog. He hosts his own podcast, Thoughts from Maharrey Head, as well as the Friday Gold Wrap podcast and the It’s Your Dime interview series for SchiffGold.
Michael is the author of three books. Our Last Hope – Rediscovering the Lost Path to Liberty, makes the historical, philosophical and moral case for nullification. Smashing Myths: Understanding Madison’s Notes on Nullification digs deep into James Madison’s views on nullification, focusing on his writing’s later in life. Finally, Michael joined Tenth Amendment Center executive director Michael Boldin in penning Nullification Objections: Dismantling the Opposition, a book that takes apart the common objections to nullification one at a time. He’s also penned several e-books, including The Power of No: The Historical and Constitutional Basis for State Nullification to Limit Federal Powe and Its Practical Application, The Constitution and the Report of 1800, and The Jefferson Letters, Vol. 1: Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions.
Michael earned a degree in Mass Communications and Media Studies from the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. As a non-traditional student, he won several academic awards and was a member of the school’s ethics bowl team that placed eighth in the nation. Mike played for the USF ice hockey team at the ripe old age of 40, earning American Collegiate Hockey Association Academic All-American honors. He also holds a B.S. degree in Accounting from the University of Kentucky. Along with his formal schooling, he’s had the opportunity to associate with and study under some of the top academics in constitutional history and our founding principles.
Michael speaks at events across the United States, and frequently appears as a guest on local, national and international radio shows advancing constitutional fidelity and liberty through decentralization.
As a working journalist, Michael has written and reported for several newspapers, including the St. Petersburg Times and the Kentucky Gazette, covering local and state politics, and sports. Mike won a pair of 2009 Kentucky Press Association awards while serving as the sports editor for the Woodford Sun in 2009. He also worked for a local television news outlet writing web content for the station’s award-winning website.
Michael lives in Lexington, Ky., with his beautiful wife Cynthia, and has two daughters and a son. Although a native Kentuckian, he spent much of his adult life in Florida and considers the Sunshine state his adopted home. In his spare time, he still plays ice hockey and is equally passionate about defending the Constitution and his crease.
Professorial Lecturer in Law, George Washington University Law School
Theodore C. (Ted) Hirt was an attorney in the Department of Justice's Civil Division from August 1979 to March 2016. He was in its Federal Programs Branch from 1979 to 2008 (trial attorney, senior trial counsel, assistant director), and then in its Office of Immigration Litigation from 2008 to 2016 (trial attorney and senior litigation counsel). Among his responsibilities (September 2001 to March 2016) was being an advisor to the Assistant Attorneys General for the Civil Division, who serve ex officio on the Civil Rules Advisory Committee. Mr. Hirt’s areas of specialization include First Amendment issues, internet and telecommunications law, and electronic discovery. From 1976 to 1979, he was an associate at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Kampelman. From 1975 to 1976 he was an attorney in the Prehearing Division of the Michigan Court of Appeals.
Deep Dive Episode 91 – The Expected New Title IX Rules
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