CEO, Asset Forfeiture Law, LLC
As a federal prosecutor, Stefan D. Cassella was one of the federal government’s leading experts on asset forfeiture and money laundering law for over thirty years. He now serves as an expert witness and consultant to law enforcement agencies and the private sector as the CEO of AssetForfeitureLaw, LLC.
As a Deputy Chief of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section and later as the Chief of the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore, Maryland, Mr. Cassella litigated some of the Government’s most significant forfeiture and money laundering cases and drafted many of the federal forfeiture and money laundering statutes.
He is the author of Asset Forfeiture Law in the United States, a one-volume resource designed to lead the practitioner, prosecutor, judge and policy maker through the labyrinth of statutes, rules and cases that govern this dynamic area of the law, and of more than 40 law review articles on money laundering and forfeiture. He has trained state and federal prosecutors and agents and their counterparts in numerous foreign countries, including over 200 lectures at the National Advocacy Center at the University of South Carolina.
Mr. Cassella is also the author and publisher of the Money Laundering and Forfeiture Digest, a monthly compendium of the forfeiture and money laundering cases decided by the federal courts that is circulated to hundreds of state, federal and foreign prosecutors and lawyers, law enforcement agents, academics and policy makers in the U.S. and abroad.
Trial Attorney, Civil Rights Division, United States Department of Justice (incoming)
Adam Griffin is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Law. During law school, he served as a research assistant to Professor Stephen E. Sachs and UNC Law Dean Martin Brinkley. After law school, he spent two years litigating for liberty at the Institute for Justice as an inaugural Law and Liberty Fellow. He served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Richard E. Myers in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, and is now a separation-of-powers attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation.
Senior Attorney, Institute for Justice
Rob Johnson is a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, where he litigates to protect private property, free speech, and other individual rights. Rob is a nationally-recognized expert on civil forfeiture. He previously represented a series of small business owners who had their entire bank accounts seized by the IRS, and he launched an initiative that resulted in the IRS reopening hundreds of closed forfeiture cases and returning millions of dollars. He has also litigated cases challenging the constitutionality of civil forfeiture procedures, and he scored a victory striking down a forfeiture program as a violation of due process.
Beyond civil forfeiture, Rob has litigated cases defending a range of constitutional rights. He was part of teams that successfully challenged occupational licensing requirements for tour guides in Savannah and Charleston. He also developed a class action lawsuit fighting the NYPD’s use of a draconian “no-fault eviction” statute to coerce residents to waive their constitutional rights, which led New York City to reform the challenged law.
Rob’s writing has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Politico, and Reason, among other venues. Rob has testified about occupational licensing before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and has twice testified about civil forfeiture before the House Ways & Means Oversight Subcommittee. He has also testified before state legislatures across the country.
From 2014-2017, Rob served as IJ’s first Elfie Gallun Fellow for Freedom and the Constitution. In that role, Rob wrote and spoke about the vital role the U.S. Constitution plays in protecting our most precious freedoms. He is currently at work on a book about the Fourteenth Amendment.
Rob studied literature and anthropology at Columbia University, and he studied law at Harvard Law School. Upon graduation, he clerked for Chief Judge Alex Kozinski on the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court.
Rob lives in Cleveland with his wife and two daughters—all named after characters in Shakespeare plays—and is an amateur large format photographer.
David B. Smith, PLLC
David B. Smith has over 35 years of white collar criminal experience. He has litigated scores of cases and argued more than one hundred federal criminal appeals as a federal prosecutor and defense attorney, including extensive experience with civil and criminal litigation in the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Smith has been repeatedly named in the list of preeminent lawyers in the field of white collar criminal defense by Best Lawyers in America (2012-2021) and Virginia Super Lawyers (2009-2020), and has received the President’s Commendation for outstanding service from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in 1993, 1994, and 2004. He served for nine years on the Board of the NACDL and has been Chair of its Forfeiture Committee since 1990. He is also a Vice-Chair of its Amicus Committee.
For nearly a decade prior to entering private practice, Mr. Smith was a prosecutor in the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice and at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, where he was involved in complex white collar criminal investigations, trials, and appeals involving defense procurement fraud, congressional bribery, espionage, tax evasion, mail fraud, false claims and other crimes. In 1995-1996, Mr. Smith served as an Associate Independent Counsel in the investigation of Michael Espy, the former secretary of agriculture.
Mr. Smith is regarded as the foremost expert in the country on asset forfeiture law and practice. He is the author of the leading two-volume legal treatise on forfeiture, Prosecution and Defense of Forfeiture Cases (2020), published by Matthew Bender, and co-author of Civil RICO (2020), also published by Matthew Bender. He has testified before congressional committees several times with respect to forfeiture, restitution, and money laundering legislation. Mr. Smith has regularly counseled the Senate and House Judiciary Committees on forfeiture legislation, and was heavily involved in drafting the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000. He has also assisted the federal advisory committees in writing the procedural rules governing criminal and civil forfeiture proceedings. In 2000-2001, Mr. Smith was appointed by Senator Richard Shelby (R. Ala.), the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to serve as a Commissioner with the Judicial Review Commission on Foreign Asset Control.
UC Foundation Assistant Professor, U.T. Chattanooga
E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Chair in Law, University of Richmond School of Law
Professor Kurt Lash teaches and writes about constitutional law. Founder and director of the Richmond Program on the American Constitution, Professor Lash has published widely on the subjects of constitutional law and constitutional history, including The Fourteenth Amendment and the Privileges or Immunities of American Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2014), The Lost History of the Ninth Amendment (Oxford University Press, 2009), and The American First Amendment in the Twenty-first Century: Cases and Materials(with William W. Van Alstyne) (5th ed., Foundation Press, 2014). An elected member of the American Law Institute, Professor Lash’s work has appeared in numerous legal journals including the Stanford Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, andNotre Dame Law Review. He has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University School of Law and is the former director of the University of Illinois College of Law Program in Constitutional Theory, History, and Law.
R. B. Price and Isabelle Wade & Paul C. Lyda Professor Emeritus of Law, University of Missouri School of Law
Carl H. Esbeck is R.B. Price Professor and Isabelle Wade & Paul C. Lyda Professor of Law emeritus at the University of Missouri. After attending Cornell University School of Law where he served as an editor on the Cornell Law Review, he held a judicial clerkship with the Honorable Howard C. Bratton, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in New Mexico.
Professor Esbeck publishes widely in the area of religious liberty and church-state relations. He is recognized as the progenitor of "Charitable Choice," an integral part of the 1996 Federal Welfare Reform Act, later made a part of the faith-based initiative and equal-treatment regulations under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In addition, he has taken the lead in recognizing that the modern Supreme Court has applied the Establishment Clause not as a personal right, but as a structural limit on the government's authority in disputes involving church governance. While on leave from 1999 to 2002, Professor Esbeck directed the Center for Law & Religious Freedom (CLRF) and later served as Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice. While directing the CLRF, Professor Esbeck was a central part of the congressional advocacy behind the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA). While at the Department of Justice one of his duties was to direct a task force to remove barriers to the equal-treatment of faith-based organizations applying for social service grants. He is the author of Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776 - 1833 (U. of MO Press, 2019).
CEO, Asset Forfeiture Law, LLC
As a federal prosecutor, Stefan D. Cassella was one of the federal government’s leading experts on asset forfeiture and money laundering law for over thirty years. He now serves as an expert witness and consultant to law enforcement agencies and the private sector as the CEO of AssetForfeitureLaw, LLC.
As a Deputy Chief of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section and later as the Chief of the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore, Maryland, Mr. Cassella litigated some of the Government’s most significant forfeiture and money laundering cases and drafted many of the federal forfeiture and money laundering statutes.
He is the author of Asset Forfeiture Law in the United States, a one-volume resource designed to lead the practitioner, prosecutor, judge and policy maker through the labyrinth of statutes, rules and cases that govern this dynamic area of the law, and of more than 40 law review articles on money laundering and forfeiture. He has trained state and federal prosecutors and agents and their counterparts in numerous foreign countries, including over 200 lectures at the National Advocacy Center at the University of South Carolina.
Mr. Cassella is also the author and publisher of the Money Laundering and Forfeiture Digest, a monthly compendium of the forfeiture and money laundering cases decided by the federal courts that is circulated to hundreds of state, federal and foreign prosecutors and lawyers, law enforcement agents, academics and policy makers in the U.S. and abroad.
Trial Attorney, Civil Rights Division, United States Department of Justice (incoming)
Adam Griffin is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Law. During law school, he served as a research assistant to Professor Stephen E. Sachs and UNC Law Dean Martin Brinkley. After law school, he spent two years litigating for liberty at the Institute for Justice as an inaugural Law and Liberty Fellow. He served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Richard E. Myers in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, and is now a separation-of-powers attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation.
Senior Attorney, Institute for Justice
Rob Johnson is a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, where he litigates to protect private property, free speech, and other individual rights. Rob is a nationally-recognized expert on civil forfeiture. He previously represented a series of small business owners who had their entire bank accounts seized by the IRS, and he launched an initiative that resulted in the IRS reopening hundreds of closed forfeiture cases and returning millions of dollars. He has also litigated cases challenging the constitutionality of civil forfeiture procedures, and he scored a victory striking down a forfeiture program as a violation of due process.
Beyond civil forfeiture, Rob has litigated cases defending a range of constitutional rights. He was part of teams that successfully challenged occupational licensing requirements for tour guides in Savannah and Charleston. He also developed a class action lawsuit fighting the NYPD’s use of a draconian “no-fault eviction” statute to coerce residents to waive their constitutional rights, which led New York City to reform the challenged law.
Rob’s writing has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Politico, and Reason, among other venues. Rob has testified about occupational licensing before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and has twice testified about civil forfeiture before the House Ways & Means Oversight Subcommittee. He has also testified before state legislatures across the country.
From 2014-2017, Rob served as IJ’s first Elfie Gallun Fellow for Freedom and the Constitution. In that role, Rob wrote and spoke about the vital role the U.S. Constitution plays in protecting our most precious freedoms. He is currently at work on a book about the Fourteenth Amendment.
Rob studied literature and anthropology at Columbia University, and he studied law at Harvard Law School. Upon graduation, he clerked for Chief Judge Alex Kozinski on the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court.
Rob lives in Cleveland with his wife and two daughters—all named after characters in Shakespeare plays—and is an amateur large format photographer.
David B. Smith, PLLC
David B. Smith has over 35 years of white collar criminal experience. He has litigated scores of cases and argued more than one hundred federal criminal appeals as a federal prosecutor and defense attorney, including extensive experience with civil and criminal litigation in the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Smith has been repeatedly named in the list of preeminent lawyers in the field of white collar criminal defense by Best Lawyers in America (2012-2021) and Virginia Super Lawyers (2009-2020), and has received the President’s Commendation for outstanding service from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in 1993, 1994, and 2004. He served for nine years on the Board of the NACDL and has been Chair of its Forfeiture Committee since 1990. He is also a Vice-Chair of its Amicus Committee.
For nearly a decade prior to entering private practice, Mr. Smith was a prosecutor in the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice and at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, where he was involved in complex white collar criminal investigations, trials, and appeals involving defense procurement fraud, congressional bribery, espionage, tax evasion, mail fraud, false claims and other crimes. In 1995-1996, Mr. Smith served as an Associate Independent Counsel in the investigation of Michael Espy, the former secretary of agriculture.
Mr. Smith is regarded as the foremost expert in the country on asset forfeiture law and practice. He is the author of the leading two-volume legal treatise on forfeiture, Prosecution and Defense of Forfeiture Cases (2020), published by Matthew Bender, and co-author of Civil RICO (2020), also published by Matthew Bender. He has testified before congressional committees several times with respect to forfeiture, restitution, and money laundering legislation. Mr. Smith has regularly counseled the Senate and House Judiciary Committees on forfeiture legislation, and was heavily involved in drafting the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000. He has also assisted the federal advisory committees in writing the procedural rules governing criminal and civil forfeiture proceedings. In 2000-2001, Mr. Smith was appointed by Senator Richard Shelby (R. Ala.), the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to serve as a Commissioner with the Judicial Review Commission on Foreign Asset Control.
Undue Delay or Due Process? Does the Due Process Clause Require a Prompt Post-Seizure Hearing When the Government Seizes an Individual’s Property?
Stefan D. Cassella, Adam F. Griffin, Robert E. Johnson, David B. Smith
The Institute for Justice (IJ) has filed a petition for certiorari in Serrano v. CPB, asking...
Undue Delay or Due Process? Does the Due Process Clause Require a Prompt Post-Seizure Hearing When the Government Seizes an Individual’s Property?
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Hamlet Without the Prince
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Privileges or Immunities: More Than a Nullity, But Not Boundless
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Only mostly dead? New Cert Petition presents Supreme Court with an opportunity to revisit the Privileges or Immunities Clause
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After Espinoza, What’s Left of the Establishment Clause?
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State Supreme Courts Protect Economic Liberty
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