President, New England Legal Foundation
Born in New York City; educated in the New York City public schools, Columbia University and Yale Law School. Joined Ropes & Gray, LLP in Boston in 1984; became litigation partner in 1993; retired in 2004. Joined New England Legal Foundation as General Counsel in 2004 and selected as President in 2006.
Tazewell Taylor Professor of Law and William H. Cabell Research Professor, William & Mary Law School
Jonathan H. Adler joined the William & Mary law faculty as the Tazwell Taylor Professor of Law and William H. Cabell Research Professor in 2025. Prior to joining the faculty, he was the inaugural Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law and the founding Director of the Coleman P. Burke Center for Environmental Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
Professor Adler is the author or editor of seven books, including Climate Liberalism: Perspectives on Liberty, Property and Pollution (Palgrave, 2023), Marijuana Federalism: Uncle Sam and Mary Jane (Brookings Institution Press, 2020), Business and the Roberts Court (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Rebuilding the Ark: New Perspectives on Endangered Species Act Reform (AEI Press, 2011).
His articles have appeared in publications ranging from the Harvard Environmental Law Review and Yale Journal on Regulation to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post. He has testified before Congress a dozen times, and his work has been cited in the U.S. Supreme Court. A 2024 study identified Professor Adler as the seventh most cited legal academic in administrative and environmental law from 2019 to 2023.
Professor Adler is a contributing editor to Civitas Outlook and a regular contributor to the popular legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy. A regular commentator on constitutional and regulatory issues, he has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, ranging from the PBS Newshour and National Public Radio to the Fox News Channel and Entertainment Tonight.
Professor Adler is a senior fellow at the Property & Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana. In 2018, Professor Adler was elected to membership in the American Law Institute and helped co-found the organization Checks and Balances. In 2024, Professor Adler was appointed a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States.
Professor Adler clerked for the Honorable David B. Sentelle on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Senior Litigation Counsel, New Civil Liberties Alliance
Jacob Huebert is Senior Litigation Counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance. He previously served as President and Director of Litigation of the Liberty Justice Center, where he successfully litigated cases to protect constitutional rights, including the landmark Janus v. AFSCME case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld government employees’ First Amendment right to choose for themselves whether to pay money to a union. Jacob was also previously a Senior Attorney at the Goldwater Institute, where he litigated cases on free speech, property rights, and the Second Amendment.
Jacob and his work have appeared in numerous national media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Fox News Channel. He is also the author of a book, Libertarianism Today.
Jacob holds a B.A. in economics from Grove City College and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School. After law school, he served as a clerk to Judge Deborah Cook of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Jacob has served as an adjunct law professor at several law schools, teaching courses in advanced appellate advocacy, the law of payments, legal writing, and jurisprudence. Before working in public interest law, Jacob was a litigator in private practice.
Trustees Professor of Law, Capital University Law School
Professor Mark P. Strasser has been named Trustees Professor of Law at Capital University Law School. This appointment recognizes Professor Strasser's extraordinary and sustained commitment to legal scholarship. Nationally recognized for his scholarship in family law, Professor Strasser is the author of numerous books and articles in the areas of family law, bioethics, and constitutional law. His most recent books include On Same-Sex Marriages, Civil Unions, and the Rule of Law: Constitutional Interpretation at the Crossroads (Praeger Publishers/Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002), Marriage and Same-Sex Unions: A Debate (Praeger Publishers, 2003), co-edited with Lynn Wardle, David Coolidge and William Duncan and Questions and Answers: Family Law (LexisNexis, 2003). Professor Strasser frequently presents papers at conferences across the country and internationally. His recent lectures have taken place at New York University Law School; the International Lesbian and Gay Law Association Conference in Turin, Italy; the Medical College of Wisconsin; Queen's University in Kingston, Canada; the University of Texas at Austin; Brigham Young University Law School; and Albany Law School. He also spoke before the Vermont House Judiciary Committee on interstate implications of Vermont recognizing same-sex marriages or domestic partnerships.
Professor Strasser is a former professor of philosophy and taught at Illinois State University, University of Texas at Arlington, and Washington University in St. Louis. A member of Capital University Law School's faculty since 1993, Professor Strasser teaches Constitutional Law, Torts, Family Law, Jurisprudence, and a seminar on Sexual Diversity and the Law. Professor Strasser was the Visiting Tyler Haynes Chair Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law in 2001 and a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law during the 1999-2000 academic year.
Distinguished Senior Fellow and Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Edward Whelan is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and holds EPPC’s Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies. He is the longest-serving President in EPPC’s history, having held that position from March 2004 through January 2021.
Mr. Whelan directs EPPC’s program on The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture. His areas of expertise include constitutional law and the judicial confirmation process. As a contributor to National Review Online’s Bench Memos blog, he has been a leading commentator on nominations to the Supreme Court and the lower courts and on issues of constitutional law. He has written essays and op-eds for leading newspapers—including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post—opinion journals, and academic symposia and law reviews. The National Law Journal has named Mr. Whelan among its “Champions and Visionaries” in the practice of law in D.C.
Mr. Whelan is co-editor of three volumes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s work: Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived (Crown Forum, 2017), a New York Times bestselling collection of speeches by Justice Scalia; On Faith: Lessons from an American Believer (Crown Forum, 2019), a collection of Justice Scalia’s writings on faith and religion; and The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law (Crown Forum, 2020), a collection of Justice Scalia’s views on legal issues.
Mr. Whelan, a lawyer and a former law clerk to Justice Scalia, has served in positions of responsibility in all three branches of the federal government. From just before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, until joining EPPC in 2004, Mr. Whelan was the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. In that capacity, he advised the White House Counsel’s Office, the Attorney General and other senior DOJ officials, and departments and agencies throughout the executive branch on difficult and sensitive legal questions. Mr. Whelan previously served on Capitol Hill as General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In addition to clerking for Justice Scalia, he was a law clerk to Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
In 1981 Mr. Whelan graduated with honors from Harvard College and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He received his J.D. magna cum laude in 1985 from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Board of Editors of the Harvard Law Review.
For more on Mr. Whelan’s background, see this interview.
Vice President for Legal Affairs, Cato Institute
Roger Pilon is the Cato’s Institute’s vice president for legal affairs, the founding director of Cato’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, the inaugural holder of Cato’s B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies, and the founding publisher of the Cato Supreme Court Review.
Prior to joining Cato, Pilon held five senior posts in the Reagan administration, including at State and Justice, and was a national fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. In 1989 the Bicentennial Commission presented him with its Benjamin Franklin Award for excellence in writing on the U.S. Constitution. In 2001 Columbia University’s School of General Studies awarded him its Alumni Medal of Distinction. Pilon lectures and debates at universities and law schools across the country and testifies often before Congress.
His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Legal Times, National Law Journal, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Stanford Law and Policy Review, and elsewhere. He has appeared on ABC’s Nightline, CBS’s 60 Minutes II, Fox News Channel, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, C-SPAN, and other media.
Pilon holds a BA from Columbia University, an MA and a PhD from the University of Chicago, and a JD from the George Washington University School of Law.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit
Judge Rao was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in March 2019. She graduated from Yale College in 1995 and the University of Chicago Law School in 1999. Following graduation, she served as a law clerk to Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and, in the 2001 October Term, as law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. Between her clerkships, Judge Rao served as counsel for nominations and constitutional law to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In 2002, she joined the international arbitration group of Clifford Chance LLP in London, England. From 2005-2006, she served as Special Assistant and Associate White House Counsel to President George W. Bush. From 2006 to 2017, Judge Rao was a professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, where she taught constitutional law, legislation and statutory interpretation, and the history and foundations of the administrative state. In 2014, she founded the Center for the Study of the Administrative State, a non-profit Center that promotes academic scholarship and public policy debates about administrative law. In July 2017, she was appointed to serve as the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management Budget. She served in this position until her appointment to the D.C. Circuit.
Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
ILYA SOMIN is Professor of Law at George Mason University and the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, democratic theory, federalism, and migration rights. He is the author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom (Oxford University Press, revised and expanded edition, 2022), Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (Stanford University Press, revised and expanded second edition, 2016), and The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain (University of Chicago Press, 2015, rev. paperback ed., 2016), coauthor of A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and co-editor of Eminent Domain: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Democracy and Political Ignorance has been translated into Italian and Japanese.
Somin’s work has appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Critical Review, and others. Somin has also published articles in a variety of popular press outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, CNN, NBC, The Atlantic, USA Today, Boston Globe, US News and World Report, South China Morning Post, National Law Journal and Reason. He has been quoted or interviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, The Economist, the Christian Science Monitor, the Financial Times, The Guardian, the Associated Press, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, BBC, Reuters, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Al Jazeera, and the Voice of America, among other media.
Somin’s writings have been cited in decisions by the United States Supreme Court, multiple state supreme courts and lower federal courts, and the Supreme Court of Israel. He is co-counsel for the plaintiffs in VOS Selections, Inc. v. Trump, a case challenging the constitutionality of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. Somin has testified on the use of drones for targeted killing in the War on Terror before the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights. In 2009, he testified on property rights issues at the United States Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Somin writes regularly for the popular Volokh Conspiracy law and politics blog, now affiliated with Reason magazine (previously affiliated with the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017). From 2006 to 2013, he served as Co-Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review, one of the country’s top-rated law and economics journals.
Somin has served as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has also been a visiting professor or scholar at the Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Hamburg, Germany, the University of Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Uriel Reichman University in Israel, and Zhengzhou University in China. He is a University Affiliate of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and an affiliated faculty member of the George Mason University Institute for Immigration Research. Before joining the faculty at George Mason, Somin was the John M. Olin Fellow in Law at Northwestern University Law School in 2002-2003. In 2001-2002, he clerked for the Hon. Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Professor Somin earned his B.A., Summa Cum Laude, at Amherst College, M.A. in Political Science from Harvard University, and J.D. from Yale Law School.
Tazewell Taylor Professor of Law and William H. Cabell Research Professor, William & Mary Law School
Jonathan H. Adler joined the William & Mary law faculty as the Tazwell Taylor Professor of Law and William H. Cabell Research Professor in 2025. Prior to joining the faculty, he was the inaugural Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law and the founding Director of the Coleman P. Burke Center for Environmental Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
Professor Adler is the author or editor of seven books, including Climate Liberalism: Perspectives on Liberty, Property and Pollution (Palgrave, 2023), Marijuana Federalism: Uncle Sam and Mary Jane (Brookings Institution Press, 2020), Business and the Roberts Court (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Rebuilding the Ark: New Perspectives on Endangered Species Act Reform (AEI Press, 2011).
His articles have appeared in publications ranging from the Harvard Environmental Law Review and Yale Journal on Regulation to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post. He has testified before Congress a dozen times, and his work has been cited in the U.S. Supreme Court. A 2024 study identified Professor Adler as the seventh most cited legal academic in administrative and environmental law from 2019 to 2023.
Professor Adler is a contributing editor to Civitas Outlook and a regular contributor to the popular legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy. A regular commentator on constitutional and regulatory issues, he has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, ranging from the PBS Newshour and National Public Radio to the Fox News Channel and Entertainment Tonight.
Professor Adler is a senior fellow at the Property & Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana. In 2018, Professor Adler was elected to membership in the American Law Institute and helped co-found the organization Checks and Balances. In 2024, Professor Adler was appointed a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States.
Professor Adler clerked for the Honorable David B. Sentelle on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Senior Litigation Counsel, New Civil Liberties Alliance
Jacob Huebert is Senior Litigation Counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance. He previously served as President and Director of Litigation of the Liberty Justice Center, where he successfully litigated cases to protect constitutional rights, including the landmark Janus v. AFSCME case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld government employees’ First Amendment right to choose for themselves whether to pay money to a union. Jacob was also previously a Senior Attorney at the Goldwater Institute, where he litigated cases on free speech, property rights, and the Second Amendment.
Jacob and his work have appeared in numerous national media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Fox News Channel. He is also the author of a book, Libertarianism Today.
Jacob holds a B.A. in economics from Grove City College and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School. After law school, he served as a clerk to Judge Deborah Cook of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Jacob has served as an adjunct law professor at several law schools, teaching courses in advanced appellate advocacy, the law of payments, legal writing, and jurisprudence. Before working in public interest law, Jacob was a litigator in private practice.
Trustees Professor of Law, Capital University Law School
Professor Mark P. Strasser has been named Trustees Professor of Law at Capital University Law School. This appointment recognizes Professor Strasser's extraordinary and sustained commitment to legal scholarship. Nationally recognized for his scholarship in family law, Professor Strasser is the author of numerous books and articles in the areas of family law, bioethics, and constitutional law. His most recent books include On Same-Sex Marriages, Civil Unions, and the Rule of Law: Constitutional Interpretation at the Crossroads (Praeger Publishers/Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002), Marriage and Same-Sex Unions: A Debate (Praeger Publishers, 2003), co-edited with Lynn Wardle, David Coolidge and William Duncan and Questions and Answers: Family Law (LexisNexis, 2003). Professor Strasser frequently presents papers at conferences across the country and internationally. His recent lectures have taken place at New York University Law School; the International Lesbian and Gay Law Association Conference in Turin, Italy; the Medical College of Wisconsin; Queen's University in Kingston, Canada; the University of Texas at Austin; Brigham Young University Law School; and Albany Law School. He also spoke before the Vermont House Judiciary Committee on interstate implications of Vermont recognizing same-sex marriages or domestic partnerships.
Professor Strasser is a former professor of philosophy and taught at Illinois State University, University of Texas at Arlington, and Washington University in St. Louis. A member of Capital University Law School's faculty since 1993, Professor Strasser teaches Constitutional Law, Torts, Family Law, Jurisprudence, and a seminar on Sexual Diversity and the Law. Professor Strasser was the Visiting Tyler Haynes Chair Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law in 2001 and a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law during the 1999-2000 academic year.
Distinguished Senior Fellow and Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Edward Whelan is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and holds EPPC’s Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies. He is the longest-serving President in EPPC’s history, having held that position from March 2004 through January 2021.
Mr. Whelan directs EPPC’s program on The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture. His areas of expertise include constitutional law and the judicial confirmation process. As a contributor to National Review Online’s Bench Memos blog, he has been a leading commentator on nominations to the Supreme Court and the lower courts and on issues of constitutional law. He has written essays and op-eds for leading newspapers—including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post—opinion journals, and academic symposia and law reviews. The National Law Journal has named Mr. Whelan among its “Champions and Visionaries” in the practice of law in D.C.
Mr. Whelan is co-editor of three volumes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s work: Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived (Crown Forum, 2017), a New York Times bestselling collection of speeches by Justice Scalia; On Faith: Lessons from an American Believer (Crown Forum, 2019), a collection of Justice Scalia’s writings on faith and religion; and The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law (Crown Forum, 2020), a collection of Justice Scalia’s views on legal issues.
Mr. Whelan, a lawyer and a former law clerk to Justice Scalia, has served in positions of responsibility in all three branches of the federal government. From just before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, until joining EPPC in 2004, Mr. Whelan was the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. In that capacity, he advised the White House Counsel’s Office, the Attorney General and other senior DOJ officials, and departments and agencies throughout the executive branch on difficult and sensitive legal questions. Mr. Whelan previously served on Capitol Hill as General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In addition to clerking for Justice Scalia, he was a law clerk to Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
In 1981 Mr. Whelan graduated with honors from Harvard College and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He received his J.D. magna cum laude in 1985 from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Board of Editors of the Harvard Law Review.
For more on Mr. Whelan’s background, see this interview.
Edward and Ellen Schwarzman Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law
Guy-Uriel Charles joined the Duke Law faculty in 2009. He is currently the Edward and Ellen Schwarzman Professor of Law at Duke Law School and the Bennett Boskey Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is the co-director, with Mitu Gulati, of the Duke Law Center on Law, Race and Politics. He teaches and writes about constitutional law, election law, campaign finance, redistricting, politics, and race. In 2016, he received the Law School’s Distinguished Teaching Award. He has published over 30 articles in journals including the Harvard Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, The Cornell Law Review, The Michigan Law Review, The Michigan Journal of Race and Law, The Georgetown Law Journal, The Journal of Politics, The California Law Review, The North Carolina Law Review, and others. He is the co-athor of two leading casebooks and two edited volumes. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Berkeley, Georgetown, Virginia, and Columbia law schools.
Professor Charles received his JD from the University of Michigan Law School and clerked for The Honorable Damon J. Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. While at the University of Michigan, he was among a group of students who founded the Michigan Journal of Race & Law and he served as the Journal’s first editor-in-chief. From 1995-2000, he was a graduate student in political science at the University of Michigan. He is a past member of the National Research Commission on Elections and Voting and the Century Foundation Working Group on Election Reform.
Prior to Duke, Professor Charles taught at the University of Minnesota Law School from 2000-2009 where he also held the Russell M. and Elizabeth M. Bennett Professor of Law. From 2006-2008, he served as the interim co-dean at the University of Minnesota Law School. At Minnesota, he was named the Stanley V. Kinyon Teacher of the Year for 2002-2003.
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