Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Randy Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He has argued before the United States Supreme Court, tried murder cases to juries as a prosecutor in Chicago, and appeared as a prosecutor in the feature film Inalienable. He is the author of numerous books, including Restoring the Lost Constitution, The Structure of Liberty, Our Republican Constitution, and The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. He has published two memoirs, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, and Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago. He is currently working on a new book, Freedom and Flourishing: Libertarianism for the Real World.
Associate Dean for Faculty Development; Diane and M.O. Miller II Research Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame Law School
Randy Kozel joined the Law School faculty in 2011. He was named the Distinguished Teacher of the Year by the Class of 2014. He also directs the Notre Dame Program on Constitutional Structure.
Kozel teaches and researches in fields including constitutional law, federal courts, information privacy, and contract law, with a particular focus on the role of precedent in legal decision making. His recent scholarship exploring the connection between precedent and interpretive philosophy has been published or is forthcoming in journals including the Northwestern University Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, the Vanderbilt Law Review, and the Texas Law Review. His book, entitled Settled Versus Right: A Theory of Precedent, makes the case for using precedent to bridge interpretive disagreements.
Kozel received his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where he was the Articles Committee Chair of the Harvard Law Review. He served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and for Judge Alex Kozinski at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. He has also practiced as a litigator with a large law firm and as Special Counsel to the General Counsel at General Electric Company.
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.
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.
Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
B.A., Yale; J.D., University of Chicago. Lee Liberman Otis is the Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President at the Federalist Society. She also serves as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference (ACUS), and as the co-chair of the National Constitution Center's Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board. She previously was a special assistant and an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, General Counsel of the Department of Energy, an associate in the appellate section of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, an associate counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and a law clerk to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. She also served as an assistant professor of law at George Mason, where she taught legislation, federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, civil procedure, and appellate advocacy. Ms. Otis has been an important member of the Federalist Society team since the organization’s beginnings. Together with David McIntosh, she led the effort to start what became the Chicago chapter of the Society. She also helped organize the Society’s first conference at Yale, its second conference at Chicago, and its first Lawyers Division chapter in Washington DC, as well as the effort to incorporate the Society, recruit its permanent staff, and obtain its early funding. She was a Founding Director of the Federalist Society.
Partner, McGuireWoods
Drawing on his deep experience in private practice and senior government service, John represents corporations, boards and executives facing significant legal, regulatory and reputational risk in criminal, regulatory, civil and congressional proceedings. He has resolved complex, high-stakes investigations through innovative settlements and successfully tried cases both as a federal prosecutor and defense counsel. A past chair of McGuireWoods’ Government Investigations & White Collar Litigation Department, he led the department to recognition by Law360 as a “Practice Group of the Year.”
In addition to his investigations practice, John is frequently called upon to brief and argue appeals in courts across the country. He co-chairs the firm’s Appeals and Strategic Issues Team and has argued appeals in the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 7th and 11th Circuits. He also routinely advises clients with matters pending before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Solicitor General’s Office.
Prior to joining McGuireWoods, John served in positions of significant responsibility throughout the government. As associate counsel to the President of the United States, he represented the Office of the President in congressional investigations and other sensitive matters. His primary responsibility included handling issues arising out of the Department of Defense and State Department. In addition, he coordinated with the Department of Justice on litigation implicating the Office of the President. And as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, he tried cases ranging from fraud to violent crime and managed complex grand jury investigations involving fraud, public corruption and other matters.
John served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas from 2006 to 2007 and to Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 2003 to 2004.
Prior to becoming an attorney, John served as a U.S. naval officer, deploying to the Persian Gulf. He led damage control operations on a Ticonderoga Class Cruiser and served as executive officer of a warship assigned to the Naval Special Warfare Command.
John is a member of the McGuireWoods' Recruiting Committee. He previously served as an adjunct professor of appellate and trial advocacy at the University of Richmond T.C. Williams School of Law and he serves as a trustee on the Executive Committee of the VMI Foundation.
Partner-in-Charge Washington, Jones Day
Noel Francisco served as the 47th Solicitor General of the United States in the Trump Administration, from 2017 to 2020. He has argued some of the most important cases the Supreme Court has heard in recent years on a wide array of issues.
For example, as Solicitor General, he argued Trump v. Hawaii, where he successfully defended the president's orders restricting travel from countries deemed to present security risks; Janus v. AFSCME, which upheld the First Amendment rights of public employees who decline to join labor unions; Kisor v. Wilkie, which adopted his argument that the "Auer deference doctrine" should be significantly curtailed but retained in its core applications; Apple Inc. v. Pepper, which addressed whether Apple's App Store customers had standing to sue the company for antitrust violations; Knick v. Township of Scott, which held that property owners could sue state and local governments in federal court to vindicate Fifth Amendment takings claims; and Seila Law LLC v. CFPB, which invalidated restrictions on the president's authority to remove the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
He also spearheaded the government's general strategy to seek emergency relief in the appellate courts and the Supreme Court when lower courts issued nationwide injunctions against important government programs.
Noel's service as Solicitor General built on his previous tenure at Jones Day, during which he argued McDonnell v. United States, which reversed the federal bribery conviction of the governor of Virginia; NLRB v. Noel Canning, which limited the president's constitutional recess appointments power; and Zubik v. Burwell, which challenged federal insurance coverage regulations that violated Catholic organizations' religious beliefs.
Partner, Goldstein & Russell
Tom Goldstein is an appellate advocate, best known as one of the nation’s most experienced Supreme Court practitioners. He has served as counsel to one of the parties in roughly 10% of all of the Court’s merits cases for the past 15 years (more than 100 in total), personally arguing 41. Only 3 lawyers in the Court's modern history have argued more cases in private practice. He has been counsel on more successful petitions for certiorari over the past decade than any other lawyer in private practice. Over the past fifteen years, the firm's petitions for certiorari have been granted at a higher rate than any private law firm or legal clinic.
Perhaps more than any other advocate in practice, Tom represents the complete spectrum of litigants before the Court; his work is not associated with any particular perspective or ideology. For example, as arguing counsel, Tom has prevailed on behalf of bond purchasers, corporate civil defendants (three times), corporate civil plaintiffs (three times), a debtor, employees (twice), a habeas petitioner (three times), an immigrant, investors, an individual civil defendant, an individual criminal defendant, a local government, persons with disabilities, and shareholders.
Tom’s representations span virtually all of federal law. For example, as arguing counsel in the Court, he has prevailed in cases involving arbitration, bankruptcy, civil procedure (twice), disability law, employment discrimination (twice), the Fourth Amendment (twice), free speech (three times), habeas corpus (three times), immigration, labor, securities (twice), and trademarks.
Tom also serves as counsel in particularly significant cases in the courts of appeals. For example, he successfully served as lead counsel for most of the nation's principal retailers in a Second Circuit appeal of the second-largest class action settlement in history. Tom also represents a number of different corporations in patent-related matters in the Federal Circuit.
In addition to practicing law, Tom has taught Supreme Court Litigation at Harvard Law School since 2004, and previously taught the same subject at Stanford Law School for nearly a decade. Tom is also the co-founder and publisher of SCOTUSblog – a web-site devoted to comprehensive coverage of the Court – which is the only weblog ever to receive the Peabody Award.
Tom has received a variety of recognitions for his practice before the Supreme Court and for his appellate advocacy generally. For example, in 2010, the National Law Journal named him one of the nation’s 40 most influential lawyers of the decade. The same publication included him in both of its most recent lists (2006 and 2013) of the nation’s 100 most influential attorneys. Legal Times named him one of the “90 Greatest Washington Lawyers of the Last 30 Years.” GQ named him (erroneously) one of the 50 most powerful people in Washington, D.C.
Tom is involved in a variety of professional organizations. Among other things, he is a member of the American Law Institute, Secretary-Elect of the ABA Labor and Employment Section, Vice Chair of the Amicus Committee of the ABA Intellectual Property Section, and an elected Fellow of the Academy of Appellate Lawyers.
Tom previously practiced at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, where for a time he served as the principal co-chair of the firmwide litigation practice. Early in his career he was an associate at both Boies Schiller and Jones Day Reavis & Pogue. He clerked for Judge Patricia Wald of the D.C. Circuit.
Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
Hon. Jennifer Mascott served as Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Separation of Powers Institute at The Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law before her appointment to the federal bench. On July 16, 2025, President Donald J. Trump nominated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (Delaware), and she was confirmed on October 9, 2025.
Prior to her confirmation, Judge Mascott wrote extensively in administrative and constitutional law, statutory interpretation, and the separation of powers. Her scholarship—published in leading journals including the Stanford Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, and Supreme Court Review—was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and multiple federal courts. She also contributed Supreme Court commentary for NBC Universal.
Before joining Catholic Law, she was an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of The C. Boyden Gray Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. In 2022 she became co-author of Beermann, Cass & Diver’s Administrative Law: Cases and Materials (9th ed.). In 2023 she received the Justice Joseph Story Award for excellence in scholarship, teaching, and advancing the rule of law.
Judge Mascott also served as a Council Member of the ABA’s Administrative Law Section and as a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States. She frequently testified before Congress on executive power, regulatory reform, and judicial jurisdiction, and participated in multiple Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
From 2019 to 2021, she took leave from academia to serve as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and later as Associate Deputy Attorney General, where she argued federal cases and assisted with Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation. Earlier in her career, she clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and for then-Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit.
Judge Mascott earned her J.D. summa cum laude from the George Washington University Law School and her B.A. from the same institution.
Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Elizabeth Papez is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and a member of the firm’s litigation group. Her practice focuses on high-stakes class actions, complex commercial litigation, and related government investigations and appeals.
As a seasoned litigator and former U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Ms. Papez has substantial experience representing clients in the financial services, pharmaceutical, consumer, and product sectors. She regularly handles federal class actions, multidistrict litigation (MDLs) and other complex commercial disputes under federal and state antitrust statutes, banking and securities laws, and false claims acts, as well as parallel regulatory investigations with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Ms. Papez has been repeatedly recognized as one of Benchmark USA’s Top 250 Women in Litigation nationwide, which named her a “client favorite” who is “extremely smart and practical and very charismatic,” and is praised by peers as a “fierce, dynamic, bright, powerhouse of a litigator.” Ms. Papez is also recognized in The Legal 500 for her antitrust and appellate work, and by The Best Lawyers in America 2019 for her appellate practice.
NBC News Justice Correspondent
Pete Williams is an NBC News correspondent based in Washington, D.C. He has been covering the Justice Department and the U.S. Supreme Court since March 1993. Williams was also a key reporter on the Microsoft anti-trust trial and Judge Jackson's decision.
Prior to joining NBC, Williams served as a press official on Capitol Hill for many years. In 1986 he joined the Washington, DC staff of then Congressman Dick Cheney as press secretary and a legislative assistant. In 1989, when Cheney was named Assistant Secretary of Defense, Williams was appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. While in that position, Williams was named Government Communicator of the Year in 1991 by the National Association of Government Communicators.
A native of Casper, Wyo. and a 1974 graduate of Stanford University, Williams was a reporter and news director at KTWO-TV and Radio in Casper from 1974 to 1985. Working with the Radio-Television News Directors Association, for which he served as a member of its board of directors, he successfully lobbied the Wyoming Supreme Court to permit broadcast coverage of its proceedings and twice sued Wyoming judges over pre-trial exclusion of reporters from the courtroom. For these efforts, he received a First Amendment Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
B.A., Yale; J.D., University of Chicago. Lee Liberman Otis is the Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President at the Federalist Society. She also serves as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference (ACUS), and as the co-chair of the National Constitution Center's Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board. She previously was a special assistant and an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, General Counsel of the Department of Energy, an associate in the appellate section of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, an associate counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and a law clerk to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. She also served as an assistant professor of law at George Mason, where she taught legislation, federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, civil procedure, and appellate advocacy. Ms. Otis has been an important member of the Federalist Society team since the organization’s beginnings. Together with David McIntosh, she led the effort to start what became the Chicago chapter of the Society. She also helped organize the Society’s first conference at Yale, its second conference at Chicago, and its first Lawyers Division chapter in Washington DC, as well as the effort to incorporate the Society, recruit its permanent staff, and obtain its early funding. She was a Founding Director of the Federalist Society.
Executive Vice President, The Federalist Society
Dean Reuter is Executive Vice President at the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. He has served in two federal government agency Offices of the Inspector General, as Counsel to the Inspector General and Deputy Inspector General, responsible for policing the use of federal funds granted and contracted through those agencies. As such, he helped conduct and oversee criminal investigations across the country. He is the principal author of the non-fiction book, The Hidden Nazi: The Untold Story of America's Deal with the Devil, and editor of Liberty’s Nemesis: The Unchecked Expansion of the State and Confronting Terror: 9/11 and the Future of American National Security. He was appointed by the President and served as Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and recently served as an appointee on the U.S. Commission on Presidential Scholars. He is a graduate of Hood College (BA with Honors) and the University of Maryland School of Law.
Partner, McGuireWoods
Drawing on his deep experience in private practice and senior government service, John represents corporations, boards and executives facing significant legal, regulatory and reputational risk in criminal, regulatory, civil and congressional proceedings. He has resolved complex, high-stakes investigations through innovative settlements and successfully tried cases both as a federal prosecutor and defense counsel. A past chair of McGuireWoods’ Government Investigations & White Collar Litigation Department, he led the department to recognition by Law360 as a “Practice Group of the Year.”
In addition to his investigations practice, John is frequently called upon to brief and argue appeals in courts across the country. He co-chairs the firm’s Appeals and Strategic Issues Team and has argued appeals in the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 7th and 11th Circuits. He also routinely advises clients with matters pending before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Solicitor General’s Office.
Prior to joining McGuireWoods, John served in positions of significant responsibility throughout the government. As associate counsel to the President of the United States, he represented the Office of the President in congressional investigations and other sensitive matters. His primary responsibility included handling issues arising out of the Department of Defense and State Department. In addition, he coordinated with the Department of Justice on litigation implicating the Office of the President. And as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, he tried cases ranging from fraud to violent crime and managed complex grand jury investigations involving fraud, public corruption and other matters.
John served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas from 2006 to 2007 and to Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 2003 to 2004.
Prior to becoming an attorney, John served as a U.S. naval officer, deploying to the Persian Gulf. He led damage control operations on a Ticonderoga Class Cruiser and served as executive officer of a warship assigned to the Naval Special Warfare Command.
John is a member of the McGuireWoods' Recruiting Committee. He previously served as an adjunct professor of appellate and trial advocacy at the University of Richmond T.C. Williams School of Law and he serves as a trustee on the Executive Committee of the VMI Foundation.
Partner-in-Charge Washington, Jones Day
Noel Francisco served as the 47th Solicitor General of the United States in the Trump Administration, from 2017 to 2020. He has argued some of the most important cases the Supreme Court has heard in recent years on a wide array of issues.
For example, as Solicitor General, he argued Trump v. Hawaii, where he successfully defended the president's orders restricting travel from countries deemed to present security risks; Janus v. AFSCME, which upheld the First Amendment rights of public employees who decline to join labor unions; Kisor v. Wilkie, which adopted his argument that the "Auer deference doctrine" should be significantly curtailed but retained in its core applications; Apple Inc. v. Pepper, which addressed whether Apple's App Store customers had standing to sue the company for antitrust violations; Knick v. Township of Scott, which held that property owners could sue state and local governments in federal court to vindicate Fifth Amendment takings claims; and Seila Law LLC v. CFPB, which invalidated restrictions on the president's authority to remove the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
He also spearheaded the government's general strategy to seek emergency relief in the appellate courts and the Supreme Court when lower courts issued nationwide injunctions against important government programs.
Noel's service as Solicitor General built on his previous tenure at Jones Day, during which he argued McDonnell v. United States, which reversed the federal bribery conviction of the governor of Virginia; NLRB v. Noel Canning, which limited the president's constitutional recess appointments power; and Zubik v. Burwell, which challenged federal insurance coverage regulations that violated Catholic organizations' religious beliefs.
Partner, Goldstein & Russell
Tom Goldstein is an appellate advocate, best known as one of the nation’s most experienced Supreme Court practitioners. He has served as counsel to one of the parties in roughly 10% of all of the Court’s merits cases for the past 15 years (more than 100 in total), personally arguing 41. Only 3 lawyers in the Court's modern history have argued more cases in private practice. He has been counsel on more successful petitions for certiorari over the past decade than any other lawyer in private practice. Over the past fifteen years, the firm's petitions for certiorari have been granted at a higher rate than any private law firm or legal clinic.
Perhaps more than any other advocate in practice, Tom represents the complete spectrum of litigants before the Court; his work is not associated with any particular perspective or ideology. For example, as arguing counsel, Tom has prevailed on behalf of bond purchasers, corporate civil defendants (three times), corporate civil plaintiffs (three times), a debtor, employees (twice), a habeas petitioner (three times), an immigrant, investors, an individual civil defendant, an individual criminal defendant, a local government, persons with disabilities, and shareholders.
Tom’s representations span virtually all of federal law. For example, as arguing counsel in the Court, he has prevailed in cases involving arbitration, bankruptcy, civil procedure (twice), disability law, employment discrimination (twice), the Fourth Amendment (twice), free speech (three times), habeas corpus (three times), immigration, labor, securities (twice), and trademarks.
Tom also serves as counsel in particularly significant cases in the courts of appeals. For example, he successfully served as lead counsel for most of the nation's principal retailers in a Second Circuit appeal of the second-largest class action settlement in history. Tom also represents a number of different corporations in patent-related matters in the Federal Circuit.
In addition to practicing law, Tom has taught Supreme Court Litigation at Harvard Law School since 2004, and previously taught the same subject at Stanford Law School for nearly a decade. Tom is also the co-founder and publisher of SCOTUSblog – a web-site devoted to comprehensive coverage of the Court – which is the only weblog ever to receive the Peabody Award.
Tom has received a variety of recognitions for his practice before the Supreme Court and for his appellate advocacy generally. For example, in 2010, the National Law Journal named him one of the nation’s 40 most influential lawyers of the decade. The same publication included him in both of its most recent lists (2006 and 2013) of the nation’s 100 most influential attorneys. Legal Times named him one of the “90 Greatest Washington Lawyers of the Last 30 Years.” GQ named him (erroneously) one of the 50 most powerful people in Washington, D.C.
Tom is involved in a variety of professional organizations. Among other things, he is a member of the American Law Institute, Secretary-Elect of the ABA Labor and Employment Section, Vice Chair of the Amicus Committee of the ABA Intellectual Property Section, and an elected Fellow of the Academy of Appellate Lawyers.
Tom previously practiced at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, where for a time he served as the principal co-chair of the firmwide litigation practice. Early in his career he was an associate at both Boies Schiller and Jones Day Reavis & Pogue. He clerked for Judge Patricia Wald of the D.C. Circuit.
Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
Hon. Jennifer Mascott served as Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Separation of Powers Institute at The Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law before her appointment to the federal bench. On July 16, 2025, President Donald J. Trump nominated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (Delaware), and she was confirmed on October 9, 2025.
Prior to her confirmation, Judge Mascott wrote extensively in administrative and constitutional law, statutory interpretation, and the separation of powers. Her scholarship—published in leading journals including the Stanford Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, and Supreme Court Review—was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and multiple federal courts. She also contributed Supreme Court commentary for NBC Universal.
Before joining Catholic Law, she was an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of The C. Boyden Gray Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. In 2022 she became co-author of Beermann, Cass & Diver’s Administrative Law: Cases and Materials (9th ed.). In 2023 she received the Justice Joseph Story Award for excellence in scholarship, teaching, and advancing the rule of law.
Judge Mascott also served as a Council Member of the ABA’s Administrative Law Section and as a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States. She frequently testified before Congress on executive power, regulatory reform, and judicial jurisdiction, and participated in multiple Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
From 2019 to 2021, she took leave from academia to serve as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and later as Associate Deputy Attorney General, where she argued federal cases and assisted with Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation. Earlier in her career, she clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and for then-Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit.
Judge Mascott earned her J.D. summa cum laude from the George Washington University Law School and her B.A. from the same institution.
Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
B.A., Yale; J.D., University of Chicago. Lee Liberman Otis is the Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President at the Federalist Society. She also serves as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference (ACUS), and as the co-chair of the National Constitution Center's Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board. She previously was a special assistant and an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, General Counsel of the Department of Energy, an associate in the appellate section of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, an associate counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and a law clerk to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. She also served as an assistant professor of law at George Mason, where she taught legislation, federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, civil procedure, and appellate advocacy. Ms. Otis has been an important member of the Federalist Society team since the organization’s beginnings. Together with David McIntosh, she led the effort to start what became the Chicago chapter of the Society. She also helped organize the Society’s first conference at Yale, its second conference at Chicago, and its first Lawyers Division chapter in Washington DC, as well as the effort to incorporate the Society, recruit its permanent staff, and obtain its early funding. She was a Founding Director of the Federalist Society.
Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Elizabeth Papez is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and a member of the firm’s litigation group. Her practice focuses on high-stakes class actions, complex commercial litigation, and related government investigations and appeals.
As a seasoned litigator and former U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Ms. Papez has substantial experience representing clients in the financial services, pharmaceutical, consumer, and product sectors. She regularly handles federal class actions, multidistrict litigation (MDLs) and other complex commercial disputes under federal and state antitrust statutes, banking and securities laws, and false claims acts, as well as parallel regulatory investigations with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Ms. Papez has been repeatedly recognized as one of Benchmark USA’s Top 250 Women in Litigation nationwide, which named her a “client favorite” who is “extremely smart and practical and very charismatic,” and is praised by peers as a “fierce, dynamic, bright, powerhouse of a litigator.” Ms. Papez is also recognized in The Legal 500 for her antitrust and appellate work, and by The Best Lawyers in America 2019 for her appellate practice.
Executive Vice President, The Federalist Society
Dean Reuter is Executive Vice President at the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. He has served in two federal government agency Offices of the Inspector General, as Counsel to the Inspector General and Deputy Inspector General, responsible for policing the use of federal funds granted and contracted through those agencies. As such, he helped conduct and oversee criminal investigations across the country. He is the principal author of the non-fiction book, The Hidden Nazi: The Untold Story of America's Deal with the Devil, and editor of Liberty’s Nemesis: The Unchecked Expansion of the State and Confronting Terror: 9/11 and the Future of American National Security. He was appointed by the President and served as Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and recently served as an appointee on the U.S. Commission on Presidential Scholars. He is a graduate of Hood College (BA with Honors) and the University of Maryland School of Law.
NBC News Justice Correspondent
Pete Williams is an NBC News correspondent based in Washington, D.C. He has been covering the Justice Department and the U.S. Supreme Court since March 1993. Williams was also a key reporter on the Microsoft anti-trust trial and Judge Jackson's decision.
Prior to joining NBC, Williams served as a press official on Capitol Hill for many years. In 1986 he joined the Washington, DC staff of then Congressman Dick Cheney as press secretary and a legislative assistant. In 1989, when Cheney was named Assistant Secretary of Defense, Williams was appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. While in that position, Williams was named Government Communicator of the Year in 1991 by the National Association of Government Communicators.
A native of Casper, Wyo. and a 1974 graduate of Stanford University, Williams was a reporter and news director at KTWO-TV and Radio in Casper from 1974 to 1985. Working with the Radio-Television News Directors Association, for which he served as a member of its board of directors, he successfully lobbied the Wyoming Supreme Court to permit broadcast coverage of its proceedings and twice sued Wyoming judges over pre-trial exclusion of reporters from the courtroom. For these efforts, he received a First Amendment Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Director, Faculty Programs & Division Administrator, The Federalist Society
Anthony Deardurff serves as Director of Faculty Programs & Division Administrator. He previously practiced complex commercial and appellate litigation in the Washington, D.C. office of WilmerHale, LLP, and clerked on both the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Mr. Deardurff earned his J.D. cum laude from Notre Dame Law School and his B.A. summa cum laude from the University of Dallas, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He holds a license to practice in both Illinois and the District of Columbia.
David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Frederick Schauer is David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, and previously was Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Schauer is the author of The Law of Obscenity (BNA, 1976), Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry (Cambridge, 1982), Playing By the Rules: A Philosophical Examination of Rule-Based Decision-Making in Law and in Life (Oxford, 1991), Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes (Harvard, 2003), Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning (Harvard, 2009), and The Force of Law (Harvard, 2015). The editor of Karl Llewellyn, The Theory of Rules (Chicago, 2011), and a founding editor of Legal Theory, he has chaired the Section on Constitutional Law of the Association of American Law Schools and the Committee on Philosophy and Law of the American Philosophical Association. In 2005 he wrote the Foreword to the Harvard Law Review’s Supreme Court issue, and has written widely on freedom of speech, constitutional interpretation, evidence, legal reasoning, and the philosophy of law.
David Boies Professor of Law, Yale Law School
Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Randy Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He has argued before the United States Supreme Court, tried murder cases to juries as a prosecutor in Chicago, and appeared as a prosecutor in the feature film Inalienable. He is the author of numerous books, including Restoring the Lost Constitution, The Structure of Liberty, Our Republican Constitution, and The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. He has published two memoirs, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, and Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago. He is currently working on a new book, Freedom and Flourishing: Libertarianism for the Real World.
Clayton J. and Henry R. Barber Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and Co-Chairman, Board of Directors, The Federalist Society
STEVEN GOW CALABRESI is the Clayton J. & Henry R. Barber Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. He has also co-taught in the Fall semester at Yale Law School from 2013 to the present. Calabresi clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and Judges Robert H. Bork and Ralph K. Winter. He was a Special Assistant to Attorney General Meese from 1985 to 1987 and worked with Ken Cribb as his deputy in 1987 on the second floor of the West Wing of the Reagan White House. Calabresi has written books on presidential power and comparative constitutional law and the origins of judicial review. He and Gary Lawson are the co-editors of a casebook on U.S. Constitutional Law, and Calabresi is also the co-editor of a casebook on comparative constitutional law. He has written over seventy law review articles since 1990.
Associate Dean for Faculty Development; Diane and M.O. Miller II Research Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame Law School
Randy Kozel joined the Law School faculty in 2011. He was named the Distinguished Teacher of the Year by the Class of 2014. He also directs the Notre Dame Program on Constitutional Structure.
Kozel teaches and researches in fields including constitutional law, federal courts, information privacy, and contract law, with a particular focus on the role of precedent in legal decision making. His recent scholarship exploring the connection between precedent and interpretive philosophy has been published or is forthcoming in journals including the Northwestern University Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, the Vanderbilt Law Review, and the Texas Law Review. His book, entitled Settled Versus Right: A Theory of Precedent, makes the case for using precedent to bridge interpretive disagreements.
Kozel received his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where he was the Articles Committee Chair of the Harvard Law Review. He served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and for Judge Alex Kozinski at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. He has also practiced as a litigator with a large law firm and as Special Counsel to the General Counsel at General Electric Company.
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.
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.
Carl and Shelia Spaeth Professor of Law; Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life, Stanford Law School
Bernadette Meyler, JD ’03, is a scholar of British and American constitutional law and of law and the humanities. She returned in 2013 to Stanford Law School, where she had previously served as Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights. Her research and teaching bring together the sometimes surprisingly divided fields of legal history and law and literature. They also examine the long history of constitutionalism, reaching back into the English common law ancestry of the U.S. Constitution. Professor Meyler’s current book projects stem from these respective areas of her scholarship. Theaters of Pardoning (Cornell UP, forthcoming 2019) demonstrates that the representation of pardoning tracks changing conceptions of sovereignty within the plays and politics of seventeenth-century England. In doing so, the book considers how the shared audiences of dramatic and historical tragicomedy—whether Kings, students at the Inns of Court, or potential jurors—brought concepts from the literary into the legal arena and back again. Common Law Originalism shifts to the American context, looking at the multiple eighteenth-century common law meanings—both colonial and English—of various constitutional terms and phrases. Based on this variety, as well as on the practices of common law interpretation with which members of the Founding generation were familiar, the book argues that we should, in large part, reject the pursuit of a singular and determinate original meaning; instead, it contends, we must embrace a more vigorous debate in the present over contested constitutional meanings. Professor Meyler is also the co-editor of several collections of essays in law and the humanities designed to introduce scholars and students to the field, including, with Elizabeth Anker, New Directions in Law and Literature (Oxford UP, 2017) and, with Simon Stern and Maksymilian Del Mar, The Oxford Handbook of Law and the Humanities (Oxford UP, forthcoming 2019).
After receiving her BA in Literature with a focus on Classics at Harvard University, Professor Meyler obtained her JD from Stanford Law School and completed a PhD in English at UC, Irvine as a Mellon Fellow in Humanistic Studies and a Chancellor’s Fellow. Following law school, Professor Meyler clerked for the Hon. Robert A. Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Professor Meyler previously taught at Cornell University, where she served, most recently, as Professor of Law and English and Faculty Director of Research at the Cornell Law School. She also visited Princeton University as the inaugural Mellon/LAPA Fellow in Law and the Humanities.
Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
B.A., Yale; J.D., University of Chicago. Lee Liberman Otis is the Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President at the Federalist Society. She also serves as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference (ACUS), and as the co-chair of the National Constitution Center's Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board. She previously was a special assistant and an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, General Counsel of the Department of Energy, an associate in the appellate section of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, an associate counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and a law clerk to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. She also served as an assistant professor of law at George Mason, where she taught legislation, federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, civil procedure, and appellate advocacy. Ms. Otis has been an important member of the Federalist Society team since the organization’s beginnings. Together with David McIntosh, she led the effort to start what became the Chicago chapter of the Society. She also helped organize the Society’s first conference at Yale, its second conference at Chicago, and its first Lawyers Division chapter in Washington DC, as well as the effort to incorporate the Society, recruit its permanent staff, and obtain its early funding. She was a Founding Director of the Federalist Society.
Partner, McGuireWoods
Drawing on his deep experience in private practice and senior government service, John represents corporations, boards and executives facing significant legal, regulatory and reputational risk in criminal, regulatory, civil and congressional proceedings. He has resolved complex, high-stakes investigations through innovative settlements and successfully tried cases both as a federal prosecutor and defense counsel. A past chair of McGuireWoods’ Government Investigations & White Collar Litigation Department, he led the department to recognition by Law360 as a “Practice Group of the Year.”
In addition to his investigations practice, John is frequently called upon to brief and argue appeals in courts across the country. He co-chairs the firm’s Appeals and Strategic Issues Team and has argued appeals in the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 7th and 11th Circuits. He also routinely advises clients with matters pending before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Solicitor General’s Office.
Prior to joining McGuireWoods, John served in positions of significant responsibility throughout the government. As associate counsel to the President of the United States, he represented the Office of the President in congressional investigations and other sensitive matters. His primary responsibility included handling issues arising out of the Department of Defense and State Department. In addition, he coordinated with the Department of Justice on litigation implicating the Office of the President. And as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, he tried cases ranging from fraud to violent crime and managed complex grand jury investigations involving fraud, public corruption and other matters.
John served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas from 2006 to 2007 and to Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 2003 to 2004.
Prior to becoming an attorney, John served as a U.S. naval officer, deploying to the Persian Gulf. He led damage control operations on a Ticonderoga Class Cruiser and served as executive officer of a warship assigned to the Naval Special Warfare Command.
John is a member of the McGuireWoods' Recruiting Committee. He previously served as an adjunct professor of appellate and trial advocacy at the University of Richmond T.C. Williams School of Law and he serves as a trustee on the Executive Committee of the VMI Foundation.
Partner-in-Charge Washington, Jones Day
Noel Francisco served as the 47th Solicitor General of the United States in the Trump Administration, from 2017 to 2020. He has argued some of the most important cases the Supreme Court has heard in recent years on a wide array of issues.
For example, as Solicitor General, he argued Trump v. Hawaii, where he successfully defended the president's orders restricting travel from countries deemed to present security risks; Janus v. AFSCME, which upheld the First Amendment rights of public employees who decline to join labor unions; Kisor v. Wilkie, which adopted his argument that the "Auer deference doctrine" should be significantly curtailed but retained in its core applications; Apple Inc. v. Pepper, which addressed whether Apple's App Store customers had standing to sue the company for antitrust violations; Knick v. Township of Scott, which held that property owners could sue state and local governments in federal court to vindicate Fifth Amendment takings claims; and Seila Law LLC v. CFPB, which invalidated restrictions on the president's authority to remove the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
He also spearheaded the government's general strategy to seek emergency relief in the appellate courts and the Supreme Court when lower courts issued nationwide injunctions against important government programs.
Noel's service as Solicitor General built on his previous tenure at Jones Day, during which he argued McDonnell v. United States, which reversed the federal bribery conviction of the governor of Virginia; NLRB v. Noel Canning, which limited the president's constitutional recess appointments power; and Zubik v. Burwell, which challenged federal insurance coverage regulations that violated Catholic organizations' religious beliefs.
Partner, Goldstein & Russell
Tom Goldstein is an appellate advocate, best known as one of the nation’s most experienced Supreme Court practitioners. He has served as counsel to one of the parties in roughly 10% of all of the Court’s merits cases for the past 15 years (more than 100 in total), personally arguing 41. Only 3 lawyers in the Court's modern history have argued more cases in private practice. He has been counsel on more successful petitions for certiorari over the past decade than any other lawyer in private practice. Over the past fifteen years, the firm's petitions for certiorari have been granted at a higher rate than any private law firm or legal clinic.
Perhaps more than any other advocate in practice, Tom represents the complete spectrum of litigants before the Court; his work is not associated with any particular perspective or ideology. For example, as arguing counsel, Tom has prevailed on behalf of bond purchasers, corporate civil defendants (three times), corporate civil plaintiffs (three times), a debtor, employees (twice), a habeas petitioner (three times), an immigrant, investors, an individual civil defendant, an individual criminal defendant, a local government, persons with disabilities, and shareholders.
Tom’s representations span virtually all of federal law. For example, as arguing counsel in the Court, he has prevailed in cases involving arbitration, bankruptcy, civil procedure (twice), disability law, employment discrimination (twice), the Fourth Amendment (twice), free speech (three times), habeas corpus (three times), immigration, labor, securities (twice), and trademarks.
Tom also serves as counsel in particularly significant cases in the courts of appeals. For example, he successfully served as lead counsel for most of the nation's principal retailers in a Second Circuit appeal of the second-largest class action settlement in history. Tom also represents a number of different corporations in patent-related matters in the Federal Circuit.
In addition to practicing law, Tom has taught Supreme Court Litigation at Harvard Law School since 2004, and previously taught the same subject at Stanford Law School for nearly a decade. Tom is also the co-founder and publisher of SCOTUSblog – a web-site devoted to comprehensive coverage of the Court – which is the only weblog ever to receive the Peabody Award.
Tom has received a variety of recognitions for his practice before the Supreme Court and for his appellate advocacy generally. For example, in 2010, the National Law Journal named him one of the nation’s 40 most influential lawyers of the decade. The same publication included him in both of its most recent lists (2006 and 2013) of the nation’s 100 most influential attorneys. Legal Times named him one of the “90 Greatest Washington Lawyers of the Last 30 Years.” GQ named him (erroneously) one of the 50 most powerful people in Washington, D.C.
Tom is involved in a variety of professional organizations. Among other things, he is a member of the American Law Institute, Secretary-Elect of the ABA Labor and Employment Section, Vice Chair of the Amicus Committee of the ABA Intellectual Property Section, and an elected Fellow of the Academy of Appellate Lawyers.
Tom previously practiced at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, where for a time he served as the principal co-chair of the firmwide litigation practice. Early in his career he was an associate at both Boies Schiller and Jones Day Reavis & Pogue. He clerked for Judge Patricia Wald of the D.C. Circuit.
Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
Hon. Jennifer Mascott served as Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Separation of Powers Institute at The Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law before her appointment to the federal bench. On July 16, 2025, President Donald J. Trump nominated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (Delaware), and she was confirmed on October 9, 2025.
Prior to her confirmation, Judge Mascott wrote extensively in administrative and constitutional law, statutory interpretation, and the separation of powers. Her scholarship—published in leading journals including the Stanford Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, and Supreme Court Review—was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and multiple federal courts. She also contributed Supreme Court commentary for NBC Universal.
Before joining Catholic Law, she was an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of The C. Boyden Gray Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. In 2022 she became co-author of Beermann, Cass & Diver’s Administrative Law: Cases and Materials (9th ed.). In 2023 she received the Justice Joseph Story Award for excellence in scholarship, teaching, and advancing the rule of law.
Judge Mascott also served as a Council Member of the ABA’s Administrative Law Section and as a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States. She frequently testified before Congress on executive power, regulatory reform, and judicial jurisdiction, and participated in multiple Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
From 2019 to 2021, she took leave from academia to serve as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and later as Associate Deputy Attorney General, where she argued federal cases and assisted with Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation. Earlier in her career, she clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and for then-Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit.
Judge Mascott earned her J.D. summa cum laude from the George Washington University Law School and her B.A. from the same institution.
Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
B.A., Yale; J.D., University of Chicago. Lee Liberman Otis is the Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President at the Federalist Society. She also serves as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference (ACUS), and as the co-chair of the National Constitution Center's Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board. She previously was a special assistant and an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, General Counsel of the Department of Energy, an associate in the appellate section of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, an associate counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and a law clerk to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. She also served as an assistant professor of law at George Mason, where she taught legislation, federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, civil procedure, and appellate advocacy. Ms. Otis has been an important member of the Federalist Society team since the organization’s beginnings. Together with David McIntosh, she led the effort to start what became the Chicago chapter of the Society. She also helped organize the Society’s first conference at Yale, its second conference at Chicago, and its first Lawyers Division chapter in Washington DC, as well as the effort to incorporate the Society, recruit its permanent staff, and obtain its early funding. She was a Founding Director of the Federalist Society.
Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Elizabeth Papez is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and a member of the firm’s litigation group. Her practice focuses on high-stakes class actions, complex commercial litigation, and related government investigations and appeals.
As a seasoned litigator and former U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Ms. Papez has substantial experience representing clients in the financial services, pharmaceutical, consumer, and product sectors. She regularly handles federal class actions, multidistrict litigation (MDLs) and other complex commercial disputes under federal and state antitrust statutes, banking and securities laws, and false claims acts, as well as parallel regulatory investigations with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Ms. Papez has been repeatedly recognized as one of Benchmark USA’s Top 250 Women in Litigation nationwide, which named her a “client favorite” who is “extremely smart and practical and very charismatic,” and is praised by peers as a “fierce, dynamic, bright, powerhouse of a litigator.” Ms. Papez is also recognized in The Legal 500 for her antitrust and appellate work, and by The Best Lawyers in America 2019 for her appellate practice.
Executive Vice President, The Federalist Society
Dean Reuter is Executive Vice President at the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. He has served in two federal government agency Offices of the Inspector General, as Counsel to the Inspector General and Deputy Inspector General, responsible for policing the use of federal funds granted and contracted through those agencies. As such, he helped conduct and oversee criminal investigations across the country. He is the principal author of the non-fiction book, The Hidden Nazi: The Untold Story of America's Deal with the Devil, and editor of Liberty’s Nemesis: The Unchecked Expansion of the State and Confronting Terror: 9/11 and the Future of American National Security. He was appointed by the President and served as Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and recently served as an appointee on the U.S. Commission on Presidential Scholars. He is a graduate of Hood College (BA with Honors) and the University of Maryland School of Law.
NBC News Justice Correspondent
Pete Williams is an NBC News correspondent based in Washington, D.C. He has been covering the Justice Department and the U.S. Supreme Court since March 1993. Williams was also a key reporter on the Microsoft anti-trust trial and Judge Jackson's decision.
Prior to joining NBC, Williams served as a press official on Capitol Hill for many years. In 1986 he joined the Washington, DC staff of then Congressman Dick Cheney as press secretary and a legislative assistant. In 1989, when Cheney was named Assistant Secretary of Defense, Williams was appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. While in that position, Williams was named Government Communicator of the Year in 1991 by the National Association of Government Communicators.
A native of Casper, Wyo. and a 1974 graduate of Stanford University, Williams was a reporter and news director at KTWO-TV and Radio in Casper from 1974 to 1985. Working with the Radio-Television News Directors Association, for which he served as a member of its board of directors, he successfully lobbied the Wyoming Supreme Court to permit broadcast coverage of its proceedings and twice sued Wyoming judges over pre-trial exclusion of reporters from the courtroom. For these efforts, he received a First Amendment Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Director, Faculty Programs & Division Administrator, The Federalist Society
Anthony Deardurff serves as Director of Faculty Programs & Division Administrator. He previously practiced complex commercial and appellate litigation in the Washington, D.C. office of WilmerHale, LLP, and clerked on both the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Mr. Deardurff earned his J.D. cum laude from Notre Dame Law School and his B.A. summa cum laude from the University of Dallas, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He holds a license to practice in both Illinois and the District of Columbia.
David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Frederick Schauer is David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, and previously was Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Schauer is the author of The Law of Obscenity (BNA, 1976), Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry (Cambridge, 1982), Playing By the Rules: A Philosophical Examination of Rule-Based Decision-Making in Law and in Life (Oxford, 1991), Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes (Harvard, 2003), Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning (Harvard, 2009), and The Force of Law (Harvard, 2015). The editor of Karl Llewellyn, The Theory of Rules (Chicago, 2011), and a founding editor of Legal Theory, he has chaired the Section on Constitutional Law of the Association of American Law Schools and the Committee on Philosophy and Law of the American Philosophical Association. In 2005 he wrote the Foreword to the Harvard Law Review’s Supreme Court issue, and has written widely on freedom of speech, constitutional interpretation, evidence, legal reasoning, and the philosophy of law.
David Boies Professor of Law, Yale Law School
Professor of Law, South Texas College of Law Houston
Josh Blackman is a national thought leader on constitutional law and the United States Supreme Court. Josh’s work was quoted during two presidential impeachment trials. He has testified before Congress and advises federal and state lawmakers. Josh regularly appears on TV, including NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and the BBC. Josh is also a frequent guest on NPR and other syndicated radio programs. He has published commentaries in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and leading national publications.
Since 2012, Josh has served as a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston. He holds the Centennial Chair of Constitutional Law. Josh is an Adjunct Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Josh has written more than seven dozen law review articles that have been cited more than a thousand times. Josh was selected as the Jurist of the Year by the Texas Journal of Law & Public Policy, received the inaugural Meese III Originalism Award, and was awarded the Inaugural Joseph Story Award. Josh was selected by Forbes Magazine for the “30 Under 30” in Law and Policy. Josh is the President of the Harlan Institute, and founded FantasySCOTUS, the Internet’s Premier Supreme Court Fantasy League. He blogs at the Volokh Conspiracyand posts@JoshMBlackman.
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.
Donald Phillip Rothschild Research Professor, George Washington University Law School
Renée Lettow Lerner is Donald Phillip Rothschild Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School.
Professor Lerner works in the fields of U.S. and English legal history, civil and criminal procedure, and comparative law. She advises judges, lawyers, and government officials from the United States and countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia about the differences between adversarial and nonadversarial legal systems.
She writes extensively about the history of American juries. Her work includes not only scholarly articles, but also online publications intended for a broader audience of legal professionals and the public. In many different settings, she has debated the role of juries with other academics and with lawyers. She has a book forthcoming with Oxford University Press in the Very Short Introduction Series entitled “The Jury.” She is also working on a book about the American civil jury, from the colonial period to the present.
She is the author, with John Langbein and Bruce Smith, of the book History of the Common Law: The Development of Anglo-American Legal Institutions (2009).
Her recent writings include a book review of Amalia D. Kessler’s Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877, 67 J. Legal Ed. 888 (2018); “How the Creation of Appellate Courts in England and the United States Limited Judicial Comment on Evidence to the Jury,” 40 Journal of the Legal Profession 215 (2016); “The Troublesome Inheritance of Americans in Magna Carta and Trial by Jury,” in Magna Carta and its Modern Legacy 77-98 (Robert Hazell and James Melton eds., Cambridge University Press 2015); and “The Failure of Originalism in Preserving Constitutional Rights to Civil Jury Trial,” 22 William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal 811 (2014).
Professor Lerner received an A.B. summa cum laude in history from Princeton University. She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where she studied English legal history. At Yale Law School, she was Articles Editor of the Yale Law Journal. She served as a law clerk to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court and to Judge Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. From 2003 to 2005, she served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Associate Professor of Government; Pre-Law Advisor, Patrick Henry College
Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
B.A., Yale; J.D., University of Chicago. Lee Liberman Otis is the Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President at the Federalist Society. She also serves as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference (ACUS), and as the co-chair of the National Constitution Center's Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board. She previously was a special assistant and an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, General Counsel of the Department of Energy, an associate in the appellate section of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, an associate counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and a law clerk to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. She also served as an assistant professor of law at George Mason, where she taught legislation, federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, civil procedure, and appellate advocacy. Ms. Otis has been an important member of the Federalist Society team since the organization’s beginnings. Together with David McIntosh, she led the effort to start what became the Chicago chapter of the Society. She also helped organize the Society’s first conference at Yale, its second conference at Chicago, and its first Lawyers Division chapter in Washington DC, as well as the effort to incorporate the Society, recruit its permanent staff, and obtain its early funding. She was a Founding Director of the Federalist Society.
Harry Kalven, Jr. Professor of Law & Faculty Director, Constitutional Law Institute, University of Chicago Law School
William Baude is a Professor of Law and the Faculty Director of the Constitutional Law Institute at the University of Chicago Law School, where he teaches federal courts, constitutional law, and conflict of laws. His current research interests include different aspects of the Fourteenth Amendment (particularly both Section One and Section Three) and the nature of judicial discretion.
Among his other activities Baude is: the co-editor of two textbooks, The Constitution of the United States and Hart & Wechsler's Federal Courts in the Federal System; an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism; a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance; a member of the American Law Institute; an occasional blogger at The Volokh Conspiracy; and a podcaster on Divided Argument. He also recently served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Professor Baude received his BS in Mathematics from the University of Chicago and his JD from Yale Law School. He then clerked for then-Judge Michael McConnell on the United States Court of Appeals, and Chief Justice John Roberts on the United States Supreme Court. Before joining the Chicago faculty, he was a fellow at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, and a lawyer in Washington, DC.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit
Judge Livingston was appointed United States Circuit Judge for the Second Circuit on May 17, 2007 and entered on duty June 1, 2007. Prior to her appointment she was the Paul J. Kellner Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where she also served as Vice Dean from 2005 to 2006. Judge Livingston joined the Columbia faculty in 1994. She continues to serve as a member of that faculty as the Paul J. Kellner Professor.
Judge Livingston received her B.A., magna cum laude, in 1980 from Princeton University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She received her J.D., magna cum laude, in 1984 from Harvard Law School, where she was an editor on the Harvard Law Review. Following law school, she served as a law clerk to Judge J. Edward Lumbard of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Judge Livingston was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York from 1986 to 1991 and she served as a Deputy Chief of Appeals in the Criminal Division from 1990 to 1991. She was an associate with the New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison from 1985 to 1986 and again from 1991 to 1992, when she elected to pursue an academic career. Judge Livingston was a member of the University of Michigan's Law School faculty from 1992 until 1994.
Judge Livingston is a co-author of the casebook, Comprehensive Criminal Procedure, and has published numerous academic articles on legal topics. She has taught courses in evidence, criminal law and procedure, and national security and terrorism. From 1994 to 2003, Judge Livingston was a Commissioner on New York City's Civilian Complaint Review Board.
Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
THOMAS W. MERRILL is the Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He previously taught at Northwestern University School of Law and Yale Law School. He has undergraduate degrees from Grinnell College and Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and a law degree from the University of Chicago. He clerked on the D.C. Circuit (for Chief Judge David Bazelon) and the U.S. Supreme Court (for Justice Harry Blackmun). From 1987-1990 he served as Deputy Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Merrill’s writings related to property include Property: Principles and Policies (Foundation Press Second Edition, 2012) (with Henry E. Smith); Property: The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law (Oxford U. Press, 2010); Property: Takings (Foundation Press, 2002)(with David Dana); and numerous articles, including “The Economics of Public Use” (Cornell Law Review 1986); “The Landscape of Constitutional Property” (Virginia Law Review 2000); and “The Character of the Governmental Action” (Vermont Law Review 2012). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
B.A., Yale; J.D., University of Chicago. Lee Liberman Otis is the Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President at the Federalist Society. She also serves as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference (ACUS), and as the co-chair of the National Constitution Center's Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board. She previously was a special assistant and an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, General Counsel of the Department of Energy, an associate in the appellate section of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, an associate counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and a law clerk to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. She also served as an assistant professor of law at George Mason, where she taught legislation, federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, civil procedure, and appellate advocacy. Ms. Otis has been an important member of the Federalist Society team since the organization’s beginnings. Together with David McIntosh, she led the effort to start what became the Chicago chapter of the Society. She also helped organize the Society’s first conference at Yale, its second conference at Chicago, and its first Lawyers Division chapter in Washington DC, as well as the effort to incorporate the Society, recruit its permanent staff, and obtain its early funding. She was a Founding Director of the Federalist Society.
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).
Panel: Originalism and Stare Decisis
Randy E. Barnett, Randy J. Kozel, John O. McGinnis, Eugene B. Meyer, Lee Liberman Otis
On January 3-4, 2020, the Federalist Society hosted its 22nd annual Faculty Conference at the...
Panel: Originalism and Stare Decisis
22nd Annual Federalist Society Faculty Conference
Washington, DCThe Federalist Paper, Fall 2019
Federalist Society chapters at law schools and in cities across the country hosted Supreme Court...
Supreme Court Preview: What Is in Store for October Term 2018?
John D. Adams, Noel J. Francisco, Tom Goldstein, Jenn L. Mascott, Elizabeth P. Papez, Pete Williams, Lee Liberman Otis, Dean Reuter
October 1st will mark the first day of oral arguments for the 2018 Supreme Court...
Supreme Court Preview: What Is in Store for October Term 2018?
John D. Adams, Noel J. Francisco, Tom Goldstein, Jenn L. Mascott, Lee Liberman Otis, Elizabeth P. Papez, Dean Reuter, Pete Williams
October 1st will mark the first day of oral arguments for the 2018 Supreme Court...
Supreme Court Preview: What Is in Store for October Term 2018?
Co-Sponsored by the Faculty Division and the Practice Groups
Washington, DCSpeak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech
Anthony M. Deardurff, Frederick Schauer, Keith E. Whittington
In Speak Freely, Prof. Whitting ton argues that universities have a distinctive and important mission...
Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech
Co-Sponsored by the Free Speech & Election Law Practice Group and the Faculty Division
TeleforumLunch Discussion: Becoming an Academic
2018 National Student Symposium
Washington, DCLunch Discussion: Becoming an Academic
2017 National Student Symposium
New York, NY