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Federalist Society

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Nov 19 2019
Tuesday 6:00 p.m. CDT    

Inaugural Meeting of the Amarillo Chapter of the Federalist Society

Amarillo, TX
Speakers:
James C. Ho
Sponsors:
Amarillo Lawyer Chapter
  • In-Person Event
Nov 19 2019
Tuesday 12:00 p.m. EDT    

The Congressional Review Act in an Election Year

Teleforum
Speakers:
Paul James Larkin • Amit Narang • Jonathan Wood
Topics:
Administrative Law & Regulation • Litigation • Property Rights
Sponsors:
Energy & Environment Practice Group
Nov 16 2019
Saturday 4:45 p.m. EDT    

Hon. Robert H. Bork Memorial Lecture

2019 National Lawyers Convention

Washington, DC
Speakers:
David J. Feder • Neil M. Gorsuch • Leonard A. Leo • Janie Nitze
Topics:
Constitution
Sponsors:
Washington DC Lawyer Chapter
  • In-Person Event
Nov 16 2019
Saturday 2:45 p.m. EDT    

Showcase Panel IV: Originalism and Precedent

2019 National Lawyers Convention

Washington, DC
Speakers:
Tara Leigh Grove • Bernadette Meyler • Michael Stokes Paulsen • Neomi Rao • Lawrence Solum
Topics:
Constitution • Supreme Court
Sponsors:
Washington DC Lawyer Chapter
  • In-Person Event
Nov 16 2019
Saturday 12:30 p.m. EDT    

Twelfth Annual Rosenkranz Debate & Luncheon

2019 National Lawyers Convention

Washington, DC
Speakers:
Stuart Kyle Duncan • Philip A. Hamburger • Michael W. McConnell • Eugene B. Meyer
Topics:
Constitution • Religious Liberty • Religious Liberties
Sponsors:
Washington DC Lawyer Chapter • Religious Liberties Practice Group
  • In-Person Event
Nov 16 2019
Saturday 11:00 a.m. EDT    

51 Imperfect Solutions for the Ethical Practice of Law

2019 National Lawyers Convention

Washington, DC
Speakers:
Barry Anderson • Josh Blackman • Jennifer Walker Elrod • Mauricio R. Hernandez • Thomas D. Morgan • John J. Park
Topics:
Jurisprudence • Philosophy • Professional Responsibility & Legal Education • Corporations & Securities • Religious Liberty • Free Speech
Sponsors:
Washington DC Lawyer Chapter • Professional Responsibility & Legal Education Practice Group
  • In-Person Event
Nov 16 2019
Saturday 11:00 a.m. EDT    

Originalism and Constitutional Property Rights Jurisprudence

2019 National Lawyers Convention

Washington, DC
Speakers:
Lisa Branch • Eric R. Claeys • Richard J. Lazarus • Thomas W. Merrill • Ilya Somin
Topics:
Environmental & Energy Law • Property Rights • Due Process • Fourteenth Amendment • Law & Economics
Sponsors:
Washington DC Lawyer Chapter • Energy & Environment Practice Group
  • In-Person Event
Nov 16 2019
Saturday 11:00 a.m. EDT    

Special Session: Executive Power vs. Congressional Power

2019 National Lawyers Convention

Washington, DC
Speakers:
W. Neil Eggleston • Edith H. Jones • Martin S. Lederman • A. Raymond Randolph • David B. Rivkin
Topics:
Constitution • Federalism • Separation of Powers • Federalism & Separation of Powers
Sponsors:
Washington DC Lawyer Chapter • Federalism & Separation of Powers Practice Group
  • In-Person Event
Nov 16 2019
Saturday 9:00 a.m. EDT    

Showcase Panel III: Does Originalism Protect Unenumerated Rights?

2019 National Lawyers Convention

Washington, DC
Speakers:
Stephanie Barclay • Randy E. Barnett • Jamal Greene • Gary Lawson • Michael W. McConnell • Kevin C. Newsom • Dean Reuter
Topics:
Civil Rights • Constitution • Philosophy • Supreme Court
Sponsors:
Washington DC Lawyer Chapter
  • In-Person Event
Nov 15 2019
Friday 7:30 p.m. EDT    

2019 NLC Florida Federalist Society Dinner

Washington, DC
  • In-Person Event
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Speaker Information
James C. Ho

James C. Ho

Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit

Biography

James C. Ho is a Circuit Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.  Before taking the bench on January 4, 2018, he was a partner and co-chair of the national Appellate and Constitutional Law practice group of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP.

As an appellate litigator for over a decade, including three years as the Solicitor General of Texas, Judge Ho presented 50 oral arguments in federal and state courts nationwide.  He won numerous appeals, including three merits cases at the U.S. Supreme Court.  He was routinely ranked among the nation’s leading lawyers by Benchmark, Chambers, Law360, The Legal 500, and The National Law Journal, among other publications.  His work has been cited favorably by courts at every level of both the federal and state judiciaries.  He won a Best Brief Award from the National Association of Attorneys General for every year that he served as solicitor general, and he is the only state solicitor general in history to be invited by the U.S. Supreme Court to express the views of a state.

Judge Ho has served in all three branches of the federal government.  On the Senate Judiciary Committee, he served as chief counsel of the Subcommittees on the Constitution and Immigration under Senator John Cornyn.  At the Justice Department, he served as Special Assistant to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and an attorney-advisor at the Office of Legal Counsel.  He clerked for Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court.

His record of public service also includes appointments as vice chair of the Federal Judicial Evaluation Committee in Texas and co-chair of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association Judiciary Committee, and as a member of the U.S. Magistrate Judge Merit Selection Panel for the Northern District of Texas, the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and the Continuity of Government Commission.

In addition, Judge Ho has served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law, where he taught seminars on U.S. Supreme Court Litigation and Religious Liberty.  He has authored numerous articles in respected law reviews nationwide, including an annual feature on exemplary judicial writing for The Green Bag Almanac & Reader.  He previously served as senior editor of The Green Bag and as co-editor of Pub. L. Misc.

Judge Ho graduated from Stanford University with honors and a B.A. in Public Policy in 1995, and the University of Chicago Law School with high honors in 1999.  Before law school, he was a legislative aide to California State Senator Quentin Kopp.  He and his wife Allyson live in Dallas, Texas, with their twin daughter and son.

 

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Speaker Information
Paul James Larkin

Paul James Larkin

Senior Legal Fellow, the Meese Institute for the Rule of Law, Advancing American Freedom

Biography

Paul J. Larkin is a Senior Legal Fellow in the Meese Institute for the Rule of Law at Advancing American Freedom. Paul has held various positions in the federal and state governments throughout his career, such as being an attorney in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the Criminal Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, an Assistant to the Solicitor General in the Office of the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice, Special Agent-in-Charge and Acting Director of the Criminal Investigation Division at the Environmental Protection Agency, and a member of the Parole Abolition and Sentencing Reform Commission and of the Juvenile Justice Reform Commission in the Office of Virginia Governor George Allen.

He has also worked at Verizon Communications and two law firms in Washington, D.C. His current research is principally in the fields of drug policy, criminal justice policy, and administrative law and policy. He has published numerous articles in law and public policy journals, both in print and online.

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Speaker Information
Amit Narang

Amit Narang

Regulatory Policy Advocate, Public Citizen, Inc.

Biography

Amit Narang is an expert on issues related to the federal regulatory process. He served as articles editor of The Administrative Law Review, a widely circulated legal journal focused on regulatory law and policy. He obtained his J.D. from American University-Washington College of Law and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

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Speaker Information
Jonathan Wood

Jonathan Wood

Vice President of Law & Policy, Property and Environment Research Center

Biography

Jonathan Wood is vice president of law and policy at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). An attorney, Jonathan has litigated environmental and property-rights cases in the Supreme Court of the United States, federal and state appellate courts, and trial courts across the country. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, National Review, Reason, and other outlets. And his research has been published in journals such as Environmental Law Reporter, Yale Journal on Regulation Notice & Comment, Pace Environmental Law Review, and California Western Law Review.

Prior to coming to PERC, Jonathan was a senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, where he litigated cases concerning the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, and other federal environmental laws. He was co-counsel for forest landowners in Weyerhaeuser Co. v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in which the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that private land could not be arbitrarily regulated as critical habitat under the ESA. He also led a successful effort to reform regulation of threatened species to better align the incentives of private landowners with the interests of rare species. 

Jonathan has testified before several congressional committees on wildlife conservation and endangered species topics. He has also appeared on national television and radio, including NPR’s All Things Considered, C-Span’s Washington Journal, Stossel, Fox News, and Hill.TV. 

Jonathan has a law degree from the New York University School of Law, a masters degree in economic policy from the London School of Economics, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Texas. He is on the executive committee for the Federalist Society’s Environmental Law and Property Rights Practice Group and a steering committee member for the Environmental Law Institute’s Emerging Leaders Initiative.

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Speaker Information
David J. Feder

David J. Feder

Associate, Jones Day

Biography

David Feder focuses on appeals and motions practice. He has drafted numerous briefs and motions in federal and state courts on behalf of a wide variety of clients ranging from professional sports teams to telecommunication, entertainment, and transportation companies. He also has argued multiple cases, including in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit (on behalf of a religious refugee from China) and in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (on behalf of a severely injured prison inmate).

David is a coauthor of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch's New York Times best seller, A Republic, If You Can Keep It. His scholarly works have been cited in the Supreme Court (Sveen v. Melin, 584 U.S. ___ (2018)), Harvard Law Review (130 Harv. L. Rev. 1496 (2017)), Stanford Law Review Online (69 Stan. L. Rev. Online 171 & 185 (2017)), and in other publications.

David received his law degree from Harvard in 2014, winning the Fay Diploma for graduating first in his class as well as the Project on the Foundations of Private Law Paper and the Irving Oberman Family Law Award for best papers in their respective fields. David received his undergraduate degree from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2011, where he received a Department Community Service Award, a Certificate of Recognition for Contributions to the Image of the Major, an Exceptional Academic Achievement Award, and was named an Outstanding Student in Organizational Communication.

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Neil M. Gorsuch

Neil M. Gorsuch

Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States

Biography

Neil M. Gorsuch, Associate Justice, was born in Denver, Colorado, August 29, 1967. He and his wife Louise have two daughters. He received a B.A. from Columbia University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a D.Phil. from Oxford University. He served as a law clerk to Judge David B. Sentelle of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and as a law clerk to Justice Byron White and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States. From 1995–2005, he was in private practice, and from 2005–2006 he was Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice. He was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in 2006. He served on the Standing Committee on Rules for Practice and Procedure of the U.S. Judicial Conference, and as chairman of the Advisory Committee on Rules of Appellate Procedure. He taught at the University of Colorado Law School. President Donald J. Trump nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and he took his seat on April 10, 2017.

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Leonard A. Leo

Leonard A. Leo

Co-Chairman, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies

Biography

Leonard is Co-Chairman and former Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society, joining the organization over 25 years ago. Since that time he has been instrumental in helping the organization top 70,000, focusing on the growth of lawyers membership, operations and activities advancing limited, constitutional government. In addition to his work at the Society, Leonard has advised President Trump on judicial selection, assisted with the Gorsuch and Kavanaugh Supreme Court selection and confirmation process, and served as a member of the transition team. He also organized the outside coalition efforts in support of the Roberts and Alito U.S. Supreme Court confirmations. Leonard was appointed by President George W. Bush to three terms to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom as chairman. He was also a U.S. Delegate to the UN Council and UN Commission on Human Rights during the Bush Administration. Leonard was the recipient of the 2009 Bradley Prize, along with the other founders and directors of the Federalist Society, for his work in advancing freedom and the rule of law. He is the coeditor of Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House, as well as the author of opinion editorials in the New York Times,The Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Leonard holds degrees from Cornell University and Cornell Law School. He presently resides in Northern Virginia, where he and his wife Sally have raised their seven children.

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Janie Nitze

Janie Nitze

New York Times Bestselling Author

Biography

Janie Nitze has written two New York Times bestsellers with Justice Gorsuch: Over Ruled and A Republic If You Can Keep It. She has also worked as a Senate-confirmed board member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, and a law clerk for Justices Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor. Janie received her B.A. in physics and her M.A. in statistics from Harvard University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School. She’s the mother of three young children and a co-founder of a preschool.

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Tara Leigh Grove

Tara Leigh Grove

Vinson & Elkins Chair in Law, University of Texas at Austin School of Law

Biography

Tara Leigh Grove is the Vinson & Elkins Chair in Law at the University of Texas School of Law. Grove graduated summa cum laude from Duke University and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as the Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review. Grove clerked for Judge Emilio Garza on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and then spent four years as an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, Appellate Staff, where she argued fifteen cases in the courts of appeals.

Grove’s research focuses on the federal judiciary, interpretive theory, and the constitutional separation of powers. She has published with such prestigious law journals as the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the New York University Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Texas Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, and the Vanderbilt Law Review. Grove has received awards for both her research and her teaching.

In 2021, Grove served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, a bipartisan commission created by President Biden and charged with examining proposals for Supreme Court reform. Since 2022, Grove has worked on the Princeton Initiative on Reclaiming the Constitutional Powers of Congress, which brings together former members of Congress, political scientists, and law professors. Grove serves as the Co-Chair of the section on the Appointments Process for the Princeton Initiative. Grove is a co-author of Low & Jeffries' Federal Courts and the Law of Federal-State Relations, a leading federal courts casebook, and she has served as the Chair of the Federal Courts Section of the Association of American Law Schools. Grove has been a visiting professor at both Harvard Law School and Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

 
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Bernadette Meyler

Bernadette Meyler

Carl and Shelia Spaeth Professor of Law; Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life, Stanford Law School

Biography

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.

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Michael Stokes Paulsen

Michael Stokes Paulsen

Distinguished University Chair and Professor of Law, University of St. Thomas School of Law

Biography

Michael Stokes Paulsen is Distinguished University Chair & Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas, where he has taught since 2007. Professor Paulsen was previously the McKnight Presidential Professor of Law & Public Policy and Associate Dean at the University of Minnesota Law School, where he taught from 1991-2007. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, Yale Law School, and Yale Divinity School. He has served as a federal prosecutor, as Attorney-Advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, and as counsel for the Center for Law & Religious Freedom.

Paulsen has taught as a visiting professor at Princeton University, Pepperdine University, Georgetown University, Bethel University, Uppsala University (Sweden), Daystar University (Kenya), and University of the Andes (Chile). He has been a guest lecturer at universities around the nation, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Penn, NYU, Georgetown, Virginia, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan, University of Chicago, and Northwestern.

Professor Paulsen is the author of more than ninety scholarly articles and book chapters on a wide variety of constitutional law topics, published in law journals including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, and the Northwestern University Law Review. He is the author or co-author of three books, including The Constitution: An Introduction (Basic Books, 2015) (co-authored with Luke Paulsen) and the casebook The Constitution of the United States, now in its fifth edition with Foundation Press, co-authored with Michael McConnell, Samuel Bray, and Will Baude.

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Neomi Rao

Neomi Rao

Judge, United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit

Biography

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.

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Lawrence Solum

Lawrence Solum

William L. Matheson and Robert M. Morgenthau Distinguished Professor of Law and Douglas D. Drysdale Research Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law

Biography

Lawrence B. Solum is an internationally recognized legal theorist who works in constitutional theory, procedure and the philosophy of law. Solum contributes to debates in constitutional theory and normative legal theory. He is especially interested in the intersection of law with the philosophy of language and with moral and political philosophy. His series of articles on constitutional originalism have shaped contemporary thinking about the great debate between originalism and constitutional theory. Solum’s original theory of the fundamental nature and purpose of law, “Virtue Jurisprudence,” has been debated and discussed in Asia, Europe and North America. He also works on problems of law and technology, including Internet governance, copyright policy and patent law. His pathbreaking article, “Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences,” published in the early 1990s, is widely acknowledged as far ahead of its time.

Solum received his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and received his B.A. with highest departmental honors in philosophy from the University of California at Los Angeles. While at Harvard, he served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After graduation, he worked for the law firm of Cravath, Swaine, and Moore in New York, and then clerked for Judge William A. Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Prior to joining the UVA Law faculty in 2020, he was a member of the faculty at Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Illinois, the University of San Diego and Loyola Marymount University, and visited at Boston University and the University of Southern California. He regularly teaches Civil Procedure and Constitutional Law. His other teaching includes seminars in constitutional theory and the philosophy of law as well as courses in conflict of laws, federal courts, intellectual property and internet law and governance.

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Stuart Kyle Duncan

Stuart Kyle Duncan

Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit

Biography

Judge Duncan received his B.A. from Louisiana State University in 1994, his J.D. from the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University in 1997, and his LL.M. from Columbia Law School in 2004.

After graduating from law school, he clerked for Louisiana-based Circuit Judge John Malcolm Duhé Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

From 2008–2012, Duncan served as Appellate Chief for Louisiana's Attorney General's office. From 2012–2014, he served as general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. From 2004-2008, he was an assistant professor of law at the University of Mississippi School of Law.

Before becoming a judge, Duncan practiced at the Washington, D.C. firm of Schaerr Duncan LLP, where he was a founding partner. He was appointed by President Trump to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on May 1, 2018.

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Philip A. Hamburger

Philip A. Hamburger

Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law, Columbia Law School; CEO, New Civil Liberties Alliance

Biography

Philip Hamburger is the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and Chief Executive Officer at the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Before coming to Columbia, he was the John P. Wilson Professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

He writes on constitutional law and its history—with particular emphasis on religious liberty, freedom of speech and the press, judicial office, administrative power, and unconstitutional conditions.

His books are Separation of Church and State (Harvard 2002), Law and Judicial Duty (Harvard 2008), Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (Chicago 2014), The Administrative Threat (Encounter 2017), and Liberal Suppression: Section 501(c)(3) and the Taxation of Speech (Chicago 2018). A forthcoming book is Purchasing Submission: Conditions, Power, and Freedom (Harvard 2021).

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has served on the board of directors of the American Society for Legal History. He has twice received the Sutherland Prize for the most significant contribution to English legal history, and has been awarded the Henry Paolucci - Walter Bagehot Book Award, the Hayek Book Prize, and the Bradley Prize.

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Michael W. McConnell

Michael W. McConnell

Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Constitutional Law Center, Stanford Law School

Biography

Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and Faculty Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, he served as a Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was nominated by President George W. Bush, a Republican, and confirmed by a Democratic Senate by unanimous consent. McConnell has previously held chaired professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah, and visiting professorships at Harvard and NYU. He teaches courses on constitutional law, constitutional history, First Amendment, and interpretive theory. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law and theory, especially church and state, equal protection, and separation of powers. His book, “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution,” was published by Princeton University Press in 2020, based on the Tanner Lectures in Human Values, which he delivered at Princeton in 2019. His latest book, co-authored with Nathan Chapman, “Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience,” was published by Oxford University Press in mid-2023. McConnell has argued sixteen cases in the United States Supreme Court, most recently Carney v. Adams (2020). defending a provision of the Delaware Constitution requiring political balance on that state’s courts. More recently, he was co-counsel in Gonzalez v. Google. He earned his B.A. from Michigan State University and his J.D. from the University of Chicago, and has received honorary degrees from Notre Dame University and Michigan State. He served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. and D.C. Circuit Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright. He has been Assistant General Counsel of the Office of Management & Budget, Assistant to the Solicitor General of the Department of Justice, and a member of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board. He is Senior of Counsel to the law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, and is co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Review Board.

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Eugene B. Meyer

Eugene B. Meyer

Former President & CEO, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies

Biography

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.

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Barry Anderson

Barry Anderson

Associate Justice, Minnesota Supreme Court (ret.)

Biography

Former Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Barry Anderson is a 1976 graduate of Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota and a 1979 graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School. He was a member of the Minnesota Court of Appeals from August 1998 until his appointment to the Supreme Court.  He was sworn in and joined the court on October 13, 2004, and served through to his retirement on May 10, 2024.

He previously was a partner in the Minneapolis and Hutchinson law firm of Arnold, Anderson & Dove, PLLP, and also served the City of Hutchinson as City Attorney from 1987 to 1998. He is certified by the Minnesota State Bar Association as a civil trial specialist.

Justice Anderson’s background includes substantial public service including as a board member and chair of variety of community organizations including service clubs, task forces and a local public access channel as well as a wide variety of other community activities.

Justice Anderson also served on the Minnesota Judicial Council, the managing body for the Minnesota Judicial Branch. He is also a frequent contributor to continuing legal education efforts on both appellate advocacy issues as well as general trial practice.

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Josh Blackman

Josh Blackman

Professor of Law, South Texas College of Law Houston

Biography

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.

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Jennifer Walker Elrod

Jennifer Walker Elrod

Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit

Biography

Jennifer Walker Elrod is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She was nominated to the Fifth Circuit in 2007, and she served as a Circuit Judge on the court until assuming the role of Chief Judge in October 2024. Prior to serving as a Circuit Judge, Chief Judge Elrod was appointed and then twice elected Judge of the 190th District Court of Harris County, Texas, where she spent over five years presiding over more than 200 jury and non-jury trials.

Chief Judge Elrod graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was an active member of the Harvard Federalist Society, an Ames Moot Court finalist, and a Senior Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. She clerked for the Honorable Sim Lake in the Southern District of Texas. Before serving as a judge, Chief Judge Elrod worked in private practice, focusing on civil litigation, antitrust, and employment matters.

She has been repeatedly recognized for her work as a jurist, as well as for her pro bono work and contributions to the community. She has been named the 2022 Texas Review of Law & Politics’ Jurist of the Year, the 2018 Harvard Federalist Society’s Alumni of the Year, the 2016–17 Texas Association of Civil Trial and Appellate Specialists’ Appellate Judge of the Year, and the 2008 Mexican-American Bar Association of Texas’s Judge of the Year.

Chief Judge Elrod is actively engaged in the academic and legal communities. Chief Judge Elrod currently serves on the Board of Directors and as the Jurist-in-Residence at the South Texas College of Law, where she teaches civil procedure and First Amendment law. She is also a member of the American Law Institute and of the Board of Advisors for the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and she is a former member of the Board of Regents of her alma mater, Baylor University, and the Board of Visitors at Brigham Young University Law School. She previously served as the Chair of the Codes of Conduct Committee for the Judicial Conference of the United States. She has also served as the M.D. Anderson Visiting Public Service Professor at the Texas Tech University School of Law and as Jurist-in-Residence at Brigham Young University Law School, and she has taught legal writing at the University of Houston Law Center. She presented the Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Distinguished Lecture at the Washington and Lee University School of Law and is a frequent speaker on the topics of trial and appellate procedure, ethics, employment law, and constitutional law. Chief Judge Elrod also serves on the board of the Garland R. Walker Inn of Court, and co-produces an annual musical CLE, for which her pupilage group has won multiple national awards.

Chief Judge Elrod’s publications include: Trial by Siri: AI Comes to the Courtroom; Don’t Mess with Texas Judges: In Praise of the State Judiciary; For Good: Enriching Your Practice and Your Life Through Pro Bono and Community Service; Is the Jury Still Out?: A Case for the Continued Viability of the American Jury; and W(h)ither the Jury? The Diminishing Role of the Jury Trial in our Legal System.

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Mauricio R. Hernandez

Mauricio R. Hernandez

Principal, Hernandez Law Office

Biography

Mauricio "Mo" Hernandez is a business attorney in Goodyear, Arizona. Before moving to the Grand Canyon State, he was in general practice in Northern Nevada and represented plaintiffs in state and federal court. Prior to his career in law, Mo spent more than two decades working in petroleum marketing operations and management for a Fortune 50 multinational.

For the past five years, Mo has been vigorously engaged in legislative efforts to advance the free speech and freedom of association interests of lawyers in Arizona. He has also continued fighting the foreseeable intensification of lawyer discipline resulting through new lawyer speech codes. In addition, he has rallied opposition against similar regulatory encroachments on attorney autonomy, individual judgment, and economic choice.

In 2015, the Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives appointed him to the House Ad Hoc Study Committee on Mandatory Bar Associations. In 2016, he was a principal drafter of the House Concurrent Memorial urging the state supreme court to modify its rules related to the state bar to ensure the protection of First Amendment freedoms. He is also the primary author of House legislation to bifurcate the regulatory and non-regulatory functions of the Arizona Bar.

He continues writing, speaking, and advocating for the assertion of attorney rights, greater regulatory transparency, and improved public protection. He graduated with honors from Loyola Marymount University and earned a JD from Western State University College of Law.

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Thomas D. Morgan

Thomas D. Morgan

Oppenheim Professor Emeritus of Antitrust and Trade Regulation Law, George Washington University Law School

Biography

Thomas D. Morgan is Oppenheim Professor of Antitrust and Trade Regulation Law Emeritus at George Washington University. He was Dean of the Emory University School of Law and on the faculties of the University of Illinois and Brigham Young University. He is co-author of Problems and Materials on Professional Responsibility (14th Ed. 2022), with Professors Mitt Regan and John Dzienkowski. Professor Morgan served as an Associate Reporter for both the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law (Third): The Law Governing Lawyers and the American Bar Association’s Ethics 2000 Commission. He is an Executive Committee member of the Federalist Society’s Professional Responsibility and Legal Education Practice Group and a member of the ABA Business Law Section’s Professional Responsibility committee. His book, “The Vanishing American Lawyer” (2010), was published by Oxford University Press.

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John J. Park

John J. Park

Legal Scholar and Solo Practitioner

Biography

Jack received his B.A. in History from the University of Virginia in 1977, graduating with Highest Distinction. After graduating Yale Law School in 1980, he served active duty in the U.S. Army's JAG Corps, rising to the rank of Major, where he represented the United States in more than 250 cases.

He practiced for a decade as an Associate for Bradley Arant in Birmingham, Alabama. He proudly served the State of Alabama in the Office of the Attorney General, both as Deputy and Assistant Attorney General, handling complex civil and criminal litigation cases for the people of Alabama. In 2000, he won the "Best Brief Award" from the National Association of Attorneys General for his brief in a case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, James Alexander v. Martha Sandoval – a case he won. He was Special Assistant to the Inspector General for the Corporation for National and Community Service, Visiting Legal Fellow for the Center for Judicial and Legal Studies for the Heritage Foundation, Of Counsel at Strickland Brockington Lewis, a solo practitioner, and General Counsel for Indigo Energy.

Most recently, he "re-upped" for military service, volunteering his legal services to the Georgia State Defense Force where twice each month he provided legal services for National Guardsmen who were being deployed. He wore his military uniform for the last time in October 2024.

Jack Park passed away on March 16, 2026.

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Lisa Branch

Lisa Branch

Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit

Biography

On March 20, 2018, Judge Elizabeth L. Branch (Lisa) was sworn in as a United States Circuit Judge for the Eleventh Circuit.

Judge Branch attended and graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina (B.A., cum laude, 1990), and Emory University School of Law (J.D., with distinction, 1994).

After graduating from law school, Judge Branch served as a federal law clerk to The Honorable J. Owen Forrester of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia from 1994 to 1996. Following her clerkship, Judge Branch joined the litigation department of Smith, Gambrell & Russell, LLP in Atlanta as an associate and then a partner.

From 2004 to 2008, Judge Branch was a senior official in the Administration of President George W. Bush in Washington, D.C. She served first as the Associate General Counsel for Rules and Legislation at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and then as the Counselor to the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the U. S. Office of Management and Budget.

She returned to Smith Gambrell in 2008 as a litigation partner. Judge Branch then was appointed to the Court of Appeals of Georgia by Governor Nathan Deal, taking office on September 4, 2012, where she served until March 19, 2018.

Judge Branch is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Atlanta Lawyers Chapter for the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies.

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Eric R. Claeys

Eric R. Claeys

Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University

Biography

Eric R. Claeys is Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. He has written widely in the fields of property, private law, and constitutional law. Professor Claeys’s current research interests focus on flourishing- and labor-based natural rights justifications for property—in American property theory, in intellectual property, and in contemporary regulation of shale gas exploration and hydraulic fracturing.  He is a member of the American Law Institute, he serves on the ALI’s Members’ Consultative Group for the first Restatement of Copyright, and he also serves as an adviser to the Restatement (Fourth) of the Law of Property.

Professor Claeys received his JD from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.  He received his AB from Princeton University, and he is a former visiting fellow and current member of Princeton’s Politics Department’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.   After law school, Professor Claeys clerked for the Hon. Melvin Brunetti, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and the Hon. William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States.

Professor Claeys’s main teaching interests include Property, Torts, Jurisprudence, and Intellectual Property. In recent years, he has also taught Water Law, Remedies, Estates and Trusts, Trade Secrecy, Constitutional Law, Torts, and Oil and Gas law.  Spring 2018, he is teaching Torts and Jurisprudence as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School.

 

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Richard J. Lazarus

Richard J. Lazarus

Howard J. and Katherine W. Aibel Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Biography

Richard Lazarus is the Howard J. and Katherine W. Aibel Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches Environmental Law, Natural Resources Law, Supreme Court Advocacy, and Torts. Professor Lazarus has represented the United States, state and local governments, and environmental groups in the United States Supreme Court in more than 40 cases and has presented oral argument in 14 of those cases, most recently for respondent in Murr v. Wisconsin (2017). He also filed briefs on behalf of governmental parties in many other regulatory takings cases including Tahoe Sierra Preservation Counsel v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (2002), Palazzolo v. Rhode Island (2001), Suitum v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (1997), Dolan v. City of Tigard (1004), Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council (1992), Nollan v. California Coastal Council (1987), San Diego Gas & Electric v. City of San Diego (1981), and Agins v. City of Tiburon (1980). He writes broadly on topics relating to Supreme Court decision-making, focusing on both advocacy before and within the Court, and on environmental law. He will be publishing next year a book on the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, which tells the inside story of the case based on interviews with the relevant Executive Branch officials, competing advocates, and judges and Justices on the D.C. Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court. See Richard Lazarus. The Rule of Five: Making History at the Supreme Court (Harvard University Press 2020).Before joining the Harvard law faculty, he was the Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., Professor of Law at Georgetown University, where he founded the Georgetown Supreme Court Institute and served as its faculty director. Professor Lazarus previously worked for the Solicitor General's Office (1986-89), where he was Assistant to the Solicitor General. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1979 and has a B.S. from the University of Illinois in Chemistry and a B.A. in Economics.



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Thomas W. Merrill

Thomas W. Merrill

Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law, Columbia Law School

Biography

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.

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Ilya Somin

Ilya Somin

Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University

Biography

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.

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W. Neil Eggleston

W. Neil Eggleston

Partner, Kirkland & Ellis LLP

Biography

Neil Eggleston is a litigation partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP.

Neil has a distinguished record of public service, and has held a number of senior government roles. He was White House Counsel to President Obama from 2014 to 2017, and advised the president on all legal and constitutional issues across a broad spectrum of domestic and foreign policy matters. Neil’s practice focuses on enforcement defense including at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), U.S. Attorney’s Offices, and other enforcement agencies.

Earlier in his career, Neil served as Associate Counsel to President Clinton from 1993 to 1994. Heals o served as Deputy Chief Counsel, U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee Investigating the Iran/Contra Affair (1987-1988); Assistant U.S. Attorney (1981-1987); and Chief Appellate Attorney for the Southern District of New York (1986-1987).

Neil served as a law clerk for the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (1978-1979) and for Chief Justice Warren E. Burger on the United States Supreme Court (1979-1980).

Neil teaches a seminar in Presidential Power at Harvard Law School in the spring of 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2021 and at Yale Law School in the spring of 2018. He also frequently lectures at American Bar Association and similar seminars. 

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Edith H. Jones

Edith H. Jones

Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit

Biography

Edith Jones graduated from Alamo Heights High School, where she was a National  Merit Scholar. In 1971, she received her B.A. in Economics from Cornell University, graduating with honors. In 1974, she was awarded her J.D. at the  University of Texas Law School, where she was a law review editor and received the Order of the Coif. 

Judge Jones was the first female partner at Andrews, Kurth, Campbell & Jones (now Hunton Andrews Kurth) where she practiced various types of litigation and  bankruptcy cases. Judge Jones went on the federal bench on June 1, 1985. 

Judge Jones served as a former member of the National Bankruptcy Review  Commission, and as a member of the Judicial Conference Commission on Bankruptcy Rules. Judge Jones served on the White House Fellows Commission.  Judge Jones served on the board of the Sam Houston Area Council of the Boy Scouts  of America. She has been a member of the Garland Walker Inn of Court in Houston for more than 20 years and its President for at least ten years. Judge Jones is also  on the Board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation.

 

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Martin S. Lederman

Martin S. Lederman

Professor from Practice, Georgetown University Law Center

Biography
Professor Lederman has taught at the Georgetown University Law Center since 2005, with an emphasis on constitutional law; separation of powers; the law of religion; national security topics; and executive branch lawyering. He is the Senior Fellow of the Supreme Court Institute at the Law Center. He has published articles on, inter alia, Congress’s authority to regulate the Commander in Chief’s conduct of war; the constitutionality of wartime military courts; and the law of religion. He also contributes regularly to Just Security, Balkinization and other blogs and periodicals, writing principally on issues relating to constitutional law, the Supreme Court, war powers, and religion and the law. Professor Lederman was Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2009 to 2010 and again from 2021 to 2023. He served as law clerk to Chief Judge Jack B. Weinstein on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and to Judge Frank M. Coffin on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
 
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A. Raymond Randolph

A. Raymond Randolph

Judge, United States Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit

Biography

Judge Randolph was confirmed by the Senate and appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by President George H. W. Bush in July 1990. 

Judge Randolph received his B.S. degree in 1966 from Drexel University, majoring in economics and basic engineering.  At Drexel, he was president of the debate society, vice president of the Student Senate, and a member of the varsity wrestling squad.  In 1969, he received his J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, summa cum laude.  Judge Randolph ranked first in his law school class all three years and was managing editor of the Law Review.

After graduation, Judge Randolph served as a law clerk to Judge Henry J. Friendly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York.

Admitted to the California Bar in 1970 (and to the District of Columbia bar in 1973), Judge Randolph worked as Assistant to the Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice, in Washington, D.C., 1970-1973.

After two years in private practice, Judge Randolph was named Deputy Solicitor General of the United States, a position he held from 1975-1977. 

In 1979, Judge Randolph was appointed Special Counsel to the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (the Ethics Committee) of the United States House of Representatives, remaining in this position until 1980.

In the 1980s, Judge Randolph held a number of positions while in private practice, including Special Assistant Attorney General for the states of New Mexico (1985 90), Utah (1986-1990) and Montana (1983-1990).  He also served as a Member of the Advisory Panel of the Federal Courts Study Committee.

From 1971-1990, Judge Randolph argued 23 times in the United States Supreme Court, winning 20 of his cases.

As an Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center from 1974-1978 he taught courses in civil procedure and injunctions.  In 1992 he taught a course in constitutional law.  He is a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law at George Mason School of Law and for the past ten years has been teaching First Amendment law.  He also serves on the Judicial Advisory Board of the George Mason University Law and Economics Center.

From 1993 through 1995 Judge Randolph was a member of the Committee on Codes of Conduct of the Judicial Conference of the United States, and from 1995 to 1998 served as the Committee's chairman.  He also served as the judicial liaison to the American Bar Association’s Administrative Law Section.

Judge Randolph is a member of the Board of Visitors at Drexel University Law School and was named to the “Drexel One Hundred” as a leading alumnus.  In 2002 he was presented the James Wilson Award by the University of Pennsylvania Law School.  In November 2005 he delivered the Fifth Annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture at the Annual Lawyers Convention of the Federalist Society.  He has published numerous articles, the most recent of which is in the June 2006 issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.  

Judge Randolph is married to the Honorable Eileen J. O’Connor, formerly Assistant Attorney General, Tax Division, U.S. Department of Justice.  His son John Trevor Randolph is an investment banker in New York.  His daughter Cynthia Lee Randolph is an artist living in San Francisco.

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David B. Rivkin

David B. Rivkin

Partner, Baker Hostetler LLP

Biography

David Rivkin is a member of the firm's litigation, international and environmental teams and is co-leader of the firm's national appellate practice. He has extensive experience in constitutional, administrative and international law litigation and has been involved in numerous high-profile cases. With his prior experience in the government sector, David draws on a wealth of knowledge when providing compliance advice to companies and handling enforcement proceedings before government agencies on issues arising out of multilateral and unilateral sanctions, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), anti-boycott issues, bankruptcy and financial fraud matters, and environmental and energy issues.

David has developed and implemented legislative, regulatory and litigation initiatives for two presidential administrations. Over the years, he has published hundreds of articles, op-eds, book reviews and book chapters on a variety of international, legal, constitutional, defense, arms control, foreign policy, environmental and energy issues for various newspapers and magazines, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today and The Los Angeles Times, and has been a frequent commentator and guest on TV and radio shows including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, NPR and PBS.

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Stephanie Barclay

Stephanie Barclay

Professor of Law and Faculty Director for the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, Georgetown University Law Center

Biography

Stephanie Barclay is a Professor of Law at Georgetown Law School, and the Faculty Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. Her research focuses on the role our different democratic institutions play in protecting minority rights, particularly at the intersection of free speech and religious exercise. Barclay‘s work is published or is forthcoming in leading journals such as the Harvard Law Review, the Chicago Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal Forum. One of her articles was also selected for the 2020 Stanford/Harvard/Yale Junior Faculty Forum. Her work has been featured in many media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, Bloomberg BNA, The Hill, and Law 360. And her work has also been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Prior to joining Georgetown, Barclay was twice voted Professor of the Year. Barclay has also litigated constitutional cases at both the trial and appellate level, including before the U.S. Supreme Court. Barclay served as a law clerk to Judge N. Randy Smith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and to Justice Neil M. Gorsuch of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Barclay is a Faculty Affiliate at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School; and she is a Nootbaar Fellow at the Nootbaar Institute on Law, Religion, and Ethics at Pepperdine University. She currently serves as the Chair for the AALS Law and Religion Section and as a Member of the Executive Committee for the AALS Constitutional Law Section. She graduated summa cum laude from BYU Law School, where she was elected to the Order of the Coif. She is completing a Ph.D. in Law at Oxford University as a Clarendon Scholar and a Tang Scholar.

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Randy E. Barnett

Randy E. Barnett

Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown University Law Center

Biography

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.

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Jamal Greene

Jamal Greene

Dwight Professor of Law, Columbia Law School

Biography

JAMAL GREENE is the Dwight Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he teaches courses in constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, and the law of the political process. He is the author of How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession With Rights Is Tearing America Apart, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on constitutional law and theory. He is also a co-chair of the Oversight Board, an independent body that reviews content moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram. He served as a law clerk to the Hon. Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for the Hon. John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court. He earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 2005 and his A.B. from Harvard College in 1999.

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Gary Lawson

Gary Lawson

Levin, Mabie & Levin Professor of Law, University of Florida Levin College of Law

Biography

Professor Gary Lawson joined the University of Florida Levin College of Law faculty on July 1, 2024, after twenty-four years at Boston University School of Law and eleven years at Northwestern University School of Law. While at Boston University, he was named a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor in 2022 – the highest faculty honor within the university. He has authored or co-authored nine editions of a textbook on administrative law, a textbook on constitutional law, five university press books, one popular press book, and more than one hundred scholarly articles on topics ranging from aspects of constitutional theory and history to the proof of legal propositions. His works have been cited in more than twenty opinions of United States Supreme Court justices. He is a founding member, and serves on the Board of Directors, of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies and is on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Heritage Guide to the Constitution.

 

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Michael W. McConnell

Michael W. McConnell

Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Constitutional Law Center, Stanford Law School

Biography

Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and Faculty Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, he served as a Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was nominated by President George W. Bush, a Republican, and confirmed by a Democratic Senate by unanimous consent. McConnell has previously held chaired professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah, and visiting professorships at Harvard and NYU. He teaches courses on constitutional law, constitutional history, First Amendment, and interpretive theory. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law and theory, especially church and state, equal protection, and separation of powers. His book, “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution,” was published by Princeton University Press in 2020, based on the Tanner Lectures in Human Values, which he delivered at Princeton in 2019. His latest book, co-authored with Nathan Chapman, “Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience,” was published by Oxford University Press in mid-2023. McConnell has argued sixteen cases in the United States Supreme Court, most recently Carney v. Adams (2020). defending a provision of the Delaware Constitution requiring political balance on that state’s courts. More recently, he was co-counsel in Gonzalez v. Google. He earned his B.A. from Michigan State University and his J.D. from the University of Chicago, and has received honorary degrees from Notre Dame University and Michigan State. He served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. and D.C. Circuit Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright. He has been Assistant General Counsel of the Office of Management & Budget, Assistant to the Solicitor General of the Department of Justice, and a member of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board. He is Senior of Counsel to the law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, and is co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Review Board.

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Kevin C. Newsom

Kevin C. Newsom

Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit

Biography

Judge Kevin C. Newsom is a member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He sits in Birmingham, Alabama.

Before his appointment to the bench, Judge Newsom was the head of the appellate practice group at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP and, before that, the Solicitor General of Alabama. As a practicing lawyer, Judge Newsom argued four cases in the Supreme Court of the United States, and nearly 40 more in the United States Courts of Appeals and state supreme and appellate courts.

Judge Newsom graduated summa cum laude from Samford University and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an articles editor on the Harvard Law Review. Following law school, Judge Newsom clerked for Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice David H. Souter of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Judge Newsom teaches at Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, Stanford Law School, and the University of Chicago Law School. His published work has appeared in the Yale Law Journal and the Harvard Law Review.

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Dean Reuter

Dean Reuter

Executive Vice President, The Federalist Society

Biography

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.

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