Justice, Supreme Court of Tennessee
Justice Sarah Campbell was confirmed to the Tennessee Supreme Court in 2022. She previously served as an Associate Solicitor General in the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office and as an associate at the law firm of Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington, DC. Justice Campbell earned her law degree from Duke University School of Law, a Master of Public Policy degree from Duke University, and her undergraduate degree from the University of Tennessee, where she received the Torchbearer Award. She served as a law clerk for Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. on the United States Supreme Court and Judge William H. Pryor Jr. on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Attorney General of Tennessee
Jonathan Skrmetti was sworn in to an eight-year term as Tennessee’s Attorney General and Reporter on September 1, 2022.
Prior to his current role, General Skrmetti served as Chief Counsel to Governor Bill Lee and as Chief Deputy Attorney General to his predecessor, Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery.
Before working for the State of Tennessee, General Skrmetti was a partner at Butler Snow LLP in Memphis. His legal career began with nearly a decade as a federal prosecutor. He worked at the Civil Rights Division at Main Justice and then at the Memphis U.S. Attorney’s Office and prosecuted sex traffickers, corrupt government officials, and violent white supremacists. In addition, General Skrmetti taught cyberlaw as an adjunct professor at the University of Memphis.
General Skrmetti earned honors degrees from George Washington University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. Following law school, Jonathan clerked for Judge Steven Colloton on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. He lives in Franklin, Tennessee, with his wife and four children.
Justice, Florida Supreme Court
On May 23, 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis appointed Justice Meredith L. Sasso to be the 93rd justice of the Supreme Court of Florida.
Justice Sasso was raised in Tallahassee. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Florida in 2005 and her law degree from the University of Florida in 2008, where she was a member of the Justice Campbell Thornal Moot Court Board. She began her career in private practice, representing clients in large loss general liability, auto negligence, and complex commercial claims in state and federal courts at trial and on appeal. She also served as guardian ad litem, representing abused or neglected children.
In August 2016, Justice Sasso joined the Office of the General Counsel to Governor Rick Scott, serving as Chief Deputy General Counsel. In this role, she represented the Governor in litigation before the Florida Supreme Court, the First District Court of Appeal, and state and federal trial courts, among other duties. In January 2019, Governor Rick Scott appointed her to the Fifth District Court of Appeal. Governor Ron DeSantis recommissioned her to the newly created Sixth District Court of Appeal on January 1, 2023, where she was elected by her colleagues to serve as its first Chief Judge.
She is an appointed member of the Florida Bar Appellate Court Rules Committee. She is also a member of the American Enterprise Institute Leadership Network and the Federalist Society.
Law Clerk, U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire
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.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
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.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Aditya Bamzai is a professor of law at the University of Virginia. He teaches administrative law, civil procedure, computer crime and conflicts of law, and he has written about these and related subjects. He has argued cases relating to the separation of powers and national security in the U.S. Supreme Court, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, D.C. Circuit and other federal courts of appeals. From 2019 to 2021, he served as a Member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a federal agency charged with ensuring that the government’s national security efforts are balanced with the need to protect privacy and civil liberties. Before entering the academy, Bamzai was an attorney-adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, and an appellate attorney in both private practice and for the National Security Division of the Department of Justice. Earlier in his career, he was a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States and to Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
Amul R. Thapar serves as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. His judicial career began in 2007 when President George W. Bush nominated him to serve on the Eastern District of Kentucky, making him the first South Asian Article III judge in American history. In 2017, he became President Donald J. Trump’s first appellate court nominee.
Before joining the bench, Judge Thapar served as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky. While United States Attorney, Judge Thapar worked on the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee (“AGAC”) and chaired the AGAC’s Controlled Substances and Asset Forfeiture subcommittee. He also served on the Terrorism and National Security subcommittee, the Violent Crime subcommittee, and the Child Exploitation working group.
Judge Thapar has worked in private practice, at Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., and Squire, Sanders & Dempsey in Cincinnati, Ohio. He also served as an Assistant United States Attorney in both the Southern District of Ohio and the District of Columbia.
Judge Thapar received his undergraduate degree from Boston College and his law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. After graduating, Judge Thapar worked as a law clerk to the Honorable S. Arthur Spiegel of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, and the Honorable Nathaniel R. Jones of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Judge Thapar has also published in the Yale Law Journal, Michigan Law Review, and Catholic University Law Review. He teaches courses on originalism, the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, and legal writing at Notre Dame Law School, the University of Virginia School of Law, and Vanderbilt Law School.
President and CEO, The Federalist Society
Sheldon Gilbert is the President and CEO of The Federalist Society. Gilbert has been involved in the conservative and libertarian legal movement since law school, and has served in prominent roles at both nonprofit organizations as well as corporate America.
A longtime constitutional litigator, Gilbert has represented clients through amicus and party briefs in nearly a hundred cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, at both the certiorari and merits stages. Most recently, Gilbert served as Senior Lead Counsel for Strategic Initiatives at Walmart, the world’s largest company, where he led teams providing legal advice related to government enforcement, internal investigations, government relations, public relations, and special projects at the center of law and policy.
Before joining Walmart, Gilbert served as Vice President for Content and Development and Senior Fellow for Constitutional Studies at the National Constitution Center, a congressionally chartered non-partisan center for constitutional education and debate, where he led both fundraising and programming efforts. While at the NCC, Gilbert helped ensure that the Center’s programming and exhibits incorporated constitutional perspectives from experts on both the right and the left, including the launch of the Center’s landmark permanent exhibit on the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments.
Prior to the National Constitution Center, Gilbert served as the director of the Institute for Justice’s Center for Judicial Engagement (CJE), where he educated the public about the role of the courts and the Constitution, where he frequently hosted discussions and debates on constitutional issues, and often spoke at Federalist Society lawyer and student chapters across the country.
He was also a litigator with the U.S. Chamber Litigation Center, the litigation arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he represented the U.S. Chamber in over 400 cases in federal and state courts addressing a wide range of legal issues, from free speech to property rights.
Gilbert is a graduate of the George Washington University Law School where he helped found a first-of-its-kind National Religious Freedom Moot Court, which hosted law students from across the country to debate important, emerging religious liberty issues. After graduating from GWU, he also taught as a professorial lecturer at the school.
A graduate of the University of Utah, Gilbert is a child of the Mountain West, where he was born in a coal mining town in Utah and raised in Idaho near the Grand Tetons. Before going to law school, Gilbert’s diverse interests led him to work in a wide range of roles, from software development project management for a nonprofit, to working in his University’s radiobiology research lab, to volunteer service in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for his church.
Gilbert is married with four children.
Chair, United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Judd and Mary Morris Leighton Professor of Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
Kimberly Yuracko is a nationally recognized expert in antidiscrimination law. Her scholarship explores the demands of antidiscrimination law across categories and contexts. She is most interested in what nondiscrimination requires with respect to individuals and groups that are different in relevant ways. Her research has touched on some of the most pressing policy questions of recent years and has been impactful beyond the walls of the academy. Her book, Gender Nonconformity and the Law, explores courts’ expanding protection for gender nonconformists and the limitations of the current approach. The book won a Choice Award. Her work on Title IX explores how athletic opportunities should be allocated across sex-segregated sports teams. Her more recent Title IX work focuses on athletic opportunities for transgender girls. Her work on homeschooling explores the extent to which state constitutional rights to education require regulation or oversight of homeschooling. Her work on tort law, with Ronen Avraham, challenges the common use of race- and sex- based actuarial tables to calculate tort damages. Yuracko and Avraham published an Op Ed based on their research, The Use of Sex-Based Data To Calculate Damages is a Stain on Our Legal System, in the Washington Post. Their torts work has also been translated into Japanese. Yuracko is the author of numerous articles and is a co-author on two casebooks, Employment Law Cases and Materials, and Feminist Jurisprudence Cases and Materials.
Chair, United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Assistant Professor, University of Toronto Faculty of Law
Adriana Robertson is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law. Professor Robertson’s research focuses on the intersection of law and finance. Trained in both law and finance, her research draws heavily on both empirical and theoretical methods from financial economics.
Professor Robertson holds a BA from the University of Toronto (Trinity College), where she was awarded the Lorne T. Morgan Gold Medal in Economics, a PhD in Finance from the Yale School of Management, and a JD from Yale Law School, where she was on the board of the Yale Journal on Regulation and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. She is an Affiliated Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Her recent work has been featured in major media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail, and The Financial Times.
Justice, Florida Supreme Court
Justice Renatha Francis is the 92nd Justice of the Florida Supreme Court.
On August 5, 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis appointed Justice Renatha Francis to the Florida Supreme Court. Previously, Governor Desantis appointed her to the 15th Judicial Circuit Court in Palm Beach County, where she successfully retained her seat for a six-year term in 2022. Justice Francis also served on the Circuit and County Courts in the 11th Judicial Circuit of Miami-Dade from 2017-19 by appointment to each by then-Governor Rick Scott. During her tenure on the bench, Justice Francis presided over large dockets, conducted numerous bench trials, and resolved hundreds of cases in family, civil, probate, and criminal law.
Justice Francis was raised in Kingston, Jamaica, where she operated small businesses while being a fulltime student. Her second career as a lawyer came after graduating from law school in Jacksonville, Florida. She clerked at the First District Court of Appeal for 6 ½ years. Thereafter, she joined Shutts & Bowen, LLP, Of Counsel, in Miami-Dade, where she was a member of the Mass Litigation and Class Action Practice Group, representing large corporate clients.
Justice Francis has been a member of several bar associations and has served as a panelist or participant at numerous conferences.
Justice Francis is the first Jamaican-American to serve on the Florida Supreme Court. She is married with two children.
Founding Partner, Lawson Huck Gonzalez, PLLC
Alan Lawson retired from the Florida Supreme Court in late 2022 after a 35-year legal and judicial career, founding the firm with his partners in early 2023.
Earlier in his legal career, Alan practiced as an associate and partner with a major Florida law firm, Steel Hector & Davis, and with the Orange County Attorney’s Office. In these capacities, Alan handled a wide array of case types in state and federal court, and before administrative agencies, including construction, government procurement, eminent domain, contract claims, public utility regulatory proceedings, business disputes, and class action defense, attaining a Martindale-Hubbell “AV” rating. This rating reflects a peer-review ranking at the highest level of professional excellence for legal knowledge, communication skills and ethical standards.
In 2002, Alan was appointed by then-Governor Jeb Bush as a Judge of the Ninth Judicial Circuit and served there for four years, presiding over more than 100 jury trials. Alan was then appointed by Governor Bush to the Fifth District Court of Appeal, where he served for eleven years, including a term as Chief Judge. In 2016, Governor Rick Scott appointed Alan to the Florida Supreme Court, where he served until his retirement from the bench. Throughout his career, Alan received numerous awards and recognitions, and has maintained a reputation for diligence, excellence, skill and professionalism.
Fireside Chat with Hon. John Skrmetti
Washington, DCNorth Central Florida Federalist Society Mixer feat. a Fireside Chat with Florida Supreme Court Justice Meredith Sasso
North Central Florida Lawyers Chapter
Ocala, FLA Fireside Chat with New Hampshire's Solicitor General
New Hampshire Lawyers Chapter
Manchester, NHFireside Chat with Judge Jim C. Ho
South Texas Student Chapter
Houston, TXFireside Chat with The Honorable Cory T. Wilson
SMU Student Chapter
Dallas, TXFireside Chat with Judge Amul Thapar
Virginia Student Chapter
Charlottesville, VAFireside Chat with the new Federalist Society President and CEO, Sheldon Gilbert
NoVA Lawyers Chapter
McLean, VAA Fireside Chat with Commissioner Andrea Lucas
Northwestern Student Chapter
Chicago, ILFireside Chat with Andrea Lucas
Chicago Student Chapter
Chicago, ILPerspectives on the Florida Supreme Court - A Fireside Chat with Justice Renatha Francis and former Justice Alan Lawson
Jacksonville Lawyers Chapter
Jacksonville, FL