Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise, Vanderbilt University Law School
Brian Fitzpatrick is the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School, where his research focuses on class action litigation, federal courts, judicial selection, and constitutional law. He is best known for his empirical studies of class action settlements as well as his book The Conservative Case for Class Actions (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Professor Fitzpatrick joined Vanderbilt's law faculty in 2007 after serving as the John M. Olin Fellow at New York University School of Law. He graduated first in his class from Harvard Law School and went on to clerk for Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. After his clerkships, Professor Fitzpatrick practiced commercial and appellate litigation for several years at Sidley Austin in Washington, D.C., and served as Special Counsel for Supreme Court Nominations to U.S. Senator John Cornyn. Before earning his law degree, Fitzpatrick graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's of science in chemical engineering from the University of Notre Dame. He has received the Hall-Hartman Outstanding Professor Award, which recognizes excellence in classroom teaching, for his Civil Procedure and Federal Courts courses.
Director of Litigation and Senior Attorney, Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute
Theodore H. Frank is director at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute and the Center for Class Action Fairness. Frank founded and ran CCAF as a non-profit, public interest law firm in 2009.
Frank has won several landmark appeals and tens of millions of dollars for consumers and other plaintiffs through his class action work. Adam Liptak of The New York Times calls Frank “the leading critic of abusive class action settlements” and the American Lawyer Litigation Daily referred to him as “the indefatigable scourge of underwhelming class action settlements.”
Previously, Frank clerked for the Honorable Frank H. Easterbrook on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and was a litigator at firms in Washington and Los Angeles and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Frank is a frequent public speaker and has testified before Congress multiple times on legal issues. He has been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, GQ, and the ABA Journal, among other publications.
In 2008, Frank was elected to membership in the American Law Institute. He also serves on the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society Litigation Practice Group. Frank graduated from The University of Chicago Law School in 1994 with high honors and as a member of the Order of the Coif and the Law Review. He is a member of the District of Columbia Bar and the state bars of California and Illinois.
Stephen Cranney has a dual PhD in sociology and demography from the University of Pennsylvania and is a freelance data scientist in the Washington, DC, area.
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).
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).
Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Policy, Department of Justice
GianCarlo Canaparo serves as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice. There, he oversees the Office's regulatory work and is the Department's liaison to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He also assists the White House in the process of selecting nominees for federal judgeships and advises Department leadership on policy and legal matters.
Before joining the Department, Canaparo was a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies where he researched constitutional law, administrative law, and civil rights.
Canaparo’s scholarship has appeared in various law reviews including the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the Notre Dame Law Review, the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, the Texas Review of Law and Politics, and the Administrative Law Review. His research has been cited by Justice Neil Gorsuch and featured in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. His analysis has appeared in Law & Liberty, Civitas, Fox News, The National Review, Law 360, FedSoc Blog, and other outlets.
Canaparo co-hosted The Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast, which follows the Supreme Court’s arguments and opinions and features interviews with judges, advocates, and scholars.
After graduating Georgetown law, Canaparo spent three years at the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and two years as a federal law clerk. He earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California at Davis.
Canaparo is a classical pianist and organist.
Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise, Vanderbilt University Law School
Brian Fitzpatrick is the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School, where his research focuses on class action litigation, federal courts, judicial selection, and constitutional law. He is best known for his empirical studies of class action settlements as well as his book The Conservative Case for Class Actions (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Professor Fitzpatrick joined Vanderbilt's law faculty in 2007 after serving as the John M. Olin Fellow at New York University School of Law. He graduated first in his class from Harvard Law School and went on to clerk for Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. After his clerkships, Professor Fitzpatrick practiced commercial and appellate litigation for several years at Sidley Austin in Washington, D.C., and served as Special Counsel for Supreme Court Nominations to U.S. Senator John Cornyn. Before earning his law degree, Fitzpatrick graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's of science in chemical engineering from the University of Notre Dame. He has received the Hall-Hartman Outstanding Professor Award, which recognizes excellence in classroom teaching, for his Civil Procedure and Federal Courts courses.
Director of Litigation and Senior Attorney, Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute
Theodore H. Frank is director at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute and the Center for Class Action Fairness. Frank founded and ran CCAF as a non-profit, public interest law firm in 2009.
Frank has won several landmark appeals and tens of millions of dollars for consumers and other plaintiffs through his class action work. Adam Liptak of The New York Times calls Frank “the leading critic of abusive class action settlements” and the American Lawyer Litigation Daily referred to him as “the indefatigable scourge of underwhelming class action settlements.”
Previously, Frank clerked for the Honorable Frank H. Easterbrook on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and was a litigator at firms in Washington and Los Angeles and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Frank is a frequent public speaker and has testified before Congress multiple times on legal issues. He has been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, GQ, and the ABA Journal, among other publications.
In 2008, Frank was elected to membership in the American Law Institute. He also serves on the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society Litigation Practice Group. Frank graduated from The University of Chicago Law School in 1994 with high honors and as a member of the Order of the Coif and the Law Review. He is a member of the District of Columbia Bar and the state bars of California and Illinois.
Professor of Law and the Mike and Teresa Baker College Professor, The University of Houston Law Center
Johnny Rex Buckles has been a faculty member of the University of Houston Law Center since August of 2000. He has also served as a Visiting Professor of Law at the Washington & Lee University School of Law. Professor Buckles has taught Taxation of Exempt Organizations, Federal Income Tax, Law & Theology, Estate Planning, Trusts & Wills, Contracts and Tax Policy Seminar. Professor Buckles’ primary research interests are in the law of tax and charity, and in law and theology. His publications include a number of law review articles and contributions to collective works. Professor Buckles holds a Juris Doctorate from the Harvard Law School, a Master of Arts in Biblical Studies from Dallas Theological Seminary, and a Bachelor of Science from Oklahoma State University.
T.J. Maloney Chair in Business Law, Fordham University School of Law
Professor Griffith is an expert in corporate and financial regulatory law. He writes and speaks on corporate law, political economy, and the constitutional rights of corporations and other business associations. In addition to his academic writing, he has authored or contributed to many amicus briefs, including: Iowa v SEC, NCPPR v SEC, AFBR v SEC, and In re Tesla.
Associate Professor of Law, University of Florida Levin College of Law
Professor Ben Johnson is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He researches and writes on governance by committees. Sometimes, the governing committee is a board of directors. Other times, it is a committee of justices at the Supreme Court. His research has won awards from national organizations in law (AALS) and political science (APSA) and can be found in law reviews and peer reviewed outlets. His recent work on the Supreme Court has been published in the Columbia Law Review and Alabama Law Review. Earlier work on district judges with financial conflicts (published in the North Carolina Law Review) led to a large exposé in the Wall Street Journal. His game theoretic model of corporate fiduciary duties is forthcoming at the BYU Law Review. He has ongoing projects on the Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket, corporate fiduciary duties, shareholder voting, and machine learning.
Professor Johnson teaches Corporations (the only course in the curriculum where students learn to build and maintain institutions that can make the world a better place long after they are gone), Empirical Methods for Lawyers, and topics on the federal judiciary.
Professor of Law and J. Philip Johnson Faculty Fellow, University of North Dakota School of Law
Michael S. McGinniss is Professor of Law and J. Philip Johnson Faculty Fellow at the University of North Dakota School of Law, where he joined the faculty in 2010 and served as the Dean from 2019 to 2022. He chairs the executive committee for the Federalist Society's Practice Group on Professional Responsibility and Legal Education.
Before entering the legal academy, Professor McGinniss served for twelve years as a Disciplinary Counsel for the Supreme Court of Delaware. He currently teaches courses on Professional Responsibility, Advanced Legal Ethics, Civil Procedure, and Federal Courts. He also serves as Faculty Advisor for the North Dakota Law Review and the UND Law Federalist Society student chapter.
Professor McGinniss’ research and scholarship interests are wide-ranging and include lawyer and judicial ethics, lawyer discipline and regulation of the profession, constitutional law (especially First Amendment, separation of powers, and federalism), and cultural challenges faced by conservatives in the law schools and the legal profession. His most recent law review article, Declaring Independence to Secure Integrity: The Supreme Court Justices' Code of Conduct, was published in the Federalist Society Review. His article Expressing Conscience with Candor: Saint Thomas More and First Freedoms in the Legal Profession, was published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.
Professor McGinniss has spoken to Federalist Society lawyer and student chapters across the country about judicial independence and ethics, especially relating to the federal courts and the United States Supreme Court Justices. In addition, he has spoken to several chapters about rising challenges to ideological diversity and targeting of conservative viewpoints in law schools and the legal profession. Although he is very pleased to speak on these and many other topics that may be of interest to lawyer and student chapters, in 2026-2027, he has particular interest in speaking on the topic “Lawyer Discipline as Political ‘Resistance’: Separation of Powers, Federalism, and the Rule of Law,” concerning his work-in-progress on the weaponization of professional disciplinary processes against conservative lawyers for political and ideological purposes.
Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Scholarship, Professor of Law, Liberty University
Timothy M. Todd, Ph.D., serves as Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Scholarship and Professor of Law. He also serves as the Director of the Wealth Management and Financial Planning Program at the law school, which has the distinction of being the first exclusively JD-based, CFP Board–registered program in the country.
He earned his Ph.D. in Personal Financial Planning from Kansas State University. He also earned a Master of Science (M.S.) in Applied Economics (with a concentration in Financial Economics) from the Johns Hopkins University. Moreover, he earned a Graduate Certificate in Applied Statistics from Kansas State University.
Dr. Todd has taught an array of courses, including individual income taxation; taxation of estates and gifts; wills, trusts, and estates; mergers and acquisitions; business planning; and bankruptcy, among others.
Todd graduated summa cum laude from Liberty University School of Law, where he graduated first in his class and served as managing editor of the law review. He clerked for the Honorable Eric G. Bruggink of the United States Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Todd has the distinct privilege of being the first Liberty Law alumnus to join the law school faculty full time. Todd also served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2016 to 2020, and he now serves as the first Associate Dean of Faculty Development & Scholarship at Liberty Law.
Dean Todd serves as a regular Forbes contributor, writing about taxes, tax planning, tax cases, and related areas.
In 2015 he was awarded an ATAX Research Fellowship, being named the 2015 John Raneri Fellow at the University of New South Wales School of Taxation and Business Law in Sydney, Australia.
Todd has been quoted in outlets such as Bloomberg, Bloomberg BNA Daily Tax Report, Tax Notes, Tax Notes Today, Accounting Today, and Business News Daily.
He is a former chair and vice chair of the ABA Section of Taxation’s Individual and Family Taxation Committee. He is a member of the AICPA National Financial Literacy Commission. He also serves as a council member for the Virginia Bar Association Taxation Section. Moreover, he has worked with the ABA’s Joint Task Force on Governance Issues for Distressed Companies, and he formerly served as a member of the AICPA’s Tax Practice and Procedures Committee.
Dr. Todd’s research and teaching interests include taxation, business planning, and corporate law, among other topics. His works have been published in Tax Notes, State Tax Notes, Texas A&M Law Review, Virginia Tax Review, Buffalo Law Review, University of Pittsburgh Law Review, Marquette Law Review, the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review, the Journal of Taxation, the University of Kansas Law Review, the South Carolina Law Review, the Charleston Law Review, the Journal of Tax Practice and Procedure, and the Liberty University Law Review.
In addition, he also holds an M.S. in Accounting, and he graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in Business (specializing in finance) from Liberty University.
Todd is licensed to practice law in the Commonwealth of Virginia. He is admitted to the bars of the Supreme Court of Virginia, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the United States Court of Federal Claims, and the United States Tax Court. He is a member of the Virginia State Bar, the Virginia Bar Association, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims Bar Association, the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, and the American Academy of Attorney-Certified Public Accountants.
Resident Fellow, Yale Law School
Lorianne Updike Toler is a constitutional legal historian and president of Libertas Constitutional Consulting, where she specializes in constitution-writing best practices, having worked and lived in Libya and the MENA region. She was the “midwife” to The Quill Project at Oxford and the founding president of The Constitutional Sources Project (www.ConSource.org) in Washington, DC. A graduate of Brigham Young University’s School of Communications and Law School (magna cum laude) and Oxford (MSt), she has published, spoken, and taught on US constitutional history, comparative constitutional history, intellectual property, Christianity, and religious freedom.
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).
Is Cy Pres Defensible?
Brian T. Fitzpatrick, Theodore "Ted" Frank
Cy pres is the practice of awarding class-action settlement funds to third-party organizations when distribution...
Is Cy Pres Defensible?
Teleforum7 Minute Presentations of Works in Progress Panel 2-A
24th Annual Federalist Society Faculty Conference
San Diego, CA24th Annual Federalist Society Faculty Conference
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Book Review: NOT Accountable, by Philip Howard (Part Two)
In light of the inequities and inefficiencies associated with monopolistic government unionism discussed in Part...
Measuring and Evaluating Public Responses to Religious Rights Rulings
Creighton Roland Meland, Stephen Cranney
The story of Jack Phillips and his cake shop—Masterpiece Cakeshop—is by now familiar. Jack Phillips...
Litigation Update: Volokh et al v. James
Eugene Volokh
In early December, Prof. Eugene Volokh, Rumble Canada, and Locals Technology filed a complaint in...
Litigation Update: Volokh et al v. James
Eugene Volokh
In early December, Prof. Eugene Volokh, Rumble Canada, and Locals Technology filed a complaint in...
Litigation Update: Volokh et al v. James
TeleforumState Court Docket Watch: In the Interest of C.G.
GianCarlo Canaparo
A recent case from the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, In the Interest of C.G.,[1] raised...