Harlan Fiske Stone Professor of Constitutional Law, Columbia Law School
A leading administrative and constitutional law scholar, Gillian Metzger ’96 writes and teaches in the areas of administrative law, constitutional law, and federal courts, with an emphasis on federalism and privatization. In 2023-2024, she served as Acting Assistant Attorney General and Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice.
Metzger's recent work covers topics ranging from constitutional attacks on the administrative state to appropriations, administrative law under the Roberts Court, and the role of administrative agencies in a polarized world. In 2015, Metzger won the American Bar Association Administrative Law Section Annual Scholarship Award for “The Constitutional Duty to Supervise,” which examined presidential control and oversight of the modern administrative state. She is a co-editor of Gellhorn & Byse’s Administrative Law: Cases and Comments, 13th ed. (Foundation Press, 2023), a seminal administrative law casebook.
Professor Metzger was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and is a Senior Fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States. In 2020, she was awarded Columbia University's Faculty Mentorship Award and in 2014, the Law School’s graduating class awarded Metzger the Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching, recognizing, among many other accomplishments, her commitment to mentoring new generations of law students.
In 2012, Metzger helped launch Columbia Law School’s Center for Constitutional Governance (CCG)—where she now serves as faculty director—a nonpartisan legal and policy organization devoted to the study of constitutional structure and authority. CCG brings together a diverse group of constitutional scholars to explore policy areas such as health care, civil rights, immigration, financial regulation, and national security.
Metzger also has co-authored and filed numerous amicus briefs in major constitutional and administrative law challenges before the Supreme Court and other courts. Most recently, Metzger filed a brief in Seila Law Center v. CFPB, a separation of powers challenge, and in Kisor v. Wilkie, a case involving judicial deference to agencies. She has also filed briefs in cases involving reproductive rights and the Affordable Care Act, among others.
Previously, Metzger served as vice dean of intellectual life at Columbia Law School. Before joining the Law School, she worked as an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice. Metzger also clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 and Judge Patricia M. Wald of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In 2018, Metzger moderated a panel discussion with Justice Ginsburg on impact litigation at Columbia Law School.
Partner, Baker Hostetler LLP
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.
Senior US District Judge, US District Court for the Southern District of New York
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit
Stephanos Bibas is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Judge Bibas was previously a professor of law and criminology at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. As director of the Penn Law Supreme Court Clinic, he argued six cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and filed briefs in dozens of others. He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University in 1989 with a B.A. in political theory and from Oxford University in 1991 with a B.A. in jurisprudence. He then earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1994.
After graduating from Yale Law, Judge Bibas clerked for Judge Patrick Higginbotham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court and was a litigation associate at Covington & Burling LLP in Washington, D.C. Thereafter, Judge Bibas served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he successfully prosecuted the world’s leading expert in Tiffany stained glass for hiring a grave robber to steal priceless Tiffany windows from cemeteries. Before his tenure at Penn Law, Judge Bibas taught at the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Iowa College of Law and was a research fellow at Yale Law School. He has published two books and seventy scholarly articles.
Professor of Law and Assistant Director, Criminal Justice Center, University of Florida Levin College of Law
Professor Stinneford teaches and writes about legal ethics, criminal law, criminal procedure, and constitutional law. His work has been cited by the United States Supreme Court, several state supreme courts and federal courts of appeal, and numerous scholars. It has published in numerous scholarly journals including the Georgetown Law Journal, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the William & Mary Law Review. The Stanford-Yale Junior faculty forum selected one of his articles as the best paper in the category of Constitutional History, and the AALS Criminal Justice Section named another article as the best paper in its Junior Scholars Paper Competition. In the fall of 2015, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Georgetown Law Center, Center for the Constitution.
Before joining the Florida faculty in 2009, Stinneford clerked for the Hon. James Moran of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, served as an Assistant United States Attorney, and practiced law with Winston & Strawn in Chicago. Stinneford teaches first-year courses in Criminal Law and Constitutional Law, and upper-level courses in Professional Responsibility, Criminal Procedure, Federal Criminal Law, Law & Literature, and White Collar Crime.
Distinguished University Professor, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
University Professor Nelson Lund is the author of Rousseau’s Rejuvenation of Political Philosophy: A New Introduction. He has also written widely in the field of constitutional law, including articles on constitutional interpretation, federalism, separation of powers, the Second Amendment, the Commerce Clause, the Speech or Debate Clause, the Equal Protection Clause, and the Uniformity Clause. In addition, he has published articles in the fields of employment discrimination and civil rights, the legal regulation of medical ethics, and the application of economic analysis to legal institutions and legal ethics.
Professor Lund graduated from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, after which he received an MA in philosophy from the Catholic University of America and a PhD in political science from Harvard University. He left the faculty of the University of Chicago to attend its law school, where he served as executive editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and chapter chairman of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. After law school, he held positions at the United States Department of Justice in the Office of the Solicitor General and the Office of Legal Counsel. He also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Patrick E. Higginbotham of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and to the Honorable Sandra Day O'Connor of the United States Supreme Court. Following his clerkship with Justice O'Connor, Professor Lund served in the White House as associate counsel to the president from 1989 to 1992.
Since joining the faculty at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, Professor Lund has taught Constitutional Law, Legislation, Federal Election Law, Employment Discrimination, State and Local Government, and seminars on the Second Amendment and on a variety of topics in Jurisprudence.
T. Terrell Sessums and Gerald Sohn Professor in Constitutional Law, University of Florida Levin College of Law
Professor Wright joined the Levin College of Law in 1998 and serves as the T. Terrell Sessums and Gerald Sohn Professor in Constitutional Law. At UF Law she has taught various subjects including, constitutional law, property, trusts and estates, legal history, feminist theory, constitutional law of property, and theories of property. As a legal historian, her research has delved into 19th century English divorce and marriage law, 19th century American property rights involving railroads and utilities, and women’s rights and constitutional protections in the 19th and early 20th centuries. She has written extensively, including several book chapters, on recreational trails and rails-to-trails conversions, on the history of English family law, on the Equal Rights Amendment, on constitutional takings law, on the logistics of drone delivery systems, and on the necessity for legal reforms in intestacy and probate law to better address land loss and the heirs’ property problem. Professor Wright has written dozens of articles, published in journals as diverse as the Iowa Law Review, the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, the Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law, Environmental Law, the Wisconsin Law Review, the Australia Journal of Legal History and Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic world. She has written two chapters, on transfer-on-death deeds and on rail-trail conversions, for the preeminent property treatise, Powell on Real Property. And her empirical work on testate and intestate distributions has earned her a grant from the ACTEC foundation, as well as acclaim in the probate and trusts field. Her articles have tackled child custody in England; religion, law and women’s rights in India; the ratification issues in the Equal Rights Amendment; and the property rights in a drone delivery highway. She has authored a popular Trusts and Estates casebook and co-authored a skills book for introducing students to the practice of trusts and estates and a chapter in a forthcoming Disaster Law Handbook. Her most recent book is on the noted Chancery case in which the Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, lost custody of his children because of his revolutionary and atheistic writings. And her work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and numerous federal and state courts.
Wright has taught at the Arizona State University Law School, Indiana University School of Law at Indianapolis, and Georgetown Law Center. She received a B.A. in English Literature from Cornell University, an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Arizona, an M.A. in Liberal Education from St. John’s College, a J.D. from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University. She is also serving as the co-director of the Center for Governmental Responsibility, the largest and oldest public policy law center in Florida.
Raymond & Miriam Ehrlich Chair in US Constitutional Law, University of Florida Levin College of Law
Lyrissa Lidsky is the Raymond & Miriam Ehrlich Chair in U.S. Constitutional Law at Florida Law. She previously served as Dean of the University of Missouri School of Law from 2017-2022. The focus of her research and teaching is the intersection of Tort Law and the First Amendment, with an emphasis on defamation and free speech issues in social media. Missouri Lawyers Media named Lidsky its 2020 Woman of the Year based on her scholarship, passion for law, mentorship of students, and engagement of constituencies supporting the school of law.
Before becoming dean at Missouri, Lidsky served in a variety of leadership roles at UF Law, including as associate dean for graduate and international programs and associate dean for faculty development. She also held the Stephen C. O’Connell Chair in Law and received a number of teaching awards during her 23-year tenure at UF, including student-selected awards such as Teacher of the Year (twice) and Faculty Graduation Speaker (three times), as well as Teacher of the Year, which was selected by a faculty committee.
Lidsky is co-reporter on the Restatement of Defamation and Privacy, which is now in progress. She is co-author of a leading Media Law casebook, a First Amendment casebook, and a reference book on press freedom and has published dozens of articles, culminating in a forthcoming article in the Virginia Law Review, co-authored with Professor Christina Koningisor, called First Amendment Disequilibrium. Her work on anonymous speech has been cited by a number of state supreme courts and the highest courts of Canada and Hong Kong.
Before becoming a law professor, Lidsky served as a clerk for the Honorable Joseph T. Sneed of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, Calif. Lidsky received her law degree from the University of Texas School of Law with high honors. She was initiated into Order of the Coif in recognition of her scholastic achievement and served as articles editor of the Texas Law Review. Before law school, she was a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge University in England, studying medieval legal history and early development of the Common Law. She received her bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, in English and political science from Texas A&M University.
Senior Vice President for Legal Studies, Cato Institute
Clark Neily is senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute. His areas of interest include constitutional law, overcriminalization, civil forfeiture, police accountability, and gun rights. Neily is the author of Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and National Review Online, as well as various law reviews, including the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, George Mason Law Review, Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, NYU Journal of Law and Liberty, and Texas Review of Law and Politics. Neily is a frequent guest speaker and lecturer for the Federalist Society, Institute for Humane Studies, and American Constitution Society.
Before joining Cato in 2017, Neily was a senior attorney and constitutional litigator at the Institute for Justice and director of the Institute’s Center for Judicial Engagement. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law, where he teaches constitutional litigation and public-interest law.
Neily served as co-counsel in District of Columbia v. Heller, the historic case in which the Supreme Court held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun for self-defense.
Neily began his legal career as a law clerk to Judge Royce Lamberth on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. After that he spent four years in the trial department of the Dallas-based firm Thompson & Knight. Neily received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Texas, where he was Chief Articles Editor of the Texas Law Review.
Senior Attorney, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
Mr. Byrnes is a senior attorney at the United States Commission on Civil Rights and has served as an attorney to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights in the Department of Education.
Is Government Health Care Constitutional?
New York City Lawyers Chapter
New York, NYA Wave of ADA Public Accommodation Lawsuits Moves from Florida and California to the Rest of the United States
Gregory P. McGuire
There recently has been a surge of private plaintiff lawsuits filed under the public accommodation...
Engage Volume 10, Issue 3, November 2009
*Online-Only Issue* CIVIL RIGHTS Two Civil Rights Decisions Close Out Supreme Court's 2008 Term by...
Corporal Punishment, Not Imprisonment
Lawrence v. Texas: The Worst Decision in the History of the United States Supreme Court
School Choice: How School Vouchers Can Save America's Children from America's Public Schools
Constitution Day 2009: Sex Offender Registration & State Law Preemption
ACORN Sues Pennsylvania AG Corbett Over Voter Fraud Allegations
Aaron Merrill
On July 22nd in Pittsburgh's federal court, the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now...
Proposals to Eliminate Sentencing Disparities between Crack and Powder Cocaine Offenses
Christopher Byrnes
Brought to you by the Civil Rights Practice GroupEDITOR’S NOTE: On March 17, 2010, the...
An Overview of the White House Office on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and the Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships
Brought to you by the Religious Liberties Practice GroupPresident Barack Obama announced President Bush’s White House...