Board Member, Center for Equal Opportunity
Roger Clegg is a Board Member at and former President and General Counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity. He focuses on legal issues arising from civil rights laws--including the regulatory impact on business and the problems in higher education created by affirmative action. A former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Reagan and Bush administrations, Clegg held the second highest positions in both the Civil Rights Division (1987-91) and in the Environment and Natural Resources Division (1991-93). He has held several other positions at the U.S. Justice Department, including Assistant to the Solicitor General (1985-87), Associate Deputy Attorney General (1984-85), and Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy (1984). Clegg is a graduate of Yale University Law School (1981).
President, Center for Individual Rights
Todd Gaziano is the President of the Center for Individual Rights. Mr. Gaziano received his J.D. in 1988 from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics. He received his B.A. from West Virginia University, summa cum laude in 1985. He was selected as a Truman Scholar from West Virginia while an undergraduate.
Mr. Gaziano’s previous legal work includes service as a law clerk for U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Judge Edith Jones, as an attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, as a chief subcommittee counsel in the U.S. House of Representatives, as a Houston trial attorney, and as a chief corporate legal officer. He also served a six-year term as commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (2008-2013), where he helped conduct oversight and investigations of civil rights agencies.
For most of the last 25 years, Mr. Gaziano was a legal scholar and public interest law leader, promoting individual liberty in the Supreme Court and Congress. From 1997 to 2013, he was the founding director of the Edwin Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation. From 2014 until he joined CIR, he was the Chief of Legal Policy and Strategic Research, and Director of the Center for the Separation of Powers, at Pacific Legal Foundation.
Senior Scholar, Manhattan Institute; Professor of Law Emerita, University of San Diego
Gail Heriot is a Senior Scholar at the Manhattan Institute, a Professor of Law Emerita at the University of San Diego and the Chairman of the Board of the American Civil Rights Project. She served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for 18 years. Her new book is entitled “Why We Walk on Eggshells: How Our Civil Rights Laws Stifle Our Public Discourse.”
Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil Rights, University of North Carolina School of Law
Theodore M. Shaw is the Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina School of Law at Chapel Hill. Professor Shaw teaches Civil Procedure and Advanced Constitutional Law/Fourteenth Amendment. Before joining the faculty of UNC Law School, from 2008-2014 Professor Shaw taught at Columbia University Law School, where he was Professor of Professional Practice. During that time he was also “Of Counsel” to the law firm of Norton Rose Fulbright (formerly Fulbright & Jaworski, LLP). His practice involved civil litigation and representation of institutional clients on matters concerning diversity and civil rights.
Professor Shaw was the fifth Director-Counsel and President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., for which he worked in various capacities over the span of twenty-six years. He has litigated education, employment, voting rights, housing, police misconduct, capital punishment and other civil rights cases in trial and appellate courts, and in the United States Supreme Court.From 1982 until 1987, he litigated education, housing, and capital punishment cases and directed LDF's education litigation docket. In 1987, under the direction of LDF's third Director-Counsel, Julius Chambers, Mr. Shaw relocated to Los Angeles to establish LDF's Western Regional Office. In 1990, Mr. Shaw left LDF to join the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School, where he taught Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure and Civil Rights. While at Michigan, he played a key role in initiating a review of the law school's admissions practices and policies, and served on the faculty committee that promulgated the admissions program that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger.
In 1993, Mr. Shaw returned to LDF as Associate Director-Counsel, and in 2004, he became LDF's fifth Director-Counsel. Mr. Shaw's legal career began as a Trial Attorney in the Honors Program of the United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C., where he worked from 1979 until 1982.
Mr. Shaw has testified on numerous occasions before Congress and before state and local legislatures. His human rights work has taken him to Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America. In addition to teaching at Columbia and at Michigan Law School, Professor Shaw held the 1997-1998 Haywood Burns Chair at CUNY School of Law at Queens College and the 2003 Phyllis Beck Chair at Temple Law School. He was a visiting scholar at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia in 2008-2009. He is a member of the faculty of the Practicing Law Institute (PLI).
Mr. Shaw served on the Obama Transition Team after the 2008 presidential election, as team leader for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.
Civil Rights in the Age of Obama
Civil Rights Practice Group and The Heritage Foundation
Washington, DC