Legal Fellow and Manager, Supreme Court and Appellate Advocacy Program, The Heritage Foundation
Zack is a Legal Fellow and Manager of the Supreme Court and Appellate Advocacy Program in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
He previously served for several years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Northern District of Florida. Prior to that, he spent two years as an associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, which he joined after clerking for the Hon. Emmett R. Cox on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Smith received his undergraduate, master’s, and law degrees from the University of Florida. During law school, Smith served as the Editor in Chief of the Florida Law Review and served on the executive boards of several student organizations, including the UF Chapter of the Federalist Society.
Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, United States Department of Housing and Urban Development
Craig Trainor is Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. President Trump nominated Mr. Trainor for this position on February 11, 2025, and the United States Senate confirmed him on October 7, 2025.
A “Day One” Trump-Vance Administration official, he previously served as Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the United States Department of Education, where he spearheaded the Department’s efforts to reorient America’s civil rights regime from an unjust spoils system to one that protects the rights of all Americans. Mr. Trainor’s February 14, 2025, “Dear Colleague” letter is widely considered the Trump Administration’s blueprint for enforcing civil rights laws and restoring the Constitution’s promise of equal protection.
Prior to serving in the Trump-Vance Administration, he was Senior Special Counsel with the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary under Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Senior Litigation Counsel with the America First Policy Institute under the Honorable Pam Bondi.
For over ten years, Mr. Trainor was a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer in New York City, litigating cases in New York state court and the United States District Court for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York.
Prior to founding his law practice, he served as a New York City prosecutor, an associate attorney at a white collar criminal defense firm, and a law clerk to Chief Judge Frederick J. Scullin, Jr., United States District Court for the Northern District of New York.
Nick Ohnell Fellow, The Manhattan Institute
Rafael Mangual is the Nick Ohnell Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a member of the Council on Criminal Justice. His first book, Criminal (In)Justice, was released in July 2022. He has authored and coauthored a number of MI reports and op-eds on issues ranging from urban crime and jail violence to broader matters of criminal and civil justice reform. His work has been featured and mentioned in a wide array of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, New York Post, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and City Journal. Mangual also regularly appears on Fox News and has made a number of national and local television and radio appearances on outlets such as C-SPAN and Bloomberg Radio. In 2020, he was appointed to serve a four-year term as a member of the New York State Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Prior to joining MI in 2015, Rafael worked in corporate communications for the International Trademark Association. He holds a B.A. in corporate communications from the City University of New York’s Baruch College and a J.D. from DePaul University in Chicago, where he was president of the Federalist Society and vice president of the Appellate Moot Court team. After graduating from law school, Mangual was inducted into the Order of the Barristers, a national honor society for excellence in oral and written advocacy.
Nick Ohnell Fellow, The Manhattan Institute
Rafael Mangual is the Nick Ohnell Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a member of the Council on Criminal Justice. His first book, Criminal (In)Justice, was released in July 2022. He has authored and coauthored a number of MI reports and op-eds on issues ranging from urban crime and jail violence to broader matters of criminal and civil justice reform. His work has been featured and mentioned in a wide array of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, New York Post, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and City Journal. Mangual also regularly appears on Fox News and has made a number of national and local television and radio appearances on outlets such as C-SPAN and Bloomberg Radio. In 2020, he was appointed to serve a four-year term as a member of the New York State Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Prior to joining MI in 2015, Rafael worked in corporate communications for the International Trademark Association. He holds a B.A. in corporate communications from the City University of New York’s Baruch College and a J.D. from DePaul University in Chicago, where he was president of the Federalist Society and vice president of the Appellate Moot Court team. After graduating from law school, Mangual was inducted into the Order of the Barristers, a national honor society for excellence in oral and written advocacy.
Segal Family Professor of Regulatory Law and Policy, New York University School of Law
Rachel Barkow is the Segal Family Professor of Regulatory Law and Policy and the Faculty Director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at NYU. In June of 2013, the Senate confirmed her as a Member of the United States Sentencing Commission. Since 2010, she has also been a member of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office Conviction Integrity Policy Advisory Panel.
Professor Barkow teaches courses in criminal law, administrative law, and constitutional law. In 2013, she was the recipient of the NYU Distinguished Teaching Award. The Law School awarded her its Podell Distinguished Teaching Award in 2007.
Her scholarship focuses on criminal law, and she is especially interested in applying the lessons and theory of administrative and constitutional law to the administration of criminal justice. She has written more than 20 articles that span a range of topics. She has written several articles on sentencing, including the relationship between modern sentencing laws and the constitutional role of the criminal jury; federalism and the politics of sentencing; the role of cost-benefit and risk tradeoff analysis in sentencing policy; what institutional model works for designing agencies that regulate criminal punishment; the political factors that lead to guideline and commission formation; and the flawed bifurcation between capital and noncapital constitutional sentencing jurisprudence. Professor Barkow has also explored in numerous articles the role of prosecutors in the criminal justice system. For example, she has analyzed how the lessons of institutional design from administrative law could improve the way prosecutors' offices are structured; she has looked to organizational guidelines and compliance programs as a model for prosecutorial oversight; and she has considered the increasing role of prosecutors as regulators through the conditions they place on corporations. Professor Barkow has also explored larger structural questions of how criminal justice is administered in the United States. In a series of major articles, she has explored the relationship between separation of powers and the criminal law and the relationship between federalism and the criminal law. Professor Barkow has also considered the role of mercy and clemency in criminal justice, paying particular attention to the relationship between administrative law's dominance and the increasing reluctance of scholars and experts to accept pockets of unreviewable discretion in criminal law.
Barkow has been invited to present her work in various settings. In the summer of 2009, Barkow testified before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection regarding the institutional design of the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Barkow testified before the United States Sentencing Commission at a 2009 regional hearing on the 25th Anniversary of the Sentencing Reform Act. In the summer of 2004, Barkow testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing on the future of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. She has also presented her work on sentencing to the National Association of Sentencing Commissions Conference, the Federal Judicial Center's National Sentencing Policy Institute, and the Judicial Conference of the Courts of Appeals for the First and Seventh Circuits. In addition, Barkow has presented papers at numerous law schools.
After graduating from Northwestern University (B.A. 1993), Barkow attended Harvard Law School (J.D. 1996), where she won the Sears Prize, which is awarded annually to two students with the top overall grade averages in the first-year class. Barkow served as a law clerk to Judge Laurence H. Silberman on the District of Columbia Circuit, and Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. Barkow was an associate at Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel, PLLC, in Washington, D.C., from 1998-2002, where she focused on telecommunications and administrative law issues in proceedings before the FCC, state regulatory agencies, and federal and state courts. She took a leave from the firm in 2001 to serve as the John M. Olin Fellow in Law at Georgetown University Law Center.
The Myth of Mass Incarceration Remains Strong—Despite All Evidence to the Contrary
Zack Smith
A review of Jeffrey Bellin, Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to...
Mass Incarceration
New Hampshire Student Chapter
Concord, NHIn the Rush to Reform, Prudence Is Among the Highest Duties: How to Responsibly Reform Cash Bail
Craig Trainor
Over the last two decades, the politics of American criminal law has made strange bedfellows....
Perspectives on Mass Incarceration
Pace Student Chapter
White Plains, NYCriminal Justice Reform and Mass Incarceration
Chicago Lawyers Chapter
Chicago, ILEugenics and Mass Incarceration in America
Portland Lawyers Chapter
Portland, OR