Professor of Law; Director, Warrior Defense Project, St. Mary's University School of Law
Lt. Colonel (U.S. Army, Ret.) Jeffrey F. Addicott is a Distingushed Professor of Law and the Director of the Warrior Defense Project at St. Mary’s University School of Law, San Antonio, Texas (2000-current). An active-duty Army officer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps for twenty years, Professor Addicott spent a quarter of his career as the senior legal advisor to the United States Army’s Special Forces. As an internationally recognized authority on national security and terrorism law Professor Addicott not only lectures and participates in professional and academic organizations both in the United States and abroad (over 1,000 speeches), but he also testifies before Congress on a variety of legal issues. Dr. Addicott is a regular contributor to national and international news media outlets to include FOX News, MSNBC, OAN, CNN, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, (over 5,000 interviews). Addicott is a prolific author, publishing over 100 books, articles, and monographs on a variety of legal and policy issues. His most recent book (2026) is entitled: Christian Doctrines.
Among his many contributions to the field, Professor Addicott pioneered the teaching of law of war and human rights courses to the militaries of numerous nascent democracies in Eastern Europe and Latin America. For these efforts he was awarded the Legion of Merit, named the “Army Judge Advocate of the Year,” and honored as a co-recipient of the American Bar Association’s Hodson Award. Addicott has served in senior legal positions in Germany, Korea, Panama, and throughout the United States (1980-2000). Professor Addicott holds a Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) and Master of Laws (LL.M.) from the University of Virginia School of Law. He also received a Master of Laws (LL.M.) from the Army Judge Advocate General’s School, where he was the Deputy Director of the International & Operational Law Division, and a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from the University of Alabama School of Law. Apart from teaching a variety of courses at the law school to include National Security Law and Terrorism Law, Dr. Addicott served as the Associate Dean for Administration at St. Mary's University School of Law (2006-2007) and as the Director of the Center for Terrorism Law (2005-2018). Dr. Addicott was the 2007 recipient of “St. Mary’s University School of Law Distinguished Faculty Award.” Dr. Addicott also heads Christian Doctrine Ministries, where he teaches non-denominational Bible classes (2009-current) at St. Mary’s University School of Law.
Garwood Visiting Professor and Visiting Fellow, James Madison Pr, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law
David F. Forte is Professor of Law at Cleveland State University, where he was the inaugural holder of the Charles R. Emrick, Jr.- Calfee Halter & Griswold Endowed Chair. This fall, Professor Forte will be the Garwood Visiting Professor at Princeton University in the Department of Politics, and Visiting Fellow at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He holds degrees from Harvard College, Manchester University, England, the University of Toronto and Columbia University.
During the Reagan administration, Professor Forte served as chief counsel to the United States delegation to the United Nations and alternate delegate to the Security Council. He has authored a number of briefs before the United States Supreme Court, and has frequently testified before the United States Congress and consulted with the Department of State on human rights and international affairs issues. His advice was specifically sought on the approval of the Genocide Convention, on world-wide religious persecution, and Islamic extremism. He has appeared and spoken frequently on radio and television, both nationally and internationally. In 2002, the Department of State sponsored a speaking tour for Professor Forte in Amman, Jordan, and he was also a featured speaker to the Meeting of Peoples in Rimini, Italy, a meeting which gathers over 500,000 people from all over Europe. He has also been called to testify before the state legislatures of Ohio, Kansas, and Idaho as well as the New York City Council. He has assisted in drafting a number of pieces of legislation for the Ohio General Assembly dealing with abortion, international trade, and federalism. He has sat as acting judge on the municipal court of Lakewood Ohio and was chairman of Professional Ethics Committee of the Cleveland Bar Association. He has received a number of awards for his public service, including the Cleveland Bar Association’s President’s Award, the Cleveland State University Award for Distinguished Service, the Cleveland State University Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Alumni Award for Faculty Excellence. He served as Consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Family under Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. In 2003, Dr. Forte was a Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the University of Trento and returned there in 2004 as a Visiting Professor. For the academic year, 2008-2009, Professor Forte was Senior Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion and the Constitution in at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. He was the Robert E. Henderson Constitution Day Lecturer at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, and he has given over 300 invited addresses and papers at more than 100 academic institutions. His work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Professor Forte was a Bradley Scholar at the Heritage Foundation, and Visiting Scholar at the Liberty Fund. He has been President of the Ohio Association of Scholars, was on the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia Society, and is also adjunct Scholar at the Ashbrook Center. He has been appointed to the Ohio State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He has also been a Civil War re-enactor and a Merit Badge Counselor for the Boy Scouts.
He writes and speaks nationally on topics such as constitutional law, religious liberty, Islamic law, the rights of families, and international affairs. He served as book review editor for the American Journal of Jurisprudence and has edited a volume entitled, Natural Law and Contemporary Public Policy, published by Georgetown University Press. His book, Islamic Law Studies: Classical and Contemporary Applications, has been published by Austin & Winfield. He is Senior Editor of The Heritage Guide to the Constitution (2006), 2d edition (2014), published by Regnery & Co, a clause by clause analysis of the Constitution of the United States.
His teaching competencies include Constitutional Law, the First Amendment, Islamic Law, Jurisprudence, Natural Law, International Law, International Human Rights, the Presidency, and Constitutional History.
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.
Senior Legal Fellow and Manager, National Security Law Program, The Heritage Foundation
Charles “Cully” Stimson is a widely recognized expert in national security, homeland security, crime control, drug policy and immigration. A senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation since 2007, Stimson became Manager of the National Security Law Program in Heritage’s Institute for Constitutional Government in April 2013 after serving as Heritage’s chief of staff for a year.
Stimson writes and lectures on policy issues such as the law of armed conflict, terrorist detainee policy and interrogations, the Geneva Conventions, military commissions, the Patriot Act and FISA, criminal law and the death penalty, immigration and the war on drugs. As chief of staff to then-Heritage President Edwin J. Feulner, he was a key adviser on public policy matters as well as manager of Feulner’s office staff and Heritage’s day-to-day operations.
Stimson’s many research papers, op-eds and articles include special reports such as “Adult Time for Adult Crime,” a comprehensive study on the constitutionality of life sentences for teen-age murderers, and Sexual Assault in the Military: Understanding the Problem and How to Fix It, a ground-breaking paper detailing the inner workings of the military justice system compared to its civilian counterpart. His work on criminal and immigration law has been cited in briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court.
He testifies before the U.S. Senate and House on national security issues, and recently testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the Law of Armed Conflict, Law of War, and the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force.
Before joining the think tank in 2007, Stimson served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs. He advised then-Secretaries of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates and coordinated the Pentagon’s global detention policy and operations, including at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was chairman of detainee-related panels such as the Defense Senior Leadership Oversight Committee, and the Special Detainee Follow Up Group. He represented the United States before the U.N. in Geneva, Switzerland in May 2006 where he led the DOD delegation in defense of the United States’ Second Period Report on the Convention Against Torture.
An accomplished trial lawyer, Stimson worked as a prosecutor at the local, state and federal levels, where he concentrated on violent crimes such as homicide, sexual assault and domestic violence. A third generation naval officer, Cully also served as a military prosecutor, defense counsel, and recently served as Deputy Chief Judge of the Navy-Marine Corps Trial Judiciary. He continues to serve, with the rank of Captain, as the Commanding Officer of the Preliminary Hearing Unit.
Stimson’s thousands of media interviews and appearances include Fox News Channel, MSNBC, CNN, BBC, NPR and C-SPAN. He has been quoted by most major newspapers, including The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and London Times.
A businessman and educator by training, Stimson is Vice Chairman of his family’s commercial real estate company in Seattle. Before 9/11, he was a Vice President at a New York-based global financial services and insurance brokerage firm where ran the private equity mergers and acquisitions D.C. operation.
Stimson holds a law degree from the George Mason University School of Law, where he later taught as an Adjunct Professor of Law. He is a graduate of Kenyon College, where he was Captain of the men’s varsity soccer team and an All-Conference player. He also studied at Harvard and Exeter universities. An avid soccer player and triathlete, he serves as Chairman of the Board of the United States Soccer Foundation, the charitable giving arm of U.S. Soccer.
Managing Director, Lexpat Global Services
Adam R. Pearlman is the Founder and Managing Director of Lexpat Global Services, an international law and consulting services firm specializing in security, defense, investigations, compliance, and training. A Special Advisor to and member of the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society’s International and National Security Law Practice Group, he is National Security Law expert and a proven senior leader with more than fifteen years of experience across the U.S. Departments of Justice, Defense, and State, in the White House, and with the U.S. Federal Judiciary.
Most recently, he served as the Senior Advisor for Legal Policy in the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, where he counseled senior officials on matters covering the entire spectrum of programs and operations to counter terrorism and violent extremism. While participating in sensitive diplomatic engagements and helping to coordinate military operations, he also advised in the development of sanctions policy and initiatives to build legal and operational capacity in partner nations. Mr. Pearlman also managed the Bureau’s participation in federal litigation and led U.S. delegations in multilateral forums concerning criminal justice and rule of law.
A former Associate Deputy General Counsel of the Department of Defense, Mr. Pearlman was agency counsel for complex civil and criminal national security matters in federal and military courts, and led the Supreme Court and appellate unit of the team dedicated to litigating classified counterterrorism cases. His earlier service in the Department of Justice spanned four litigating divisions and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General. His diverse experience included reviewing complex international transactions and mergers, and advising on immigration removal proceedings, human rights abuses, and terrorist financing investigations. Mr. Pearlman also served with distinction in Iraq as an early advisor to the Iraqi High Tribunal’s prosecution of Saddam Hussein. He was a law clerk for The Honorable Royce C. Lamberth, and during law school interned in the White House Counsel’s Office.
Mr. Pearlman is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Visiting Fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, a member of the American Bar Association’s Africa Law Initiative Council, and a member of the Center for Strategic & International Studies’ Project on Nuclear Issues. He is a former National Security Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, vice chairman of the ABA Section of International Law’s committees on national security, and aerospace and defense, and also previously served as a liaison to the Board of Directors of the ABA’s Rule of Law Initiative. He has been co-editor of the U.S. Intelligence Community Law Sourcebook since 2011 and has published articles in the Harvard National Security Journal, Stanford Law & Policy Review, and Intelligence & National Security.
Mr. Pearlman earned his B.A., with honors, from UCLA, and his J.D., with honors, from The George Washington University Law School, where he was a member of the International Law Review. He also earned a Master of Science of Strategic Intelligence degree from the National Intelligence University, where he was the inaugural recipient of the Kornblum Award for national security law and ethics. Mr. Pearlman speaks and reads Portuguese at the intermediate level and holds certificates in international human rights law from the University of Oxford and in U.S. and international anti-corruption law from American University’s Washington College of Law. He is admitted to the State Bars of California and Virginia, as well as to the Bar of the United States Supreme Court.
Director, Center for Religious Freedom, Hudson Institute
An international human-rights lawyer for over thirty years, Nina Shea joined Hudson Institute as a Senior Fellow in November 2006, where she directs the Center for Religious Freedom. Shea works extensively for the advancement of individual religious freedom and other human rights in U.S. foreign policy as it confronts an ascendant Islamic extremism, as well as nationalist and remnant communist regimes. She undertakes scholarship and advocacy in defense of those persecuted for their religious beliefs and identities and on behalf of diplomatic measures to end religious repression and violence abroad, whether from state actors or extremist groups.
Ms. Shea was appointed by the U.S. House of Representatives to serve seven terms as a Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (June 1999 - March 2012). During the Soviet era, Shea’s first client before the United Nations was Soviet Nobel Peace Laureate Andrei Sakharov. Since then, she has been appointed as a U.S. delegate to the United Nation's main human rights body by both Republican and Democratic administrations. She also served as a member of the Clinton administration's Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad. In 2009, she was appointed to serve as a member of the U.S. National Commission to UNESCO.
Ms. Shea played a leading role in building grassroot support for the adoption of the International Religious Freedom Act (1998). For seven years ending in 2005, she helped organize and lead a coalition of churches and religious groups that worked to end a religious war against non-Muslims and dissident Muslims in southern Sudan. In 2014, she initiated and helped lead a coalition of hundreds of prominent American religious leaders to issue The Pledge of Solidarity for Persecuted Iraqi, Syrian and Egyptian Christians and Other Minorities, which was released by a bi-partisan Congressional panel on May 7. In summer 2014, she met with Pope Francis to discuss the persecution of Christians in the Middle East.
At Hudson, she has organized conferences for Nigerian schoolgirls and others who survived Boko Haram attacks, Christian converts formerly imprisoned in Iran, Coptic bishops from Egypt, Catholic bishops from China and the Gulf, Muslim scholars, and many others. Ms. Shea advocates in the nation's capital on behalf of a broad range of persecuted religious minorities around the world; and, for such work, was honored by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA with the Community's inaugural "Ahmadiyya Muslim Humanitarian Award."
She has authored and/or edited four widely-acclaimed reports on Saudi state educational materials that promote extremist views and in 2011 had an opportunity to travel to Saudi Arabia and speak directly about her findings with the Ministers of Education, Justice and Islamic Affairs. Her reports include: Ten Years On: Saudi Arabia's Textbooks Still Promote Religious Violence (2011), Update: Saudi Arabia's Curriculum of Intolerance (2008), Saudi Arabia's Curriculum of Intolerance (2006), and Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques (2005), all of which translated and analyzed Saudi governmental publications that teach hatred and violence against the religious "other."
She is the co-author of Silenced: How Apostasy & Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide, with a Foreword by Kyai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid, the former President of Indonesia and head of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world's largest Muslim organization (Oxford University Press, 2011). Her most recent book, which she also co-authored, is Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2013). She regularly presents testimony before Congress, delivers public lectures, organizes briefings and conferences, and writes frequently on religious freedom issues. Her writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, CQ Researcher, Weekly Standard, National Review Online, CNN, Fox, The Daily Beast, HuffingtonPost, and RealClearWorld, among others.
For the ten years prior to joining Hudson, Ms. Shea worked at Freedom House, where she directed the Center for Religious Freedom, an entity which she had helped found in 1986 as the Puebla Institute.
She is a member of the bar of the District of Columbia. She is a graduate of Smith College, and American University's Washington College of Law.
Founder and President, American Islamic Forum for Democracy
M. Zuhdi Jasser, M.D. is the Founder and President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD). A devout Muslim, Dr. Jasser founded AIFD in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States as an effort to provide an American Muslim voice advocating for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state. Dr. Jasser is a first generation American Muslim whose parents fled the oppressive Baath regime of Syria in the mid-1960’s for American freedom. He is leading the fight to shake the hold that the Muslim Brotherhood and their network of American Islamist organizations and mosques seek to exert on organized Islam in America.
Dr. Jasser earned his medical degree on a U.S. Navy scholarship at the Medical College of Wisconsin in 1992. He served 11 years as a medical officer in the U. S. Navy. His tours of duty included Medical Department Head aboard the U.S.S. El Paso which deployed to Somalia during Operation Restore Hope; Chief Resident at Bethesda Naval Hospital; and Staff Internist for the Office of the Attending Physician to the U. S. Congress. He is a recipient of the Meritorious Service Medal. Dr. Jasser is a respected physician currently in private practice in Phoenix, Arizona specializing in internal medicine and nuclear cardiology. He is a Past-President of the Arizona Medical Association.
AIFD seeks to counter political Islam the ideology that fuels radical Islamists. AIFD’s current passions include the Muslim Liberty Project (MLP) and involvement in the newly formed American Islamic Leadership Coalition (AILC). The Muslim Liberty Project seeks to instill the ideas of liberty into young Muslim adults in order to inoculate them against the viral threat of political Islam. The project brought together its first class of Muslim Youth in March 2011 with tremendous success. AILC is a broad based coalition of diverse Muslim organizations that provide a stark alternative to the domestic and global network of Islamist organizations.
Dr. Jasser is also actively involved in the Syrian-American community as the co-founder of Save Syria Now! which was formed by Americans of Syrian descent to put pressure on the United States to call for immediate action to end the regime of Bashar Assad of Syria and to help bring true liberty to the people of Syria. Dr. Jasser has also been asked to play a formative role in the emerging Syrian Democracy Council which is creating an opposition roadmap for a free, secular, and non-Islamist post-Assad Syria. Dr. Jasser briefed members of the U.S. House of Representatives on the situation in Syria in July 2011.
Dr. Jasser regularly briefs members of the House and Senate congressional anti-terror caucuses on the threat of Political Islam. Dr. Jasser testified before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security on March 10, 2011 on “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response” and again on June 20, 2012 on the “The American Muslim Response to Hearings on Radicalization within their Community.” On June 24, 2011 Dr. Jasser testified before the Constitution Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives on the importance of HR 963 “The See Something, Say Something” Act of 2011. On March 20, 2012, Dr. Jasser was appointed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).
Dr. Jasser is an internationally recognized expert in the contest of ideas against political Islam and American Islamist organizations. He has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The New York Post, The Dallas Morning News, CNN, CBS, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and BBC in addition to nationally syndicated radio programs. He has spoken at hundreds of national and international events including universities, places of worship, and government venues. In just the past year he has spoken at the Hudson Institute’s “The Perils of Global Intolerance: The UN and Durban III,” The U.S. Strategic Command’s 2011 Deterrence Symposium panel on “What did the rest of world learn about deterrence from the recent upheavals in the Middle East and Africa?,” and at the National FBI National Executive Institute on “Whose Voice are you listening to? What are the questions we should be asking?” In the past, Dr. Jasser has lectured on Islam to deploying officers at the Joint Forces Staff College at Norfolk, VA and was part of a select Muslim group that briefed Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the “Contest of Ideas with the Muslim World.”
Dr. Jasser was presented with the 2007 Director’s Community Leadership Award by the Phoenix office of the FBI and was recognized as a “Defender of the Home Front” at the annual Keeper of the Flame Dinner of the Center for Security Policy in 2008. Dr. Jasser is a contributing writer to a number of books and is the author of The Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith (Simon & Schuster, June 2012). He is featured in four documentaries: America at Risk, Islam v Islamists, A Question of Honor and The Third Jihad.
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).
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