Hon. George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy, Georgetown Law
David Cole is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy and former National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He writes about and teaches constitutional law, freedom of speech, and constitutional criminal procedure. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and is the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation.
David has published widely in law journals and the popular press, including The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Stanford Law Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. He is the author or editor of ten books, several of which have won awards. Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror, published in 2007, and co-authored with Jules Lobel, won the Palmer Civil Liberties Prize for best book on national security and civil liberties. Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism received the American Book Award in 2004. No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Boston Book Review and best book on an issue of national policy in1999 by the American Political Science Association.
David received his bachelor’s degree and law degree from Yale University. He worked as a staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights from 1985 to 1990. He has continued to litigate as a professor and, from 2017 to 2024, as National Legal Director of the ACLU. He has litigated many significant constitutional cases at the Supreme Court, including Texas v. Johnson (1989), which extended First Amendment protection to flag burning; Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), which held that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity are prohibited forms of sex discrimination under Title VII; Mahanoy Area Sch. Dist. v. B.L. (2021), which protected student online speech from school discipline; and National Rifle Association v. Vullo (2024), which held that government officials violate the First Amendment when they use their regulatory authority to coerce private parties to blacklist a disfavored political group.
David has received two honorary degrees and numerous awards for his work, including the inaugural Norman Dorsen Presidential Prize from the ACLU for lifetime commitment to civil liberties. The late New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis called David “one of the country’s great legal voices for civil liberties today.” Nat Hentoff called him “a one-man Committee of Correspondence in the tradition of patriot Sam Adams.”
Partner, BakerHostetler, Adjunct Fellow, The Manhattan Institute
Andrew Grossman leads BakerHostetler’s Appellate and Major Motion team. He has appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court, nearly all the federal courts of appeals, as well as some state appellate courts, litigating high-profile and complex commercial, administrative and constitutional issues.
Andrew works with practice groups across BakerHostetler to identify and tackle complex issues, advise on administrative law and strategy, tee up issues for appeal and tackle appeals. He has developed and implemented litigation and administrative strategies for clients in several fields and industries.
In addition to his practice, Andrew advises members of Congress on matters of constitutional and administrative law, having testified more than a dozen times before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. He has been a frequent legal commentator on radio and television, having appeared on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR and its affiliates, CBN and elsewhere. His legal commentary has also appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Times and many others.
Andrew is a Senior Legal Fellow at the Buckeye Institute, an Adjunct Fellow the Manhattan Institute and a member of the leadership of the Federalist Society. He previously served as an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. He clerked for Judge Edith H. Jones on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Partner, Schaerr | Jaffe LLP
Erik Jaffe has been involved in appeals on a broad range of legal issues, including First Amendment challenges to campaign finance reform, Commerce Clause challenges to Health Care Reform and other federal legislation, Equal Protection Clause challenges to affirmative action in education, First Amendment challenges to school vouchers, Fifth Amendment challenges to takings of property, Second Amendment challenges to restrictions on gun ownership, and a wide variety of cases involving patents, copyrights, ERISA, securities fraud, federal preemption, environmental regulation, and other state and federal constitutional and statutory matters. He has represented businesses and non-profit groups, Judges, Senators, former government officials, Nobel Prize winners, and a broad cross-section of private individuals. Mr. Jaffe has been involved in over 120 Supreme Court matters, including filing over 30 cert. petitions, representing half-a-dozen parties on the merits, and filing over 70 amicus briefs at both the cert. and merits stages.
A 1990 graduate of the Columbia University School of Law, Mr. Jaffe was a law clerk to Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1990 to 1991. Following that clerkship he spent five years in litigation practice with the Washington, D.C. law firm of Williams & Connolly. In the summer of 1996 he left Williams & Connolly to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. At the end of that clerkship he started his own practice, and he was a sole practitioner from 1997 to 2018. He joined the firm of Schaerr | Jaffe LLP in 2018.
Director of the Higher Education Reform Initiative, America First Policy Institute
Dr. Christopher Schorr, Ph.D., is from San Diego, California and serves as Director for AFPI’s Higher Education Reform Initiative. In this role, Chris works to develop the Initiative’s research agenda and advance its policy priorities, including eliminating divisive DEI and gender theory-based practices, promoting academic freedom, combating antisemitism, and reforming student loans and accreditation. Prior to joining AFPI, Chris supported the Defense Health Board, a Department of Defense federal advisory committee, as a research analyst. He coauthored the Amazon best seller Black Eye for America: How Critical Race Theory is Burning Down the House.
Chris is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in American Government from Georgetown University, and his B.A. in political science (summa cum laude) from the University of California, San Diego. With three children, Chris’s “free time” is largely accounted for; however, he and his wife enjoy reading, fitness, shooting, and the outdoors.
Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies, Manhattan Institute
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Previously he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute.
Shapiro is the author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (2025) and Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020), coauthor of Religious Liberties for Corporations? (2014), and editor of 11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review (2008-18). He has contributed to a variety of academic, popular, and professional publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, and Newsweek. He also regularly provides commentary for various media outlets, writes the Shapiro’s Gavel newsletter on Substack, and once appeared on the Colbert Report.
Shapiro has testified many times before Congress and state legislatures and has filed more than 500 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court. He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, is a member of the board of fellows of the Jewish Policy Center, was an inaugural Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute, and has been an adjunct law professor at the George Washington University and University of Mississippi. He is also the chairman of the board of advisers of the Mississippi Justice Institute, a barrister in the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court, and a former member of the Virginia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Earlier in his career, Shapiro was a special assistant/adviser to the Multi-National Force in Iraq on rule-of-law issues and practiced at Patton Boggs and Cleary Gottlieb. Before entering private practice, he clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He holds an AB from Princeton University, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School.
Senior Fellow, Independent Women's Forum; Clinical Associate Professor, NYU Grossman Long Island School of Medicine
Dr. Ahmed is a physician, non-fiction author and broadcast media commentator. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, Al Jazeera, The Independent, USA Today, The Daily Beast, the World Policy Journal, Fox News, CNN, and many others.
Dr. Ahmed is the first physician, and first Muslim woman, to be awarded the Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship in Journalism at the University of Cambridge, England.
In 2012, she testified to Congress on Radical Islam in the United States. She subsequently has provided Congressional Briefings at the invitation of Congressional Staff on the issues of Palestinian child radicalization in the Disputed Territories. In 2016, she was nominated to Life Membership at the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States in recognition of her journalistic work focusing on Islamism.
A graduate of the University of Nottingham, Dr. Ahmed has practiced subspecialty medicine in the United Kingdom, the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Currently, a triple board-certified pulmonologist and sleep disorders specialist, Dr. Ahmed is currently appointed Clinical Associate Professor at NYU Grossman Long Island School of Medicine, an Honorary Professor at the School of Health and Life Sciences at Glasgow Caledonian University and an Honorary Fellow at the Technion-Israel Institute of Science and Technology. She is a Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians, a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a Fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
In December 2015 Dr. Ahmed was naturalized as an American citizen. Today, she maintains dual British and U.S. citizenship and lives in New York where she continues to write and practice medicine.
Founder, Libertas-West Project
Karen Lugo is a constitutional law consultant and national security analyst. She was Director of the Center for Tenth Amendment at Texas Public Policy Foundation from 2013 to 2015. When living in California, she was Co-Director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence Center. From 2005 – 2012, she was a clinical visiting and adjunct professor at Chapman University School of Law where she co-taught the advanced Constitutional Law Clinic. Karen has co-authored and written circuit-level and Supreme Court amicus briefs on such issues as FISA Surveillance, Healthcare Reform, Arizona’s Border Security, Gay Marriage, The Ten Commandments, Eminent Domain, Christian Clubs on University Campuses, and Material Support for Terrorists.
Karen is the founder of the Libertas-West Project, a center for study Islamic integration and radicalization issues. In this capacity, she consulted with the Center for Security Policy to write a book on local over-watch of mosque construction and community engagement called: Mosques in America: A Guide to Accountable Permit Hearings and Continuing Citizen Oversight.
Karen writes and speaks for European and American groups on the importance of basing assimilation efforts on principles of Western exceptionalism. She presented a policy brief to the French Conseil d’Etat analyzing the legal implications of banning the burqa. Ms. Lugo has written one of the most comprehensive overviews of sharia law in American courts, American Family Law and Sharia-Compliant Marriages, for the Federalist Society law journal, Engage. She has written several white papers on the American Law for American Courts legislation and sharia tribunals in America.
Ms. Lugo was an appointee to the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She also taught a Human Rights law course on the contrast between French and English Enlightenment theories in Strasbourg, France.
Until moving from California, Ms. Lugo was a member of the David Horowitz Freedom Center Board of Directors. She was also a regular guest on the Orange County PBS local issues debate program, Inside OC, and she is a contributor to Pajamas Media, National Review Online, City Journal, American Spectator, American Greatness, Townhall.com, American Thinker, Daily Caller, and Family Security Matters. She has been interviewed by dozens of radio hosts and has spoken for civic groups on constitutional and cultural concerns.
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).
Legal Director, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
Will began defending student and faculty rights for FIRE in 2006 after graduating from New York University School of Law, where he served as an associate executive editor for the New York University Law Review. Will has appeared on national cable television and radio on behalf of FIRE and has spoken to students, faculty, administrators, and attorneys at events across the country. Will’s writing has been published by The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jurist, Inside Higher Ed, Daily Journal, the Charleston Law Review, and many other outlets. Will edited the second edition of FIRE’s Guide to Due Process and Campus Justice, co-edited the second edition of FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus, and has coauthored amicus curiae briefs submitted to a number of courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States and the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits. Will has taught FIRE’s Continuing Legal Education programs in New York, Pennsylvania, and online. A member of the New York State Bar and the First Amendment Lawyers Association, Will serves as Co-Chair of the Education Subcommittee of the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice.
Will graduated magna cum laude from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2003. A proud native of Buffalo, New York, Will now lives in New Jersey with his wife and two children.
Special Counsel, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP
Aharon Friedman is Special Counsel at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution. He formerly served as senior counsel to the House Ways and Means Committee, senior adviser to the U.S. Treasury Department and as a law clerk for Israel’s Supreme Court.
Professor of Law and Director, Center for the Middle East and International Law, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School
Professor of Law Eugene Kontorovich is one of the world’s preeminent experts on universal jurisdiction and maritime piracy, as well as international law and the Israel-Arab conflict. He is also the Director of Scalia Law School's Center for the Middle East and International Law. Professor Kontorovich joined the Scalia Law School from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law where he was a Professor of Law from 2011 to 2018 and an Associate Professor from 2007 to 2011. Previously, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago from 2005 to 2007 and an Assistant Professor at George Mason School of Law from 2003 to 2007.
Professor Kontorovich has published over thirty major scholarly articles and book chapters in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals in the United States and Europe, including the American Journal of International Law, International Review of Law & Economics, Stanford Law Review, California Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Virginia Law Review. His scholarship has been cited in leading foreign relations and international law
His expertise is often sought out and quoted by major news organizations such the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR News, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and numerous television and radio programs. Prof. Kontorovich’s popular writings have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, POLITICO, Commentary, Haaretz, and numerous other leading publications. He is also a regular contributor to the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy legal blog.
He attended the University of Chicago for college and law school. After law school, he clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He has been honored with a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in 2011-12, and with the Federalist Society’s prestigious Bator Award, given annually to a young scholar (under 40), for outstanding scholarship and teaching.
Arbitrator, American Arbitration Association & Former Deputy Director, Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), U.S. Department of Labor
Bob Gaglione is an Arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association based in San Diego, California. He also teaches law and politics courses at several universities in Southern California.
From 2019-2021, Mr. Gaglione was a Presidential appointee serving as Deputy Director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) at the U.S. Department of Labor.
Mr. Gaglione has over 30 years of legal experience, including most recently, serving as founder and principal of Gaglione Law Group in San Diego, CA, where he practiced civil litigation including business, employment, insurance, real estate, and tort litigation. He previously served as a partner at the law firm of McInnis, Fitzgerald, Rees & Sharkey – one of San Diego’s largest law firms at the time.
For more than a decade, Mr. Gaglione has been as a member of the American Arbitration Association National Roster of Neutrals and Panel of Arbitrators. He served as an Arbitrator or Mediator in close to 100 cases before he went to work for the Department of Labor. .
Mr. Gaglione was elected by his peers to a three-year term on the San Diego County Bar Association Board of Directors from 2011-2014. He is a founding Director of the San Diego Chapter of the Federalist Society and a Chair of the Board of Advisors of this chapter. Mr. Gaglione is a Past President of the Todd American Inn of Court and a past Chair of the Bar History Committee and Litigation Section of the San Diego County Bar Association. He has also served on the Board of Directors of the San Diego-Imperial Council of Boy Scouts of America.
Mr. Gaglione is AV-rated by Martindale Hubbell and has been featured in Best’s Directory of Recommended Insurance Attorneys, Law & Business Directory of Environmental Attorneys and Who’s Who in American Law. Mr. Gaglione has been included in the San Diego Daily Transcript Top Attorneys, was named a Super Lawyer numerous times, and has made the list of Top Lawyers in San Diego Magazine.
Mr. Gaglione has taught law and political science courses at DeVry University, Keller Graduate School of Management, and JP Catholic University. He is also a frequent lecturer at the University of San Diego School of Law, San Diego State University, and California Western School of Law.
Mr. Gaglione hosted a radio show known as Independent Counsel: the news from a legal perspective for over seven years. He is also a frequent legal commentator on radio and television news programs.
Mr. Gaglione received a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from the University of Southern California and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of San Diego School of Law. He is a member of the California, District of Columbia, and New York Bars. He is also admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and all United States District Courts in California.
Founder, Justice Legal Strategies PLLC
Jon Greenbaum, the founder of Justice Legal Strategies, is one of the top civil rights and voting rights lawyers in the country, having worked for over 25 years in key positions at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. Jon has litigated some of the most important and complex civil rights cases in this century. Jon also has two decades of experience as a manager of large legal teams and has collaborated closely with a variety of external partners. Jon brings his skills as a litigator, legal thinker, developer and implementer of programs, and manager of people and processes to help progressive legal organizations achieve greater impact through innovative and carefully considered strategies and the ability to create legal teams that thrive.
For nearly fifteen years as Chief Counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee, Jon managed a multi-unit legal department with as many as forty people, served on the Executive Management Team, and co-led teams with law firm partners and nonprofit leaders. Jon worked with staff lawyers and pro bono counsel, public policy teams, communications professionals, organizers, social scientists, clients, external partners, and others to craft multifaceted responses to civil rights issues.
Jon brings his skills as a litigator, legal thinker, developer and implementer of programs, and manager of people and processes to help progressive legal organizations achieve greater impact through innovative and carefully considered strategies and the ability to create legal teams that thrive.
Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Professor Emeritus of Public Policy, Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County
George R. La Noue is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He has served as a trial expert in twenty cases involving public procurement preferences. For thirty years, he was Director of the Project on Civil Rights and Public Contracts at UMBC which recently contributed 289 public contracting disparity studies to the Library of Congress. He has been a consultant to nine governments and trial expert in thirty cases where the validity of disparity studies was at issue.
Prof. La Noue can be reached by email at glanoue@umbc.edu.
Associate Judge, Superior Court of the District of Columbia and President of the Bar Association of the District of Columbia
Craig E. Leen is an Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. He also serves as the 139th President of the Bar Association of the District of Columbia and a Professorial Lecturer in Law at George Washington University School of Law.
Prior to being sworn in, Judge Leen was a partner at K&L Gates in the Washington, DC office focused on labor & employment, litigation, government contracts, and administrative & regulatory law. He was also the pro bono coordinator for the DC office.
Judge Leen was formerly a federal agency head, serving as Director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) at the U.S. Department of Labor.
Prior to his federal service at OFCCP, Judge Leen was the City Attorney of the City of Coral Gables, and before that was Chief of the Appeals Section and then Chief of the Federal Litigation Section at the Miami-Dade County Attorney's Office. Earlier in his career, Judge Leen served as a law clerk to the Honorable Robert E. Keeton, United States District Judge, District of Massachusetts.
In recognition of his public service, Judge Leen received the Secretary's Exceptional Achievement Award - Professional while at the U.S. Department of Labor, and the Paul S. Buchman Award for Outstanding Contribution in the Area of Legal Public Service while in local government.
Judge Leen received his Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School, graduating as a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and having served as a teaching fellow in both Contracts and Torts. Judge Leen received his Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, from Georgetown University, where he majored in both Government and Economics.
Adjunct Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
Jenny R. Yang served in the White House, Domestic Policy Council as a Deputy Assistant to the President for Racial Justice and Equity until March 2024. From the first day of the Biden-Harris Administration until March 2023, she served as the Director of the Office of Federal Contracts Compliance Programs at the U.S. Department of Labor. Before that she served on the Biden-Harris Labor Transition Team. Ms. Yang served as Chair, Vice-Chair, and Commissioner of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 2013 to 2018.
Ms. Yang is currently teaching Employment Law at New York University School of Law. She previously served as a Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute and a consultant with Working Ideal from 2019-2020. She spent a decade representing workers in complex nationwide employment discrimination and wage and hour actions as a partner and Chair of the Diversity Committee at Cohen Milstein. Before that, she served as a Senior Trial Attorney with the U.S. Department of
Justice, Civil Rights Division, Employment Litigation Section. She began her career at the National Employment Law Project protecting the rights of garment workers. Prior to that she clerked for Judge Edmund Ludwig of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Ms. Yang served a co-chair of the first national board of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. A graduate of Cornell University, she earned a B.A. in Government. She earned a J.D. from NYU School of Law where she was a Root-Tilden Public Interest scholar and served as Notes Editor of the Law Review.
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law
Hon. Kenneth L. Marcus is an internationally recognized expert in civil and human rights, as well as a leader in the fight against anti-Semitism on and off university campuses. He is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, the leading civil rights legal organization fighting against anti-Semitism. The New York Times has called him “The Man Who Helped Redefine Campus Anti-Semitism.” He been described, in that paper, as “the single most effective and respected force” to combat anti-Semitism.
During his public service career, Marcus served as Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education for Civil Rights; Staff Director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; and General Deputy Assistant U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.
In academia, he serves as Professorial Lecturer in Law at George Washington University. He formerly held the Lillie and Nathan Ackerman Chair in Equality and Justice in America at the City University of New York’s Bernard M. Baruch College, served as Visiting Research Professor of Political Science at Yeshiva University, and was a Board of Visitors member George Mason University and Distinguished Senior Fellow at that university’s law school. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism and previously served as Associate Editor of the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism.
Marcus is also author of The Definition of Anti-Semitism (Oxford University Press) and Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America (Cambridge University Press). He has published widely in academic journals as well as in more popular venues such as The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Newsweek, USA Today, and Politico. He is a graduate of Williams College and the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.
Earlier in his career, he was a litigation partner in two major law firms, where he conducted complex commercial and constitutional litigation. He also serves as Chairman emeritus of the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy Civil Rights Practice Group.
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).
Author and Columnist
Bruce Bawer is the author of several books, including the bestselling While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (2006), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (2009). His earlier books include the influential A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (1993), which was a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”; Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity (1997); and several volumes of literary criticism, film criticism, and poetry. His essays have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, The American Scholar, Newsweek, The Wilson Quarterly, Standpoint, City Journal, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and he has been a prolific book reviewer, contributing regularly to The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, and The Wall Street Journal. He is a native New Yorker, holds a doctorate in English from Stony Brook University, and has lived in Norway for over a decade. His website is http://www.brucebawer.com.
Barrister
Paul Diamond is a barrister who practices in the field of the law of religious liberty. He is one of Britain’s and Europe’s leading attorneys in this area. He has been instructed in some of the most controversial cases; for example, the case of the British Airways employee who was prevented from wearing a Cross (whilst other religious groups were permitted to manifest their faith), the right to free religious speech during a General Election by the ProLife Alliance and in cases over the repeated clash between the religious rights of individuals and the same sex agenda. In his recent major case, on the right of a Christian marriage counselor to be exempted from the counseling of same sex partners, he acted on behalf of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey. Paul’s counsel is sought after by a number of religious leaders and organizations.
The rapid growth of the militant secular agenda which seek to remove religious values from public life has turned a rather specialist and sleepy area of law into the front line in the battle to maintain Judeo Christian civilized values. This gave the opportunity to Paul to develop his legal skills.
Paul was always fascinated with the issue of religion and felt the call of God in his life. After studying Middle East Government, Paul attended Magdalene College, Cambridge to study law. From there, he won a scholarship to the Hague Academy of International Law, The Netherlands. An early article by Paul, attracted the attention of Lord Denning (the most famous British Judge) who openly supported Paul’s arguments. He commenced practice thereafter and has appeared before all levels of court including the House of Lords.
Early in his career, he became the barrister to the Keep Sunday Special Campaign (until the mid 1990s, Britain had a ban on Sunday trading and the campaign sought to keep Sundays as a ‘day of rest’). As standing Counsel, Paul handled many leading controversial cases and built a reputation for his future work in religious liberties. The issue of Sunday working was one that directly affected family life as the pressures on low income families to work has become relentless in recent years.
Paul has been involved in a number of controversial cases. In 2009, he was instructed to prevent a Hizbollah terrorist from entering the United Kingdom by the use of the threat of an international arrest warrant; and in 2011, Vladimir Bukovsky, the famous Soviet dissident instructed Paul to seek legal redress against former Soviet President Gorbachev.
Vicar of St Mary, Australia
Mark Durie completed an Arts Degree with First Class Honours and a University Medal in Germanic Languages and Linguistics. He gained his PhD in Linguistics from the Australian National University in 1984 with a study of the language of the Acehnese, a Muslim people of Indonesia. He conducted field research trips in Aceh during the 1980’s and 1990’s, producing several books, and many research articles. The dialects he documented were among those obliterated by the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004.
Dr. Durie was a visiting researcher at the University of Leiden in 1985, investigating the Dutch Acehnese manuscripts, many of which are concerned with Islamic jihad. Then he spent two years as a Harkness Fellow in the USA, holding positions as visiting researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Los Angeles and Stanford University. After coming to Melbourne, Dr. Durie became Head of the Department of Linguistics and Language Studies before taking up an Australian Research Council Senior Research Fellowship in the mid 1990’s. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities in 1991, and awarded an Australian Centennial Medal in 2001 for contributions to linguistics.
After a change in career, Dr. Durie now works as the Vicar of St Mary’s Anglican Church, Caulfield in Melbourne. He is a human rights activist, writing and speaking extensively in Australia and internationally on issues relating to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the persecution of religious minorities, particularly Christians living under the Islamic sharia. He speaks across Australia and internationally on Islam. He also writes on issues related to world missions, interfaith dialogue and religious conflict. His book Revelation: do we worship the same God? was published by CityHarvest in July 2006 and is into its second edition. His latest books The Third Choice and Liberty to the Captives, appeared in 2010. They are on understanding Islam, the experience of non-Muslims living under Islamic rule, and how to find spiritual freedom in the face of the challenge of Islam.
Author and Columnist
Bruce Bawer is the author of several books, including the bestselling While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (2006), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (2009). His earlier books include the influential A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (1993), which was a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”; Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity (1997); and several volumes of literary criticism, film criticism, and poetry. His essays have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, The American Scholar, Newsweek, The Wilson Quarterly, Standpoint, City Journal, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and he has been a prolific book reviewer, contributing regularly to The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, and The Wall Street Journal. He is a native New Yorker, holds a doctorate in English from Stony Brook University, and has lived in Norway for over a decade. His website is http://www.brucebawer.com.
Barrister
Paul Diamond is a barrister who practices in the field of the law of religious liberty. He is one of Britain’s and Europe’s leading attorneys in this area. He has been instructed in some of the most controversial cases; for example, the case of the British Airways employee who was prevented from wearing a Cross (whilst other religious groups were permitted to manifest their faith), the right to free religious speech during a General Election by the ProLife Alliance and in cases over the repeated clash between the religious rights of individuals and the same sex agenda. In his recent major case, on the right of a Christian marriage counselor to be exempted from the counseling of same sex partners, he acted on behalf of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey. Paul’s counsel is sought after by a number of religious leaders and organizations.
The rapid growth of the militant secular agenda which seek to remove religious values from public life has turned a rather specialist and sleepy area of law into the front line in the battle to maintain Judeo Christian civilized values. This gave the opportunity to Paul to develop his legal skills.
Paul was always fascinated with the issue of religion and felt the call of God in his life. After studying Middle East Government, Paul attended Magdalene College, Cambridge to study law. From there, he won a scholarship to the Hague Academy of International Law, The Netherlands. An early article by Paul, attracted the attention of Lord Denning (the most famous British Judge) who openly supported Paul’s arguments. He commenced practice thereafter and has appeared before all levels of court including the House of Lords.
Early in his career, he became the barrister to the Keep Sunday Special Campaign (until the mid 1990s, Britain had a ban on Sunday trading and the campaign sought to keep Sundays as a ‘day of rest’). As standing Counsel, Paul handled many leading controversial cases and built a reputation for his future work in religious liberties. The issue of Sunday working was one that directly affected family life as the pressures on low income families to work has become relentless in recent years.
Paul has been involved in a number of controversial cases. In 2009, he was instructed to prevent a Hizbollah terrorist from entering the United Kingdom by the use of the threat of an international arrest warrant; and in 2011, Vladimir Bukovsky, the famous Soviet dissident instructed Paul to seek legal redress against former Soviet President Gorbachev.
Vicar of St Mary, Australia
Mark Durie completed an Arts Degree with First Class Honours and a University Medal in Germanic Languages and Linguistics. He gained his PhD in Linguistics from the Australian National University in 1984 with a study of the language of the Acehnese, a Muslim people of Indonesia. He conducted field research trips in Aceh during the 1980’s and 1990’s, producing several books, and many research articles. The dialects he documented were among those obliterated by the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004.
Dr. Durie was a visiting researcher at the University of Leiden in 1985, investigating the Dutch Acehnese manuscripts, many of which are concerned with Islamic jihad. Then he spent two years as a Harkness Fellow in the USA, holding positions as visiting researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Los Angeles and Stanford University. After coming to Melbourne, Dr. Durie became Head of the Department of Linguistics and Language Studies before taking up an Australian Research Council Senior Research Fellowship in the mid 1990’s. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities in 1991, and awarded an Australian Centennial Medal in 2001 for contributions to linguistics.
After a change in career, Dr. Durie now works as the Vicar of St Mary’s Anglican Church, Caulfield in Melbourne. He is a human rights activist, writing and speaking extensively in Australia and internationally on issues relating to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the persecution of religious minorities, particularly Christians living under the Islamic sharia. He speaks across Australia and internationally on Islam. He also writes on issues related to world missions, interfaith dialogue and religious conflict. His book Revelation: do we worship the same God? was published by CityHarvest in July 2006 and is into its second edition. His latest books The Third Choice and Liberty to the Captives, appeared in 2010. They are on understanding Islam, the experience of non-Muslims living under Islamic rule, and how to find spiritual freedom in the face of the challenge of Islam.
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.
Former Director (consultant), International Affairs, The Federalist Society
From 2005 to 2025, Jim Kelly served on a consulting basis as the Federalist Society’s Director of International Affairs, responsible for outreach to law students, lawyers, and judges in Canada, Europe, and Israel. From 2005 to 2008, he served on the U.S. National Commission to UNESCO, and as Chairman of its Social and Human Sciences Committee. From 2001 to 2008, he served as an official U.S. delegate to five international human rights conferences. In 2019, the U.S. State Department appointed Jim to serve as one of the two U.S. members on the European Commission for Democracy through Law (the “Venice Commission”). In 2020, the State Department named him as an expert to the OSCE Moscow Mechanism. In March 2022, he initiated Ukraine’s consideration and use of the Moscow Mechanism to conduct the first official international investigation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which resulted in the Report on Violations of International Humanitarian and Human Rights Law, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Committed in Ukraine (1 April – 25 June 2022). Jim is the Founder of, and Director of Research for, Global Governance Watch, a web-based project that monitors the global governance activities of the UN’s sustainable development and ESG agenda. In 2022, in connection with his position as a Lecturer at the Busch School of Business at Catholic University of America, he authored Evolution of Business, Human Rights, & ESG, consisting of 28 one-hour presentations about the technocratic, anti-democratic, anti-capitalist, and religious nature and practices of the ESG movement. Jim is Founder and President of Solidarity Center for Law and Justice, P.C., which, since 2001, has filed amicus curiae briefs in five landmark U.S. Supreme Court educational and religious liberty cases. He is the Founder and General Counsel of the Georgia GOAL Scholarship Program, Georgia’s largest K-12 tuition tax credit scholarship program, which, since 2008, has awarded scholarships worth $224.3 million to 21,744 students for use at the accredited private K-12 schools of their choice. He has served on the Georgia Judicial Nominating Commission and Georgia Board of Juvenile Justice. In 2005, he authored Christianity, Democracy, and the American Ideal, a collection of the writings of the French-Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain. Jim earned his BBA and Law degrees from the University of Georgia. He also earned a Master of Taxation degree from Georgia State University, a Master of Non-Profit Management degree from Regis University, and a Master of International Relations degree from Salve Regina University. Jim and his wife, Lisa, reside in the Atlanta area.
Lecturer in Law, UCLA Law
Amjad Mahmood Khan teaches Fundamentals of U.S. Contract Law for Foreign Lawyers. A partner at Brown, Neri, Smith & Khan LLP (bnsklaw.com), he represents both plaintiffs and defendants in a wide range of high-stakes business litigation, including disputes related to commercial contracts, civil fraud, business torts, intellectual property, energy, insurance, antitrust and unfair competition and the False Claims Act. Amjad's clients have included a range of high-profile corporations, executives and organizations, including mortgage lenders, energy companies, technology firms, major airlines, municipalities and religious establishments. Amjad has extensive stand-up trial experience, having won multiple significant jury verdicts, including an award of approximately $12.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages. Amjad has significant appellate experience briefing and arguing appeals in both state and federal courts across the nation. Amjad has been recognized as a “Rising Star” by Southern California Super Lawyers every year since 2012.
Amjad previously served as litigation counsel at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, associate at Latham & Watkins LLP and judicial clerk to the Honorable Warren J. Ferguson at the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
Amjad received his J.D. in 2004 from Harvard Law School. While in law school, Amjad served as editor-in-chief of the Harvard Human Rights Law Journal and as a teaching assistant to Professor Scott Brewer (Contracts, Jurisprudence). Amjad graduated summa cum laude from Claremont McKenna College in 2001, with a B.A. in Government and English (Literature).
In addition to his litigation practice, Amjad devotes a considerable portion of his time to pro bono matters. Amjad has special expertise in asylum and refugee law, deportation defense and providing legal aid to disaster victims. Amjad was co-chair of Latham & Watkins’ global human rights and refugee practice group. Amjad has first chaired over two dozen successful immigration and asylum matters. Amjad has received numerous awards and accolades for his pro bono work, which includes sharing the 2012 Muslim Advocates Thurgood Marshall Award. Amjad has also served as an expert witness in asylum cases and has testified five times before the U.S. House of Representatives on the human rights abuses of religious minorities in the Near East and South Asia. Amjad is also a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Amjad has published articles on qui tam and derivative suit litigation in Financial Fraud Law Report and Securities Regulation and Law Report. Amjad’s academic work focuses on transnational legal studies, comparative constitutional law and national security. He is a recognized expert on religious freedom in the Islamic world, and his scholarship has appeared in Harvard International Law Journal,Harvard National Security Law Journal, Harvard Human Rights Journaland Richmond Journal of Global Law and Business.
Director of Legal Affairs, Center for Political Studies
Jacob Mchangama is director of legal affairs at the Center for Political Studies, a think tank based in Copenhagen, where he focuses on advocacy and academic research in the fields of human rights with a specific focus on freedom of expression. He is also an external lecturer in international human rights law at the University of Copenhagen. He has published numerous articles in academic journals as well as in international newspapers such as Wall Street Journal Europe, Globe and Mail, National Review, Reason, The Australian, South China Morning Post, Jerusalem Post, Hürriet Daily News, Voice of Russia, China Post, and Daily News (Egypt). His work has been mentioned in international media including the Economist, Courrier International and CBS.com. He is a frequent commentator for Danish TV and radio. In 2010 he was voted the most influential Danish public intellectual under the age of 40 by Danish newspaper Politiken.
Research Fellow, Hudson Institute
Before joining Hudson in 2011, Tadros was a Senior Partner at the Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth, an organization that aims to spread the ideas of classical liberalism in Egypt. He has received his MA in Democracy and Governance from Georgetown University and his BA in Political Science from the American University in Cairo. Mr. Tadros has previously interned at the American Enterprise Institute, where he worked on the Muslim Brotherhood and worked as a consultant for the Hudson Institute on Moderate Islamic Thinkers, and most recently the Heritage Foundation on Religious Freedom in Egypt. In 2007 he was chosen by the State Department in its first Leaders for Democracy Fellowship Program in collaboration with Syracuse University's Maxwell School. His articles have previously been published by the Wall Street Journal, the American Thinker, the American Interest and the Weekly Standard. Mr. Tadros is a Professional Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
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.
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.
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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The Future of Civil Rights Enforcement at the EEOC, OFCCP, and DOJ
Robert J. Gaglione, Jon Greenbaum, George R. La Noue, Craig E. Leen, Jenny R. Yang
Federal civil rights enforcement in the employment area is handled by the Equal Employment Opportunity...
The Landmark Case Of Shaare Tefila v. Cobb
Kenneth L. Marcus
A review of Annalise E. Glauz-Todrank, Judging Jewish Identity in the United States (Lexington Books 2023)...
The “Hecklers’ Veto” - Podcast
Nina Shea, Zuhdi Jasser, Eugene Volokh
Two American Muslim professors have been targeted by ISIS for criticizing the Charlie Hebdo attacks....
The “Hecklers’ Veto”
TeleforumPanel II: Growing Repression in the West
Bruce Bawer, Paul Diamond, Mark Durie
The 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the deadly 2006 Danish cartoon riots brought worldwide...
Panel II: Growing Repression in the West
Bruce Bawer, Paul Diamond, Mark Durie
The 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the deadly 2006 Danish cartoon riots brought worldwide...
Panel I: The Muslim World
David F. Forte, James P. Kelly, Amjad M. Khan, Jacob Mchangama, Samuel Tadros
The 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the deadly 2006 Danish cartoon riots brought worldwide...