Associate Professor, Charleston School of Law
Bill Merkel joined the Charleston School of Law faculty in 2012. Merkel graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a B.A. in history in 1988 and proceeded to work as a cook in Baltimore and then as an analyst with the Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C. before returning to graduate studies in history and law.
He completed his J.D. at Columbia Law School in 1996 and then worked in appellate litigation with Wiley, Rein & Fielding in Washington, D.C. from 1997-1998. Merkel is the author, with the late Richard Uviller, of The Militia and the Right to Arms, Or, How the Second Amendment Fell Silent (Duke University Press, 2002). He taught American history at Oxford University from 2001-2003 and Comparative Introduction to American Law to foreign trained LL.M. students at Columbia Law School from 2003-2005. From 2005-2011, Merkel was an Associate Professor of Law at Washburn Law School in Topeka, Kansas, where he was named Professor of the Year by the graduating class in 2008. At Washburn, Merkel taught Constitutional Law I & II, Comparative Constitutional Law, Public International Law, and International Criminal Law and the Law of War. He received a doctorate in history from Oxford University in 2007.
Merkel has held visiting positions at the University of North Dakota School of Law in 2009 and at the University of South Carolina School of Law in 2011-12. In 2013 and 2014, Merkel taught The United States and the International Court of Justice in the Hague, Netherlands as part of the Charleston School of Law’s summer school consortium program administered by Stetson University School of Law. At the Charleston School of Law, Merkel continues to teach courses in Constitutional Law, International Law, Comparative Law, and Legal History. Merkel’s article “Jefferson’s Failed Anti-Slavery Proviso of 1784 and the Nascence of Free Soil Constitutionalism” was selected as the best submission in constitutional history by the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum in 2006. Merkel is in the process of revising his Oxford doctoral thesis “Race, Liberty, and Law: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery, 1770-1800” for publication as a book to be titled Ambiguous Beginnings: Thomas Jefferson, Slavery, and the Foundations of American Constitutionalism. Merkel has published numerous articles in journals including the Chicago-Kent Law Review, Connecticut Law Review, Lewis and Clark Law Review, Santa Clara Law Review, Seton Hall Law Review, Rutgers Law Review, and Law and History Review. His scholarship on the Second Amendment has been cited by many authors and jurists, including Justice Breyer in a dissenting opinion in McDonald v. City of Chicago. In 2013, following the successful defense of his dissertation “The Second Amendment and the Constitutional Right to Self-Defense,” Merkel was awarded a J.S.D. degree by Columbia University.
Merkel is a member of the District of Columbia, New York, and United States Supreme Court Bars.
Senior Fellow, Ave Maria School of Law and Host of the Four Boxes Diner Second Amendment Channel
Mark W. Smith is a visiting member of the Senior Common Room, New College, Oxford University and a Visiting Fellow in Pharmaceutical Public Policy and Law in the Department of Pharmacology, Oxford University. Mark is also a Distinguished Scholar and Senior Fellow of Law and Public Policy at the Ave Maria School of Law. He hosts the Four Boxes Diner YouTube Channel (youtube.com/TheFourBoxesDiner), which addresses Second Amendment scholarship, cases, history and related issues, and whose videos have received almost 90 million views. Mark's scholarship has been cited by federal courts and by parties before the United States Supreme Court in Viramontes v. Cook County, New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen and in United States v. Rahimi. He is a graduate of the NYU School of Law. Mark is also a New York Times bestselling author who appears frequently in the national media including on the Fox News Channel.
Managing Partner, Cooper & Kirk PLLC
David Thompson is the Managing Partner of Cooper & Kirk and joined the firm at its founding. Mr. Thompson has extensive trial and appellate experience in a wide range of matters and has secured victories worth billions of dollars. He has successfully challenged numerous laws on Second Amendment grounds. He has also litigated cases in over 30 federal district courts, argued in each of the 13 federal circuit courts of appeal, and argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as many state courts. Mr. Thompson was awarded an A.B. degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard University in 1991, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1994, Mr. Thompson received a J.D. degree, cum laude, from Harvard Law School.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Lawrence VanDyke serves as a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Prior to that appointment in January 2020, he served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the United States Department of Justice. Before that, he served consecutively as the Solicitor General of two western states – Nevada and Montana. At the beginning of his legal career, he worked as an attorney in the Appellate and Constitutional Issues practice group at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, LLP.
Judge VanDyke received his law degree magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor on the Harvard Law Review. He has engineering and theology undergraduate degrees and a masters degree in engineering management. He served as a law clerk to the Honorable Janice Rogers Brown of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Judge VanDyke and his wife Cheryl live in Reno, Nevada, and they have three children.
President and General Counsel, New Civil Liberties Alliance
NCLA’s President and General Counsel, Mark Chenoweth, has observed the administrative state up close and personal from perches in all four branches of the federal government. Mark served as the first chief of staff to Congressman Mike Pompeo, as legal counsel to Commissioner Anne Northup at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, as an attorney advisor in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice, and as a law clerk to the Hon. Danny J. Boggs on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Mark has worked in several different roles in the private sector as well. He began his legal career in D.C. as a regulatory associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. He then returned to his home state of Kansas to serve as in-house counsel for Koch Industries. Most recently he spent over four years as general counsel of the Washington Legal Foundation.
Mark is a graduate of Yale College and the University of Chicago Law School, where he co-founded the Institute for Justice Clinic on Entrepreneurship and became a Tony Patiño Fellow. Mark has been widely quoted and/or published in newspapers and websites including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New Hampshire Union Leader, and Metropolitan Corporate Counsel. He has also had recurring op-eds in the Los Angeles Daily Journal, and at Forbes.com.
President and General Counsel, New Civil Liberties Alliance
NCLA’s President and General Counsel, Mark Chenoweth, has observed the administrative state up close and personal from perches in all four branches of the federal government. Mark served as the first chief of staff to Congressman Mike Pompeo, as legal counsel to Commissioner Anne Northup at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, as an attorney advisor in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice, and as a law clerk to the Hon. Danny J. Boggs on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Mark has worked in several different roles in the private sector as well. He began his legal career in D.C. as a regulatory associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. He then returned to his home state of Kansas to serve as in-house counsel for Koch Industries. Most recently he spent over four years as general counsel of the Washington Legal Foundation.
Mark is a graduate of Yale College and the University of Chicago Law School, where he co-founded the Institute for Justice Clinic on Entrepreneurship and became a Tony Patiño Fellow. Mark has been widely quoted and/or published in newspapers and websites including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New Hampshire Union Leader, and Metropolitan Corporate Counsel. He has also had recurring op-eds in the Los Angeles Daily Journal, and at Forbes.com.
Senior Fellow, Stand Together Trust
Vikrant Reddy is a senior fellow at Stand Together Trust, specializing in the area of criminal justice reform. Reddy previously served as a senior policy analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), where he managed the launch of TPPF’s national Right on Crime initiative in 2010. He has worked as a research assistant at the Cato Institute, as a judicial clerk to the Hon. Gina M. Benavides in Texas, and as an attorney in private practice. He is a member of the State Bar of Texas, and he serves on the Executive Committee of the Criminal Law Practice Group of the Federalist Society. He is also an appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Texas State Advisory Committee.
Reddy’s research and scholarly opinions have appeared in a range of national media outlets, including USA Today, National Review, The Federalist, and others.
Reddy earned his law degree from the Southern Methodist University School of Law. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin.
Legal Director & General Counsel, Criminal Justice Legal Foundation
Kent S. Scheidegger has been the Legal Director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation since December 1986. He also served as Chairman of the Criminal Law Practice Group of the Federalist Society 2003 to 2005. His articles on criminal and constitutional law have been published in law reviews, national legal publications, and congressional reports. Legal arguments authored by Mr. Scheidegger have been cited and incorporated in several precedent-setting United States Supreme Court decisions.
After receiving a degree in physics with honors from New Mexico State University in 1976, Mr. Scheidegger served for six years in the United States Air Force as a Nuclear Research Officer. He took his law degree with distinction from the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in 1982 and practiced civil law in Northern California. He was general counsel of California Cooler, Inc. from 1984 until 1986, when he joined the Foundation.
Second Amendment: Will the Supreme Court Adhere to Bruen (and Originalism) in Rahimi and Beyond?
William G. Merkel, Mark W. Smith, David H. Thompson, Lawrence VanDyke
Oral argument was held in U.S. v. Rahimi on November 7, 2023. The case asks...
Dept. of Ed. v. Brown & Biden v. Nebraska - Post-Argument SCOTUScast
Mark Chenoweth
On February 28, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in two cases challenging the...
Courthouse Steps Oral Argument: Dept. of Ed. v. Brown & Biden v. Nebraska
Mark Chenoweth
February 28, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument in two cases challenging...
Two Views on Criminal Justice Reform: The Author and a Critic on Locked In
Vikrant P. Reddy, Kent Scheidegger
A Debate About: Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Real...