Ohio Fifth District Court of Appeals
Judge Craig Baldwin was appointed to the Fifth District Court of Appeals in 2013. He was elected to the position in 2014 and again in 2016. Prior to his time on the appellate court, Judge Baldwin served eight years as a judge in the Licking County Court of Common Pleas, Domestic Relations Division. An attorney since 1992, Judge Baldwin was a partner with the law firm of Jones, Norpell, List, Miller and Howarth. In 2001 he was appointed by the Licking County Commissioners as director of the Licking County Child Support Enforcement Agency until his election as judge in 2004. He was re-elected as judge in 2010.
Judge Baldwin obtained his Juris Doctor from Capital University, Bachelor of Arts degree from Ohio University and pursued graduate degree work in public administration at Ohio University.
Judge Baldwin has served by assignment on the Ohio Supreme Court. Judge Baldwin is a former chair of the Ohio Supreme Court’s Commission on the Rules of Superintendence, a member of the Licking County Bar, Stark County Bar and Ohio State Bar Associations. In 2012 he was appointed to the Ohio Supreme Court’s Task Force on the Funding of Ohio Courts. Judge Baldwin is also a frequent instructor at the Ohio Judicial College.
Judge Baldwin is a member of the Newark-Heath Rotary and a board member of the Licking Memorial Hospital. He is married and has two children.
United States District Judge, Southern District of Ohio
Douglas R. Cole was nominated for the position in May 2019 by President Donald J. Trump and confirmed by the Senate in December 2019. Immediately before joining the bench, Judge Cole was a founding partner at Organ Cole, a litigation boutique in Columbus, Ohio.
Judge Cole received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, where he graduated with High Honors and Order of the Coif, was an Olin Fellow in Law & Economics, and was a member of the editorial board of the University of Chicago Law Review. He clerked for Judge Frank H. Easterbrook on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit before joining Kirkland & Ellis in its Chicago office. He has served as a professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law and at the Michael E. Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University, where he taught in the fields of business law, law & economics, and intellectual property. From 2003-2006, he was the State Solicitor for the State of Ohio. In that capacity, he argued five cases at the United States Supreme Court, and multiple cases in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and the Ohio Supreme Court. Before joining Organ Cole, Judge Cole was a litigation partner at the Columbus office of Jones Day, where he practiced in the Issues & Appeals group and the Intellectual Property group.
Judge Cole has undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering, mathematics, and physics, and worked as an electrical engineer before attending law school.
Associate Justice, Ohio Supreme Court
Mary DeGenaro became the 159th justice of the Ohio Supreme Court by gubernatorial appointment, effective Jan. 28, 2018.
Justice DeGenaro served nearly 17 years as a judge on the Seventh District Court of Appeals in Youngstown prior to her Supreme Court appointment. The appointed term ends Jan. 1, 2019 for a seat up for election in November 2018.
During her tenure on the Seventh District Court of Appeals, which began Feb. 9, 2001, she sat by assignment with the Ohio Supreme Court and other appellate districts.
Justice DeGenaro has served in many roles outside the courtroom. She was an adjunct faculty member for the political science department at Youngstown State University, where she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree. She received her law degree from the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, where she interned with U.S. District Judge George White.
She also was vice president of the Ohio Women’s Bar Association at the time of her Supreme Court appointment.
Admitted to the Ohio bar in 1986, she also was admitted to practice in the federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court and the Sixth Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals.
Prior to her judgeship, she served on the Poland Village Council.
Justice DeGenaro was appointed by the late Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyer to serve during 2002 and 2003 as a member of the Voter Education & Public Funding Working Group to further Judicial Impartiality: The Next Step Forum. This court-policy initiative addressed issues involving judicial races and preserving the integrity of Ohio’s judiciary.
In 2005, she began serving as a founding member of the Ohio State Bar Association’s Appellate Practice Specialty Certification Board, which administers the specialty bar examination and certification.
Involved in a variety of community organizations, Justice DeGenaro's service includes the board of trustees of the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County and the Mahoning Valley Historical Society. Past service includes the external advisory committees for the Ohio Center for the Advancement of Women in Public Service at Cleveland State University, and Youngstown State University’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.
Outside of her judicial duties, Justice DeGenaro enjoys reading and beekeeping. She and her husband, Steve, reside in Poland, Ohio. They have two adult sons.
Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court
Michael P. Donnelly is a judge on the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas General Division in Cleveland, Ohio. He first joined the court on January 3, 2005. Donnelly won re-election to a third consecutive term in the general election on November 8, 2016. His current term expires January 2, 2023.
Donnelly received his undergraduate degree from John Carroll University and his J.D. from the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. He was admitted to the Ohio Bar in 1992 and began working as an assistant prosecutor for Cuyahoga County. In 1997, he left that role to become an attorney at the firm of Davis & Young, where he worked until 1999. He then joined the firm of Climaco, Lefkowitz, Peca, Wilcox & Garofoli, working as a private practice attorney until his election to the common pleas bench in 2004.
In 2011, Donnelly participated in a program with the National Judicial College called "Innovative Leadership/Management Skills for Future Court Leaders". In 2012, Donnelly served as the Chair of Commission on Professionalism.
Ohio Eighth District Court of Appeals
Elected to the Ohio Court of Appeals – Eighth Appellate District in 2006 and twice reelected, Judge Melody Stewart has over 30 years of combined administrative, legal, and academic experience in a number of private and public settings. She has been an administrator for a healthcare management company, a music teacher, a civil defense litigator, and a law school administrator and professor. She served as the Administrative Judge for the Court of Appeals in 2013.
Judge Stewart earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati; her law degree as a Patricia Roberts Harris Fellow from the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University; and her Ph.D. as a Mandel Leadership Fellow at Case Western Reserve University’s Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences.
After practicing law as an assistant law director for the cities of Cleveland and East Cleveland, Judge Stewart worked as a lecturer, an adjunct instructor, and an assistant dean at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law before joining the faculty. Her primary teaching areas were ethics and professional responsibility, criminal law, criminal procedure, and legal research, writing, and advocacy. Additionally, she taught at the University of Toledo College of Law, at Ursuline College, and was Director of Student Services at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law.
Judge Stewart has served on many boards of trustees and been a member of various professional, educational, civic, and community organizations. She also served as a commissioner and chair of the Board of Planning and Zoning for the city of Euclid. Recently Judge Stewart served as a member of the Ohio Criminal Justice Recodification Committee. She is currently a member of the board of the Ohio Supreme Court’s Judicial College and is chair of the Ohio Capital Case Attorney Fee Council. Judge Stewart is admitted to practice in the state and federal courts in Ohio, the District of Columbia, and the United States Supreme Court.
Partner and Co-Chair, Public Policy Group, Shook Hardy & Bacon LLP
Mark Behrens co-chairs Shook's Washington, DC-based Public Policy Practice Group and is a leading national expert on civil justice issues with over thirty years of experience. A substantial part of his practice is working to improve the civil litigation environment through state and federal legislation; in the courts through amicus curiae briefs; through legal scholarship and judicial education; and in the court of public opinion.
Mark is actively involved in civil justice reform efforts at the federal and state levels. He has testified before the U.S. Congress and most state legislatures on behalf of business and civil justice organizations. Mark also has an active amicus brief practice specializing in tort liability and civil justice issues. He has authored or co-authored over 150 amicus briefs in cases before the United States Supreme Court and federal and state appellate courts on behalf of business, civil justice, and defense lawyer organizations. In addition, Mark routinely files comments on behalf of business, civil justice, and defense lawyer organizations regarding potential changes to federal and state court rules. He chairs the International Association of Defense Counsel’s (IADC) Civil Justice Response Committee and serves on the Board of Directors of Lawyers for Civil Justice (LCJ).
Mark is a member of the American Law Institute (ALI). He received his J.D. in 1990 from Vanderbilt University Law School, where he was a member of the Vanderbilt Law Review. He received his B.A. in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1987.
Staff Attorney, Shook Hardy & Bacon
Sarah works with Shook Hardy & Bacon’s Public Policy Group, whose aim is to improve civil litigation through judicial education, communications and legal scholarship; she also is a member of the Litigation practice group. Since joining the firm, she also has worked on construction industry-related arbitrations.
Before joining Shook, Sarah worked on litigation and administrative appeals for the Civil Beat Law Center in Hawaii, which provides advice and representation to the public and the media to achieve transparency in government. During law school, Sarah was senior research assistant to Andrew F. Popper during his work on the third edition of Administrative Law: A Contemporary Approach.
Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law and Director, Classical Liberal Institute, New York University School of Law; Director, Classical Liberal Institute, Civitas Institute University of Texas at Austin
Richard A. Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, at New York University, a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas Austin, and a senior Lecturer, the University of Chicago. He received an LL.D., h.c . from the University of Ghent, 2003 , and an LLD h.c . from the University of Siegen in 2018 and the Bradley Prize in 2011. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985. He has edited both the Journal of Legal Studies (1981-1991) and the Journal of Law and Economics (1991-2001). He is also a founder and director of the Classical Liberal Institute at NYU Law School. His most recent book is The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (2014). His other books include Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain ( 1985); Bargaining with the State (1993); Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995); Principles for a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty and the Common Good (1998); Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Theory of Classical Liberalism (2003); Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration and the Rule of Law (2011), and most recently, The Myth of Birthright citizenship—and Beyond (2026). He has taught courses in , administrative law, antitrust, constitutional, contracts, environmental law, land use planning; real property, torts and water law. He has written and spoken extensively on a wide range of topics, and is writes a regular column for Defining Ideas.
Ohio Fifth District Court of Appeals
Judge Craig Baldwin was appointed to the Fifth District Court of Appeals in 2013. He was elected to the position in 2014 and again in 2016. Prior to his time on the appellate court, Judge Baldwin served eight years as a judge in the Licking County Court of Common Pleas, Domestic Relations Division. An attorney since 1992, Judge Baldwin was a partner with the law firm of Jones, Norpell, List, Miller and Howarth. In 2001 he was appointed by the Licking County Commissioners as director of the Licking County Child Support Enforcement Agency until his election as judge in 2004. He was re-elected as judge in 2010.
Judge Baldwin obtained his Juris Doctor from Capital University, Bachelor of Arts degree from Ohio University and pursued graduate degree work in public administration at Ohio University.
Judge Baldwin has served by assignment on the Ohio Supreme Court. Judge Baldwin is a former chair of the Ohio Supreme Court’s Commission on the Rules of Superintendence, a member of the Licking County Bar, Stark County Bar and Ohio State Bar Associations. In 2012 he was appointed to the Ohio Supreme Court’s Task Force on the Funding of Ohio Courts. Judge Baldwin is also a frequent instructor at the Ohio Judicial College.
Judge Baldwin is a member of the Newark-Heath Rotary and a board member of the Licking Memorial Hospital. He is married and has two children.
United States District Judge, Southern District of Ohio
Douglas R. Cole was nominated for the position in May 2019 by President Donald J. Trump and confirmed by the Senate in December 2019. Immediately before joining the bench, Judge Cole was a founding partner at Organ Cole, a litigation boutique in Columbus, Ohio.
Judge Cole received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, where he graduated with High Honors and Order of the Coif, was an Olin Fellow in Law & Economics, and was a member of the editorial board of the University of Chicago Law Review. He clerked for Judge Frank H. Easterbrook on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit before joining Kirkland & Ellis in its Chicago office. He has served as a professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law and at the Michael E. Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University, where he taught in the fields of business law, law & economics, and intellectual property. From 2003-2006, he was the State Solicitor for the State of Ohio. In that capacity, he argued five cases at the United States Supreme Court, and multiple cases in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and the Ohio Supreme Court. Before joining Organ Cole, Judge Cole was a litigation partner at the Columbus office of Jones Day, where he practiced in the Issues & Appeals group and the Intellectual Property group.
Judge Cole has undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering, mathematics, and physics, and worked as an electrical engineer before attending law school.
Associate Justice, Ohio Supreme Court
Mary DeGenaro became the 159th justice of the Ohio Supreme Court by gubernatorial appointment, effective Jan. 28, 2018.
Justice DeGenaro served nearly 17 years as a judge on the Seventh District Court of Appeals in Youngstown prior to her Supreme Court appointment. The appointed term ends Jan. 1, 2019 for a seat up for election in November 2018.
During her tenure on the Seventh District Court of Appeals, which began Feb. 9, 2001, she sat by assignment with the Ohio Supreme Court and other appellate districts.
Justice DeGenaro has served in many roles outside the courtroom. She was an adjunct faculty member for the political science department at Youngstown State University, where she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree. She received her law degree from the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, where she interned with U.S. District Judge George White.
She also was vice president of the Ohio Women’s Bar Association at the time of her Supreme Court appointment.
Admitted to the Ohio bar in 1986, she also was admitted to practice in the federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court and the Sixth Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals.
Prior to her judgeship, she served on the Poland Village Council.
Justice DeGenaro was appointed by the late Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyer to serve during 2002 and 2003 as a member of the Voter Education & Public Funding Working Group to further Judicial Impartiality: The Next Step Forum. This court-policy initiative addressed issues involving judicial races and preserving the integrity of Ohio’s judiciary.
In 2005, she began serving as a founding member of the Ohio State Bar Association’s Appellate Practice Specialty Certification Board, which administers the specialty bar examination and certification.
Involved in a variety of community organizations, Justice DeGenaro's service includes the board of trustees of the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County and the Mahoning Valley Historical Society. Past service includes the external advisory committees for the Ohio Center for the Advancement of Women in Public Service at Cleveland State University, and Youngstown State University’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.
Outside of her judicial duties, Justice DeGenaro enjoys reading and beekeeping. She and her husband, Steve, reside in Poland, Ohio. They have two adult sons.
Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court
Michael P. Donnelly is a judge on the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas General Division in Cleveland, Ohio. He first joined the court on January 3, 2005. Donnelly won re-election to a third consecutive term in the general election on November 8, 2016. His current term expires January 2, 2023.
Donnelly received his undergraduate degree from John Carroll University and his J.D. from the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. He was admitted to the Ohio Bar in 1992 and began working as an assistant prosecutor for Cuyahoga County. In 1997, he left that role to become an attorney at the firm of Davis & Young, where he worked until 1999. He then joined the firm of Climaco, Lefkowitz, Peca, Wilcox & Garofoli, working as a private practice attorney until his election to the common pleas bench in 2004.
In 2011, Donnelly participated in a program with the National Judicial College called "Innovative Leadership/Management Skills for Future Court Leaders". In 2012, Donnelly served as the Chair of Commission on Professionalism.
Ohio Eighth District Court of Appeals
Elected to the Ohio Court of Appeals – Eighth Appellate District in 2006 and twice reelected, Judge Melody Stewart has over 30 years of combined administrative, legal, and academic experience in a number of private and public settings. She has been an administrator for a healthcare management company, a music teacher, a civil defense litigator, and a law school administrator and professor. She served as the Administrative Judge for the Court of Appeals in 2013.
Judge Stewart earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati; her law degree as a Patricia Roberts Harris Fellow from the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University; and her Ph.D. as a Mandel Leadership Fellow at Case Western Reserve University’s Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences.
After practicing law as an assistant law director for the cities of Cleveland and East Cleveland, Judge Stewart worked as a lecturer, an adjunct instructor, and an assistant dean at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law before joining the faculty. Her primary teaching areas were ethics and professional responsibility, criminal law, criminal procedure, and legal research, writing, and advocacy. Additionally, she taught at the University of Toledo College of Law, at Ursuline College, and was Director of Student Services at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law.
Judge Stewart has served on many boards of trustees and been a member of various professional, educational, civic, and community organizations. She also served as a commissioner and chair of the Board of Planning and Zoning for the city of Euclid. Recently Judge Stewart served as a member of the Ohio Criminal Justice Recodification Committee. She is currently a member of the board of the Ohio Supreme Court’s Judicial College and is chair of the Ohio Capital Case Attorney Fee Council. Judge Stewart is admitted to practice in the state and federal courts in Ohio, the District of Columbia, and the United States Supreme Court.
Co-Chairman, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Leonard is Co-Chairman and former Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society, joining the organization over 25 years ago. Since that time he has been instrumental in helping the organization top 70,000, focusing on the growth of lawyers membership, operations and activities advancing limited, constitutional government. In addition to his work at the Society, Leonard has advised President Trump on judicial selection, assisted with the Gorsuch and Kavanaugh Supreme Court selection and confirmation process, and served as a member of the transition team. He also organized the outside coalition efforts in support of the Roberts and Alito U.S. Supreme Court confirmations. Leonard was appointed by President George W. Bush to three terms to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom as chairman. He was also a U.S. Delegate to the UN Council and UN Commission on Human Rights during the Bush Administration. Leonard was the recipient of the 2009 Bradley Prize, along with the other founders and directors of the Federalist Society, for his work in advancing freedom and the rule of law. He is the coeditor of Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House, as well as the author of opinion editorials in the New York Times,The Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Leonard holds degrees from Cornell University and Cornell Law School. He presently resides in Northern Virginia, where he and his wife Sally have raised their seven children.
Vice President, Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law, Advancing American Freedom
John G. Malcolm oversees Advancing American Freedom’s work to increase understanding of the Constitution and the rule of law as Vice President of the organization’s Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law. Malcolm brings to the challenge a wealth of legal expertise and experience in both the public and private sectors.
Prior to joining Advancing American Freedom in 2025, Malcolm was the Vice President of the Institute for Constitutional Government and the Director of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation. Prior to joining Heritage in 2012, Malcolm was general counsel at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, as well as a distinguished practitioner in residence at Pepperdine Law School. From 2004 to 2009, Malcolm was executive vice president and director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association.
Malcolm served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division from 2001 to 2004, where he oversaw sections on computer crime and intellectual property, domestic security, child exploitation and obscenity, and special investigations. Immediately prior to that, he was a founding partner in the Atlanta law firm of Malcolm & Schroeder, LLP.
From 1990 to 1997, Malcolm was an assistant U.S. attorney in Atlanta, assigned to the fraud and public corruption section, and also an associate independent counsel, investigating fraud and abuse in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was honored with the Director’s Award for Superior Performance for his work in connection with the successful prosecution of Walter Leroy Moody Jr., who assassinated an 11th Circuit judge and the head of the Savannah chapter of the NAACP.
A graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia College, Malcolm began his career as a law clerk to a federal district court judge and a federal appellate court judge, and as an associate at the Atlanta-based law firm of Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan (new Eversheds Sutherland).
Malcolm, who resides in Washington, D.C., serves on the Board of Trustees of the Washington National Opera and is a Senate-confirmed member of the Board of Directors of the Legal Services Corporation, the largest funder of civil legal aid in the United States.
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