Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, University of Virginia School of Law; Alice McKean Young Regents Chair in Law Emeritus, University of Texas
Douglas Laycock is perhaps the nation’s leading authority on the law of religious liberty and also on the law of remedies. He has taught and written about these topics for more than four decades at the University of Chicago, the University of Texas, the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia. He retired from teaching at UVA Law School in May 2023.
Laycock has testified frequently before Congress and has argued many cases in the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, where he has served as lead counsel in six cases and has also filed influential amicus briefs. He is the author (co-author in the most recent edition) of the leading casebook Modern American Remedies, the award-winning monograph The Death of the Irreparable Injury Rule and many articles in leading law reviews. He co-edited a collection of essays, Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty.
His many writings on religious liberty have been republished in a five-volume collection:
Laycock resigned from the council and as first vice president of the American Law Institute to become co-reporter for the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Remedies. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He earned his B.A. from Michigan State University and his J.D. from the University of Chicago.
Founder and President, American Civil Rights Institute
Ward Connerly is founder and President of the American Civil Rights Institute – a national, not-for-profit organization aimed at educating the public about the need to move beyond race and, specifically, racial and gender preferences. Mr. Connerly has gained national attention as an outspoken advocate of equal opportunity for all Americans, regardless of race, sex, or ethnic background.
Mr. Connerly is author of Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences and his new release Lessons from My Uncle James: Beyond Skin Color to the Content of Our Character. One part memoir, one part moral guide, Lessons from My Uncle James is a touching, funny and ultimately a philosophical book about living a principled and productive life regardless of skin color. Lessons illustrates how Mr. Connerly arrived at the ethics that have guided his life and is a new starting point for the discussion about character that America must have in order to move beyond race for good.
As a member of the University of California Board of Regents, Mr. Connerly focused the attention of the nation on the University's race-based system of preferences in its admissions policy. On July 20, 1995, following Mr. Connerly's lead, a majority of the Regents voted to end the University's use of race as a means for admissions. He was appointed to a 12-year term as UC Regent in March 1993.
In 1995, Mr. Connerly accepted chairmanship of the California Civil Rights Initiative (Proposition 209) campaign. Under his leadership, the campaign successfully obtained more than 1 million signatures and qualified for the November 1996 ballot. California voters passed Proposition 209 by a 55 percent to 45 percent margin.
Mr. Connerly also led the efforts to pass initiatives in the States of Washington, Michigan, Nebraska and Arizona that were patterned after California's Proposition 209, to require equal treatment under the law for all residents in public education, public employment and public contracting.
Mr. Connerly has been profiled on 60 Minutes, the cover of Parade magazine, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek magazine, and virtually every major news magazine in America. He has also appeared on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Crossfire, Hannity & Colmes, Meet the Press, Dateline, NBC Nightly News, CNN, and C-SPAN.
Mr. Connerly is President and Chief Executive Officer of Connerly & Associates, Inc., a Sacramento-based association management and land development consulting firm founded in 1973. He is regarded as one of the housing industry's top experts, possessing a comprehensive knowledge of housing and development issues. He has been inducted as a lifetime member into the California Building Industry Hall of Fame and has been a member of the Rotary Club of Sacramento for over 15 years.
Senior Fellow, National Security Institute, Antonin Scalia School of Law, George Mason University; Retired Professor, Distinguished Fellow and Co-Founder, Center for National Security Law, University of Virginia School of Law (1987-2020)
Robert F. Turner holds both professional and academic doctorates from the University of Virginia School of Law. He co-founded the Center for National Security Law with Professor John Norton Moore in April 1981 and served as its associate director for 39 years, except for two periods of government service in the 1980s and during 1994-95, when he occupied the Charles H. Stockton Chair of International Law at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He retired from UVA in January 2020 and currently serves as a non-resident senior fellow at the GMU National Security Institute. He also served briefly in 2020 as President of the Crime Prevention Research Center—one of the most respected pro-Second Amendment groups in the country—while its founder, Dr. John Lott, was on leave of absence.
A former Army captain and veteran of two tours in Vietnam, Turner served as a research associate and public affairs fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace before spending five years in the mid-1970s as national security adviser to U.S. Senator Robert P. Griffin, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (where Turner anticipated by seven years the Supreme Court’s landmark INS v. Chadha decision, striking down legislative vetoes). He also served in the executive branch during the Reagan administration as a member of the Senior Executive Service, first in the Pentagon as special assistant to the undersecretary of defense for policy, then in the White House as counsel to the President's Intelligence Oversight Board, and at the State Department as principal deputy and then acting assistant secretary for legislative affairs. In 1986, he became the first president of the congressionally established United States Institute of Peace.
A former three-term chairman of the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security (and for many years editor of the ABA National Security Law Report), Turner also chaired the Executive-Congressional Relations Subcommittee of the ABA Section on International Law and Practice and chaired or co-chaired the National Security Law Subcommittee of the Federalist Society’s International and National Security Law Practice Group for several years.
Turner taught undergraduate courses at Virginia on international law, U.S. foreign policy, the Vietnam War and foreign policy and the law in what is now the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics. In addition, he co-taught National Security Law and advanced national security law seminars on the Indochina War and on war and peace with Moore at the Law School.
The author or editor of 17 books and monographs (including co-editor of the Center's 1,600-page National Security Law & Policy casebook, National Security Law Documents, and Legal Issues in the Struggle Against Terror) and numerous articles in law reviews and other professional journals, Turner has also contributed articles to most of the major U.S. newspapers, including The New York Times and USA Today. In an op-ed published in The International Herald Tribune in September 1990, he and Moore were the first to call for a war-crimes trial for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and for international controls over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and the following month he wrote the lead story in The Washington Post Sunday Outlook Section, “Killing Saddam: Would It Be a Crime?,” arguing that Hussein would be a lawful target during Operation Desert Storm. (His reasoning contributed to the modern legal justification for drone strikes targeting specific terrorist leaders.) Three years before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Turner published an op-ed in USA Today entitled: “In Self-defense, U.S. Has Right to Kill bin Laden.”
In July 2007, he co-authored an article in The Washington Post with former U.S. Marine Corps Commandant General P.X. Kelley, “War Crimes and the White House,” criticizing the use of unlawful “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the Central Intelligence Agency. On the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon he authored an article in The Wall Street Journal, “Saigon’s Fall Still Echoes Today,” noting that after the war ended, Hanoi admitted it had made a decision in 1959 to open the Ho Chi Minh Trail and start sending troops, weapons and supplies into South Vietnam to overthrow its government — just as the United States had charged. In 2010 Turner received the first “person of the year” award from SACEI, a major Vietnamese-American human rights organization.
A frequent lecturer and debater, Turner has spoken at more than 100 law schools around the nation and in other fora — taking on as many as four opponents at a time. His debate opponents have included former or future deans of Yale, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Berkeley law schools. Following a 1987 debate against Dean Harlan Cleveland (Rhodes Scholar, U.S. Ambassador to NATO, and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient) in which Turner defended the legality of U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras during the Reagan Administration, the host student debating societies awarded Turner the victory by an 85-to-15 percent margin.
Turner has also written and lectured widely on University of Virginia founder and America’s third president Thomas Jefferson. In 2000-2001 he chaired the Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission. In his 2012 book Master of the Mountain, Jefferson critic Henry Wiencek described Turner as “Jefferson’s chief scholarly defender."
A former distinguished lecturer at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Turner is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Academy of Political Science, the Committee on the Present Danger, The Heterodox Academy, and other professional organizations. He maintained a 4.0 gpa as a graduate student at Stanford in History and Political Science and in the UVA Department of Government and Foreign Affairs and was the first person admitted directly to the UVA academic law doctorate (SJD) program without first being required to earn an LL.M. master’s degree. He was selected for inclusion in Who’s Who in American Law less than two years after graduating from law school and Who’s Who in the World before he reached the age of 40. Turner has testified before more than a dozen different congressional committees on issues of international or constitutional law and other topics.
David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, University of Virginia School of Law
Lillian BeVier taught constitutional law (with special emphasis on First Amendment issues), intellectual property (trademark, copyright), real property and torts from 1973-2010 at the Law School, and now teaches a January Term course on judicial philosophy.
At Stanford Law School, BeVier was revising editor for the Stanford Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. Before coming to Virginia, she was associate professor of law at the University of Santa Clara Law School; practiced law with Spaeth Blase Valentine & Klein in Palo Alto, Calif.; served as research associate to Professor William F. Baxter at Stanford University Law School, working on the FAA-ABA study of the legal aspects of airport noise and the sonic boom; and was assistant to the general secretary and assistant staff legal counsel for Stanford University.
BeVier received the University of Virginia Alumni Association Distinguished Professor Award in 2006. The Raven Society elected her to membership in 1993 and honored her with the faculty award in 2010. She delivered the Henry Miller Memorial Lecture at Georgia State Law School in 2005, the Coen Memorial Lecture at the University of Colorado Law School in 2000, and the David C. Baum Lecture on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the University of Illinois Law School in 1996. In 1999, at the invitation of the Supreme Court Historical Society, she spoke to the Society on Free Expression in the Warren and Burger Courts. Suffolk University awarded her an honorary S.J.D. degree in 1998. In the fall of 2003, she was a visiting scholar at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
Having been nominated by President Bush and confirmed by the Senate in 2003, she served as vice-chair of the Board of Directors of the Legal Services Corporation until 2009. She serves on the national Board of Visitors of the Federalist Society. Within the Charlottesville community, BeVier has served as chair of the Board of Trustees of St. Anne’s-Belfield School and of the Martha Jefferson Hospital. She is currently chair of the board of the Martha Jefferson Health Services Corporation and of Piedmont CASA (Court-Appointed Special Advocates).
Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
An expert in consumer finance and law and economics, Rich Hynes teaches Bankruptcy, Contracts, Corporate Finance, and Secured Transactions at Virginia.
Hynes received his B.S. from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a law degree from the University of Chicago. He was elected to the Order of the Coif. After graduating from law school, he practiced law with Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in Los Angeles. He joined the faculty at the William and Mary School of Law in 2000, and he joined the Virginia faculty in 2007 after visiting during the 2006-07 academic year.
George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
TODD J. ZYWICKI is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University and Research Fellow of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. During the Fall 2023 semester he served as the Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy for the Bruce Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado-Boulder. From 2020-2021 he was Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Taskforce on Federal Consumer Financial Law. In 2021 he was inducted to the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers. He is also a Senior Fellow of the F.A. Hayek Program for the Advanced Study of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at George Mason University and a former Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute. From 2015-2017 he was Executive Director of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. He served as Co-Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review from 2006-2017. From 2003-2004, Professor Zywicki served as the Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. He has also taught at Vanderbilt University Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Boston College Law School, Mississippi College School of Law, and China University of Political Science and Law.
Professor Zywicki clerked for Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and worked as an associate at Alston & Bird in Atlanta, Georgia, where he practiced bankruptcy and commercial law. He received his J.D. from the University of Virginia, where he was executive editor of the Virginia Tax Review and John M. Olin Scholar in Law and Economics. Professor Zywicki also received an M.A. in Economics from Clemson University and an A.B. cum Laude with high honors in his major from Dartmouth College.
Professor Zywicki is also a Lone Mountain Fellow of the Property and Environment Research Center, a Fellow of the International Centre for Economic Research in Turin, Italy, and a former Senior Fellow of the Goldwater Institute. During the Fall 2008 Semester Professor Zywicki was the Searle Fellow of the George Mason University School of Law and was a 2008-09 W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Arch W. Shaw National Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He has lectured and consulted with government officials around the world, including Iceland, Italy, Japan, and Guatemala. In 2006 Professor Zywicki served as a Member of the United States Department of Justice Study Group on “Identifying Fraud, Abuse and Errors in the United States Bankruptcy System.”
Professor Zywicki is the author of more than 130 articles in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed economics journals. He is one of the Top 10 most-cited law professors in the field of Commercial Law and one of the Top 25 law professors on Twitter as measured by engagement levels. He is one of the Top 50 Most Downloaded Law Authors at the Social Science Research Network. He has testified multiple times before Congress on issues of consumer bankruptcy law and consumer credit and is a frequent commentator on legal issues in the print and broadcast media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Nightline, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Neil Cavuto Show, Fox & Friends, Smerconish, Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream, Fox Business, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg News, BBC, The Diane Rehm Show, Lou Dobbs Show, Jerry Doyle Show, and The Laura Ingraham Show.
Professor Zywicki is former Chairman and a current member of the Board of Directors of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Humane Studies, Bill of Rights Institute, the Executive Committee for the Federalist Society's Financial Institutions and E-Commerce Practice Group, the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment. He formerly served on the Governing Board and the Advisory Council for the Financial Services Research Program at George Washington University School of Business. He is currently the Chair of the Academic Advisory Council for the following organizations: The Bill of Rights Institute, the film “We the People in IMAX,” and the McCormick-Tribune Foundation “Freedom Museum” in Chicago, Illinois. He is a member of the Board of Visitors of Ralston College and was a member of the Board of Trustees of Yorktown University. From 2005-2009 he served as an elected Alumni Trustee of the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees.
James Madison Distinguished Professor of Law and Class of 1941 Research Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Professor John C. Harrison is the James Madison Distinguished Professor of Law and Class of 1941 Research Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. He joined the faculty at University of Virginia in 1993 as an associate professor of law after a distinguished career with the U.S. Department of Justice. His teaching subjects include constitutional history, federal courts, remedies, corporations, civil procedure, legislation and property. In 2008 he was on leave from the Law School to serve as counselor on international law in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State.
A 1977 graduate of the University of Virginia, Harrison earned his law degree in 1980 at Yale, where he served as editor of the Yale Law Journal and editor and articles editor of the Yale Studies in World Public Order. He was an associate at Patton Boggs & Blow in Washington, D.C., and clerked for Judge Robert Bork on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He worked with the Department of Justice from 1983-93, serving in numerous capacities, including deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel (1990-93).
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