Partner, Stone Pigman Walther Wittmann LLC
Mr. Thomson concentrates his practice in white collar criminal defense, government investigations, and corporate compliance. He has tried over 50 criminal trials to verdict in federal and state courts, and has experience in appellate litigation. His practice also includes civil litigation and information security. Prior to joining Stone Pigman, Mr. Thomson had a 23 year career as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice. He served on special assignment with the National Security Agency, where he worked on matters involving information assurance and intelligence collection.
Prior to private practice, Mr. Thomson was recognized numerous times by government agencies, including a Special Commendation Award given by the U.S. Attorney General for completing the Justice Department's Leadership Excellence and Achievement Program; Special Commendation by FBI Director for outstanding performance for successful corruption prosecution after Hurricane Katrina; Special Award from the U.S. Postal Service for prosecution of corrupt employee; Special Award by New Orleans Police Department, ATF and U.S. Department of Justice for his contributions to Project Exile; and Special Awards for Outstanding Contributions to Drug Law Enforcement from the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Director of the Program in Human Rights, Catholic University of America
William L. Saunders is Chair Emeritus of the Religious Liberties Practice Group of the Federalist Society. He is also a religious liberty and human rights scholar as well as director of the Center for Human rights at The Catholic University of America. He is Law Fellow with the Institute for Human Ecology, Professor and Director of the Program in Human Rights in the School of Arts & Sciences and Co-director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Columbus School of Law. Before joining The Catholic University of America, Mr. Saunders served as Senior Vice President and Senior Counsel with Americans United for Life for ten years. From 1999 to 2009, he was Senior Fellow in Bioethics and Human Rights Counsel at the Family Research Council.
Mr. Saunders attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a Morehead scholarship. He obtained his degree in law from the Harvard Law School.
Mr. Saunders was featured in Harvard’s first Guide to Conservative Public Interest Law in 2003 and again in the 2008 edition. He served on Harvard’s Advisory Committee for its 2008 celebration of public interest law. A member of the Supreme Court bar, he has authored numerous legal briefs in state, federal, foreign, and international courts.
Mr. Saunders’ book, Unborn Human Life and Fundamental Rights: Leading Constitutional Cases Under Scrutiny, was published in 2019. His articles and book chapters have been published by the university presses of Harvard, Villanova, Brigham Young, Fordham, Georgetown, Houston, Scranton, and the Catholic University of America, as well as by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Freedom House, Greenhaven Press, Rowan & Littlefield, Praeger, St. Augustine’s, and Intervarsity press. He has given lectures and participated in debates at many colleges, universities, and law schools, including Princeton, Harvard, Georgetown, and Notre Dame. He delivered the annual J. Michael Miller Lecture at the University of St. Thomas (on international law) in February 2007, the annual R. Wayne Kraft Memorial Lecture (on bioethics) at DeSales University in February 2004 and the annual James Moore Lecture (on human rights violations in Sudan) at Millikin University in 1999. He has also lectured, and/or has been published, in many foreign countries, including Italy, Germany, Poland, Austria, Spain, Greece, Slovakia, Mexico, Qatar, Malaysia, Romania, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom.
In addition to speaking and writing frequently on bioethics topics, Mr. Saunders has submitted testimony to the President’s Council on Bioethics, as well as to UNESCO’s Committee on Bioethics, and has briefed Congressional staff and state legislatures. He is a regular columnist for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly.
Mr. Saunders has appeared often in the media, including BBC World News, CNN, Fox News, Vatican Radio, and National Public Radio. His articles on issues have appeared in a variety of journals, such as First Things, Human Events, Human Life Review, The Legal Times, Communio, The Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy, Ethics & Medics, and Touchstone.
Mr. Saunders served on the official United States delegation to the UN Special Session on Children in 2001/02. In 2011, he was a speaker at an official briefing at the UN, addressing the topic, why euthanasia is not a human right.
In 2004, he served on the NGO Working Committee in connection with the Doha Intergovernmental Conference for the Family.
Mr. Saunders is Senior Fellow with the Religious Freedom Institute, and Affiliated Scholar with the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Ethics at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. He is President of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars and a member of the boards of the International Association of Catholic Bioethicists, the International Right to Life Federation, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, and the Society of Catholic Social Scientists.
In 1999, Mr. Saunders founded Sudan Relief and Rescue, Inc., to aid the persecuted church in Sudan. He has worked for and written on behalf of the persecuted church for many years.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit
Judge Katsas was appointed to the D.C. Circuit in December 2017. He graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, where he was an executive editor on the Harvard Law Review. Between 1989 and 1992, he served as a law clerk to Judge Edward Becker on the Third Circuit, to then-Judge Clarence Thomas on the D.C. Circuit, and to Justice Thomas on the Supreme Court. Between 1992 and 2001, he was an associate and then partner in the Washington office of Jones Day, where he specialized in appellate and complex civil litigation. Between 2001 and 2009, he served in many senior positions in the Department of Justice, including as Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division and as Acting Associate Attorney General. In 2009, he returned to Jones Day. From January to December 2017, he served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President.
Before joining the bench, Judge Katsas argued more than 75 appeals, including three cases in the Supreme Court, 13 cases in the D.C. Circuit, and cases in every other federal court of appeals. By appointment of the Chief Justice, he served on the Advisory Committee on Appellate Rules from 2013 to 2017. In 2016, he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers.
Robina Chair of Law, Science and Technology, University of Minnesota Law School
Professor June Carbone joined the University of Minnesota Law School faculty in June 2013 as the inaugural holder of the Robina Chair in Law, Science and Technology from her position as the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC). She is an expert in family law, assisted reproduction, property, and law, medicine and bioethics, and also has taught contracts, remedies, financial institutions, civil procedure, and feminist jurisprudence.
Before joining UMKC in 2007, Professor Carbone was an associate professor and a professor at Santa Clara University (SCU) School of Law, beginning in 1987. From 2000-06 she served as associate dean for faculty development and from 2001-03 as the Presidential Professor of Ethics and the Common Good, an appointment that supports ethics research at the SCU’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. She was a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender in 1995-96.
While at SCU, she also was co-director of the National University of Singapore summer program focused on intellectual property and international trade (2006), director of the Sydney summer study program focused on law and biotechnology (2004 and 2005), and director of the Hong Kong summer study program focused on comparative legal systems and international trade (1994).
Previously she was an assistant professor at George Mason University School of Law (1983-87) and a trial attorney in the Civil Division, Federal Programs Branch of the U.S. Department of Justice (1978-83).
Professor Carbone writes prolifically on law and the family, marriage, divorce, and domestic obligations, including changes brought about by the biotechnology revolution. Her most recent books are Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (Oxford U. Press, 2010), which explores the effects of diverging values and norms in America, and Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family (Oxford U. Press, 2014), which examines the widening class divide in the American family. Both are co-authored with Naomi Cahn.
Among the honors Professor Carbone has received are the 2009-10 Daniel L. Brenner Faculty Publishing Award from UMKC School of Law, the 2002 SCU Award for Recent Achievement in Scholarship over the previous five years, and the 2002 SCU Law School Award for Distinguished Scholarship. At the Association of American Law Schools, she is a founding member of the Biolaw Section, a former chair of the Family and Juvenile Law Section, and a former Liaison to the Joint Editorial Board of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. She also has been a member of the Yale Cultural Cognition Project since 2010.
Professor Carbone received her J.D. from the Yale Law School in 1978 and her A.B., magna cum laude, from the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1975.
Associate Professor of Economics and Law, University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC) School of Law
Adjunct Professor, Belmont Abbey College
Chairman, The Ashcroft Law Firm LLC, and former United States Attorney General
Former U.S. Attorney General, Governor and U.S. Senator John Ashcroft serves as the firm’s founder and chairman. As Attorney General, and the U.S. Justice Department’s CEO, Mr. Ashcroft led the world’s largest and foremost international law firm and law enforcement agency—an organization larger than most Fortune 500 companies, with over 122,000 employees. Mr. Ashcroft integrated strategic planning, budgeting, and performance measures, which resulted in the DOJ earning a clean audit for the first time in its history.
Mr. Ashcroft boldly led the Department of Justice through the transformational period after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He subsequently reorganized the Department to focus on its number one priority: preventing terrorism. The tough antiterrorism campaign he directed helped keep America safe throughout his tenure and resulted in the dismantling of terrorist cells across America and the disruption of over 150 terrorist plots worldwide.
Within two months of the attacks, and with financial markets still reeling, the unprecedented corporate scandals at ENRON, WorldCom and dozens more unfolded, further destabilizing the weakened economy. John Ashcroft was called upon to restore America’s faith in the integrity of our marketplace. He marshaled the resources of the federal government to bring to justice those guilty of massive corporate fraud. At all times, he demanded that cases be brought swiftly, with appropriate serious penalties—always taking into account the best interests of the employees and shareholders whose lives were most directly affected.
From 1985 to 1993, as Governor of Missouri, Ashcroft balanced eight consecutive budgets, built a $120 million budget surplus and established a $190 million operating reserve. His management and fiscal integrity helped generate 338,000 new jobs state-wide, a triple-A bond rating from the three major Wall Street rating agencies, a per capita state and local tax burden ranked 49th in the United States and a 12 percent increase in personal income. His new education performance standards led Fortune magazine to name him as one of the nation’s top ten Education Governors. In 1991, the non-partisan National Governors Association voted him Chairman.
Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1994, he brought his management skills to Washington where he authored budget rules protecting Social Security and Medicare and helped balance the federal budget for the first time in decades. As a member of the Senate Judiciary, Foreign Relations and Commerce Committees, he worked to reform laws regulating the banking, telecommunications, aviation, transportation and information technology industries.
In 1973, Mr. Ashcroft served as Missouri Auditor, followed by two terms as Missouri Attorney General. He was raised in Springfield, Missouri, received his undergraduate degree from Yale University and his Juris Doctor from the University of Chicago.
Missouri Representative
Missouri Speaker of the House
Attorney General, Kansas
Attorney General Kris Kobach was raised in Topeka, Kansas where he graduated from Washburn Rural High School. He completed his undergraduate studies in government at Harvard University, graduating first in his department and summa cum laude. A Marshall Scholarship recipient, he received his Ph.D. in politics from the University of Oxford. Kobach received his J.D. from Yale Law School, serving as notes development editor of the Yale Law Journal.
Kobach clerked for the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and shortly thereafter became a professor of constitutional law at the University of Missouri - Kansas City School of Law. Kobach received a White House Fellowship from President George W. Bush. He served in the United States Department of Justice under Attorney General John Ashcroft as Counsel to the Attorney General.
He has litigated some of the most high-profile cases in the country, including defending statutes and ordinances against the ACLU on multiple occasions. In 2012, Kobach brought the first challenge to President Obama’s DACA amnesty on behalf of 10 ICE agents. His victory in federal district court paved the way for Texas to defeat the Obama Justice Department in its litigation.
Kobach served as the 31st Kansas Secretary of State, 2011-2019. He lives near Lecompton with his wife, Heather, and their five children.
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.
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