Partner, Arnold & Porter
John Elwood is the head of Arnold & Porter’s Appellate and Supreme Court practice. He has argued before the Supreme Court nine times, and appeared before most of the federal courts of appeals. He has successfully argued cases across a broad cross-section of subjects, with particular experience in environmental law, the False Claims Act, government contracting, and federal criminal law
Mr. Elwood’s work has earned him recognition as one of Washington’s top Supreme Court lawyers (Washingtonian, 2013), as one of “a small group of lawyers” with an “outsized influence at the U.S. Supreme Court” (Reuters, 2014), and as one of the country’s most innovative lawyers (Financial Times, 2014). Chambers USA reports that “[t]he much-admired John Elwood is praised for his advocacy skills” (2013), and describes Mr. Elwood as “phenomenal” (2014), “incredibly talented” (2012), and “a much-loved and widely respected lawyer who is quick on his feet” (2010).
Before joining the firm, Mr. Elwood served in senior-level positions in the U.S. Department of Justice. Beginning as an Assistant to the Solicitor General, and continuing with the firm, he has briefed more than 20 merits cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, and has briefed approximately 135 cases at the certiorari stage. As the senior Deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel, he advised the White House and federal agencies on a range of constitutional, statutory, and regulatory issues.
Professor of Law, University of San Diego School of Law (Retired)
Gail Heriot is a recently retired law professor from the University of San Diego. She also served as a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 2007 to 2025. She is also the chairman of the board of the American Civil Rights Project and the chair emerita of the Civil Rights practice group at the Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy.
Professor Heriot is a prolific writer in the area of civil rights. She is the author of many law review articles. She is also the editor (along with Maimon Schwarzschild) of the 2021 anthology, A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education. Her upcoming book is entitled, Why We Walk on Eggshell: How Our Civil Rights Laws Helped Bring About the Woke Era—And the Trump Era, Too.
Her writings for a general audience have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the National Review and many other newspapers and magazines.
In 1996, she co-chaired the successful “Yes on Proposition 209” campaign, which amended the California Constitution to prohibit state-sponsored discrimination or preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin. In 2020, she co-chaired the “No on Proposition 16” campaign, which successfully prevented Proposition 209’s repeal.
Partner, Millbank LLP
Mr. Katyal, the former Acting Solicitor General of the United States, focuses on appellate and complex litigation. He has argued 54 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States.
He has extensive experience in matters of antitrust, corporate, constitutional, securities, technology, criminal, patent, copyright, trademark, ERISA, products liability, labor, employment and tribal law. In the 2022-23 Supreme Court term, he argued five separate cases (nearly 10% of the docket), including winning the landmark voting case Moore v. Harper, which Judge Michael Luttig described as “the most important case for American democracy in the almost two and a half centuries since America’s founding.” Judge Luttig also said Mr. Katyal’s argument “was the single best oral argument I have ever heard made in the Supreme Court of the United States.” His cases include successfully striking down the Guantanamo military tribunals, successfully defending the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act and successfully defending the Peace Cross in Maryland. His 2017 win in Bristol Myers Squibb v. Superior Court was a landmark victory for personal jurisdiction law and his 2006 win in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld was described by former Acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger as “simply the most important decision on presidential power and the rule of law ever. Ever.”
From 2010 to 2011, Mr. Katyal served as Acting Solicitor General of the United States, where he argued several major Supreme Court cases involving a variety of issues, such as his successful defense of the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, his victorious defense of former Attorney General John Ashcroft for alleged abuses in the war on terror, his unanimous victory against eight states who sued the nation's leading power plants for contributing to global warming, and a variety of other matters. As Acting Solicitor General, he was responsible for representing the federal government of the United States in all appellate matters before the US Supreme Court and the Courts of Appeals throughout the nation. He served as Counsel of Record hundreds of times in the US Supreme Court. He was also the only head of the Solicitor General's office to argue a case in the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, on the important question of whether certain aspects of the human genome were patentable.
After graduating from Yale Law School, Mr. Katyal clerked for The Honorable Guido Calabresi of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as well as for The Honorable Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the US Supreme Court. He also served in the Deputy Attorney General's Office at the Justice Department as National Security Advisor and as Special Assistant to the Deputy Attorney General during 1998-1999.
Mr. Katyal is a best-selling New York Times author and has published dozens of scholarly articles in law journals (including several in the Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal), as well as many op-ed articles in publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. He has testified numerous times before various committees of both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate.
Supreme Court Correspondent, The New York Times
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court for The New York Times. Liptak’s column on legal affairs, “Sidebar,” appears every other Tuesday.
A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, Liptak practiced law at a large New York City law firm and in the legal department of The New York Times Company before joining the paper’s news staff in 2002.
Liptak was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting in 2009 for “American Exception,” a series of articles examining ways in which the American legal system differs from those of other developed nations. He received the 2010 Scripps Howard Award for Washington reporting for a five-part series on the Roberts Court.
He is the author of “To Have and Uphold: The Supreme Court and the Battle for Same-Sex Marriage.”
His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Business Week and Rolling Stone, and he has published articles in The Arizona Law Review, The Michigan Law Review and The New York University Annual Survey of American Law.
Liptak has taught courses at Yale, Columbia, the University of Chicago, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Southern California and U.C.L.A. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor of Law and Assistant Director, Criminal Justice Center, University of Florida Levin College of Law
Professor Stinneford teaches and writes about legal ethics, criminal law, criminal procedure, and constitutional law. His work has been cited by the United States Supreme Court, several state supreme courts and federal courts of appeal, and numerous scholars. It has published in numerous scholarly journals including the Georgetown Law Journal, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the William & Mary Law Review. The Stanford-Yale Junior faculty forum selected one of his articles as the best paper in the category of Constitutional History, and the AALS Criminal Justice Section named another article as the best paper in its Junior Scholars Paper Competition. In the fall of 2015, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Georgetown Law Center, Center for the Constitution.
Before joining the Florida faculty in 2009, Stinneford clerked for the Hon. James Moran of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, served as an Assistant United States Attorney, and practiced law with Winston & Strawn in Chicago. Stinneford teaches first-year courses in Criminal Law and Constitutional Law, and upper-level courses in Professional Responsibility, Criminal Procedure, Federal Criminal Law, Law & Literature, and White Collar Crime.
Supreme Court Preview: What Is in Store for October Term 2015?
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