Senior Counsel, Litigation, Defense of Freedom Institute
Don Daugherty is Senior Counsel, Litigation, at the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies. He previously served as a Senior Counsel at the Institute for Free Speech and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. Before that, he was a partner at three of Wisconsin’s largest firms, with nearly 30 years of trial and appellate litigation experience. He has been consistently recognized as among the “Best Lawyers in America,” as well as Wisconsin’s “Super Lawyers.” He received his B.A. from the University of Virginia and his J.D. from Northwestern University Law School. After law school, he served as a clerk to the Honorable Roger J. Miner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Don is on the Board of Advisors for the Milwaukee Lawyers’ Chapter of the Federalist Society, and on the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society’s Litigation Practice Group.
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.
Professor of Law, Notre Dame Law School
Professor Derek Muller is a nationally-recognized scholar in the field of election law. His research focuses on the role of states in the administration of federal elections, the constitutional contours of voting rights and election administration, the limits of judicial power in the domain of elections, and the Electoral College.
He has published more than two dozen academic works, and his op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He has testified before Congress, and he is a contributor at the Election Law Blog. He is a co-author on a Federal Courts casebook published by Carolina Academic Press. He is also the co-reporter on a new Restatement of the Law, Election Litigation, an effort led by the American Law Institute.
Professor Muller teaches Election Law, Civil Procedure, and Evidence.
President, Cass & Associates, PC
Ronald A. Cass is Dean Emeritus of Boston University School of Law (where he was Dean from 1990-2004), President of Cass & Associates, PC, former Vice-Chairman and Commissioner of the U.S. International Trade Commission, former faculty member at Boston University School of Law and the University of Virginia Law School, and Distinguished Senior Fellow at the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. Dean Cass also sits as an arbitrator for commercial, international, and intellectual property rights disputes, and is a former United States member of the Panel of Conciliators of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. He is a member of the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States and has received seven presidential appointments, spanning Presidents Ronald Reagan to Donald J. Trump.
As a law professor, lecturer, and scholar, Dean Cass has been teaching and writing about a wide array of legal issues on topics such as administrative law and regulation, antitrust, constitutional law, communications, intellectual property, international trade, separation of powers, and legal process. He has published more than 160 scholarly books, chapters, articles, and papers, including a leading casebook on administrative law. Dean Cass has taught judges as well as students in schools of law, economics, business, and public policy and has held academic appointments in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
In addition to his academic work, Dean Cass has participated in numerous important legal cases as an amicus, consultant, or expert, and has advised businesses, law firms, investment funds, and government agencies on a range of trade, antitrust, intellectual property, and regulatory issues. He has a broad range of affiliations with professional groups, and has received numerous honors, fellowships and awards.
Dean Cass is a graduate of the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago Law School.
Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and Director, Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law, Harvard Law School
Noah Feldman specializes in constitutional studies, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, free speech, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory. Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, he is also a Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. In 2003 he served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution. He received his A.B. summa cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D.Phil. in Oriental Studies from Oxford University in 1994. From 1999 to 2002, he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. Before that he served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998 to 1999) and to Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1997 to 1998). He received his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1997, serving as Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal. He’s the author of eight books: The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President (Random House, 2017); Cool War: The Future of Global Competition (Random House, 2013); Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices (Twelve Publishing, 2010); The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2008); Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2005); What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation building (Princeton University Press 2004); and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2003. He also co-authored two textbooks with Kathleen Sullivan: Constitutional Law, Twentieth Edition (Foundation Press, Fall 2019) and First Amendment (Foundation Press, 2016).
Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law
James Lindgren is a law professor at Northwestern University, with a BA from Yale and a JD and a PhD in (quantitative) sociology from the University of Chicago. He is a cofounder of the Section on Scholarship of the Association of American Law Schools and a former chair of its Section on Social Science and the Law. He has published in the Yale Law Journal and the Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, California, Northwestern, Georgetown, and UCLA Law Reviews, among others. His work includes "Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal " (Yale Law Journal, 2002) and "Term Limits for the Supreme Court: Life Tenure Reconsidered " (Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 2006). In Evans v. US (1992), the US Supreme Court adopted Lindgren's view of the overlap of bribery and federal extortion. He blogs at the Washington Post.
President, JCN
Carrie Campbell Severino is the president of the JCN, and co-author with Mollie Hemingway of the bestselling book Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Court. As a go-to expert on the confirmation process, Mrs. Severino has been extensively quoted in the media. She regularly appears on television, including FOX, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and ABC’s This Week.
Severino writes and speaks on a wide range of judicial issues, including the constitutional limits on government, the federal nomination process, and state judicial selection. She has testified before Congress on constitutional questions and briefed Senators on judicial nominations, and regularly files briefs in high-profile Supreme Court cases. She was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and to Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School (J.D.), Duke University (B.A., Biology), and Michigan State University (M.A., Linguistics).
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.
Professor of Law, Harry Radzyner Law School, Interdisciplinary Center
Rivka Weill is a Professor of Law (tenured) at the Radzyner Law School, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC). In recent years, she was a Visiting Law Professor at Cardozo Law School (2016-2017), David R. Greenbaum and Laureine Knight Greenbaum Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at University of Chicago Law School (Fall 2017) and Visiting Law Professor at Yale Law School (Spring 2018). She earned her LLM and JSD from Yale Law School and holds an additional degree in Accounting from Tel-Aviv University. She was a clerk and legal adviser for the President of the Supreme Court of Israel, Aharon Barak. In recent years, she received three times the IDC’s “Best Researcher in Law School” award (2012, 2015, 2017) as well as the IDC’s “Best Lecturer in Law School” award (2010). Her work focuses on constitutional law as well as administrative law with a focus on theoretical and comparative dimensions. She has published in leading law journals in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. Professor Weill gave invited talks at prestigious universities across the United States, Europe, New Zealand and Australia.
Among her articles are Court Packing as an Antidote (Cardozo Law Review, 2020), The Strategic Common Law Court of Aharon Barak and its Aftermath: On Judicially-led Constitutional Revolutions and Democratic Backsliding (Law & Ethics of Human Rights, 2020), Secession and the Prevalence of Both Militant Democracy and Eternity Clauses Worldwide (Cardozo Law Review, 2018), On the Nexus of Eternity Clauses, Proportional Representation, and Banned Political Parties (Election Law Journal, 2017), Resurrecting Legislation (I*CON, 2016), Exodus: Structuring Redemption of Captives (Cardozo Law Review, 2014), The New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism Notwithstanding: On Judicial Review and Constitution-Making (American Journal of Comparative Law, 2014), Hybrid Constitutionalism: the Israeli Case for Judicial Review and Why We Should Care (Berkeley Journal of International Law, 2012), Reconciling Parliamentary Sovereignty and Judicial Review: On the Theoretical and Historical Origins of the Legislative Override Power (Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2012), Centennial to the Parliament Act 1911: the Manner and Form Fallacy (Public Law, 2012), Evolution vs. Revolution: Dueling Models of Dualism (American Journal of Comparative Law, 2006), We the British People (Public Law, 2004), Dicey was not Diceyan (Cambridge Law Journal, 2003).
Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and Director, Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law, Harvard Law School
Noah Feldman specializes in constitutional studies, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, free speech, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory. Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, he is also a Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. In 2003 he served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution. He received his A.B. summa cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D.Phil. in Oriental Studies from Oxford University in 1994. From 1999 to 2002, he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. Before that he served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998 to 1999) and to Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1997 to 1998). He received his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1997, serving as Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal. He’s the author of eight books: The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President (Random House, 2017); Cool War: The Future of Global Competition (Random House, 2013); Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices (Twelve Publishing, 2010); The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2008); Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2005); What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation building (Princeton University Press 2004); and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2003. He also co-authored two textbooks with Kathleen Sullivan: Constitutional Law, Twentieth Edition (Foundation Press, Fall 2019) and First Amendment (Foundation Press, 2016).
Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law
James Lindgren is a law professor at Northwestern University, with a BA from Yale and a JD and a PhD in (quantitative) sociology from the University of Chicago. He is a cofounder of the Section on Scholarship of the Association of American Law Schools and a former chair of its Section on Social Science and the Law. He has published in the Yale Law Journal and the Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, California, Northwestern, Georgetown, and UCLA Law Reviews, among others. His work includes "Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal " (Yale Law Journal, 2002) and "Term Limits for the Supreme Court: Life Tenure Reconsidered " (Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 2006). In Evans v. US (1992), the US Supreme Court adopted Lindgren's view of the overlap of bribery and federal extortion. He blogs at the Washington Post.
President, JCN
Carrie Campbell Severino is the president of the JCN, and co-author with Mollie Hemingway of the bestselling book Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Court. As a go-to expert on the confirmation process, Mrs. Severino has been extensively quoted in the media. She regularly appears on television, including FOX, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and ABC’s This Week.
Severino writes and speaks on a wide range of judicial issues, including the constitutional limits on government, the federal nomination process, and state judicial selection. She has testified before Congress on constitutional questions and briefed Senators on judicial nominations, and regularly files briefs in high-profile Supreme Court cases. She was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and to Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School (J.D.), Duke University (B.A., Biology), and Michigan State University (M.A., Linguistics).
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.
Professor of Law, Harry Radzyner Law School, Interdisciplinary Center
Rivka Weill is a Professor of Law (tenured) at the Radzyner Law School, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC). In recent years, she was a Visiting Law Professor at Cardozo Law School (2016-2017), David R. Greenbaum and Laureine Knight Greenbaum Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at University of Chicago Law School (Fall 2017) and Visiting Law Professor at Yale Law School (Spring 2018). She earned her LLM and JSD from Yale Law School and holds an additional degree in Accounting from Tel-Aviv University. She was a clerk and legal adviser for the President of the Supreme Court of Israel, Aharon Barak. In recent years, she received three times the IDC’s “Best Researcher in Law School” award (2012, 2015, 2017) as well as the IDC’s “Best Lecturer in Law School” award (2010). Her work focuses on constitutional law as well as administrative law with a focus on theoretical and comparative dimensions. She has published in leading law journals in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. Professor Weill gave invited talks at prestigious universities across the United States, Europe, New Zealand and Australia.
Among her articles are Court Packing as an Antidote (Cardozo Law Review, 2020), The Strategic Common Law Court of Aharon Barak and its Aftermath: On Judicially-led Constitutional Revolutions and Democratic Backsliding (Law & Ethics of Human Rights, 2020), Secession and the Prevalence of Both Militant Democracy and Eternity Clauses Worldwide (Cardozo Law Review, 2018), On the Nexus of Eternity Clauses, Proportional Representation, and Banned Political Parties (Election Law Journal, 2017), Resurrecting Legislation (I*CON, 2016), Exodus: Structuring Redemption of Captives (Cardozo Law Review, 2014), The New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism Notwithstanding: On Judicial Review and Constitution-Making (American Journal of Comparative Law, 2014), Hybrid Constitutionalism: the Israeli Case for Judicial Review and Why We Should Care (Berkeley Journal of International Law, 2012), Reconciling Parliamentary Sovereignty and Judicial Review: On the Theoretical and Historical Origins of the Legislative Override Power (Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2012), Centennial to the Parliament Act 1911: the Manner and Form Fallacy (Public Law, 2012), Evolution vs. Revolution: Dueling Models of Dualism (American Journal of Comparative Law, 2006), We the British People (Public Law, 2004), Dicey was not Diceyan (Cambridge Law Journal, 2003).
Last Hurrah for the Minimalist Court?
Donald A. Daugherty
A review of SCOTUS 2020: Major Decisions and Developments of the U.S. Supreme Court, edited...
Torres v. Madrid - Post-Decision SCOTUScast
Kent Scheidegger
On March 25, 2021, the Supreme Court decided Torres v. Madrid. This case arises out...
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Kisor on Remand: Raising the Bar to “Genuinely Ambiguous” at Auer Step Zero
A recent decision from the Federal Circuit may provide a roadmap for the future of...
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Timeless Concepts for a Trying Time: The Separation of Powers and Judicial Review
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men,...
Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Degraffenreid - Post-Decision SCOTUScasat
Derek T. Muller
On February 22, 2021, by a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court denied cert in Repubulican...
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SCOTUS Asked If 5th Amendment Bars Compelling Defendants to Unlock Electronic Devices
Last month, a New Jersey police officer who was under investigation for leaking information about...
Bureaucracy With Bumper Guards: Better Than It Rules?
Ronald A. Cass
A review of Law & Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State, by Cass Sunstein & Adrian...
Is Rational Basis the Appropriate Test to Apply in Reviewing Emergency COVID-19 Orders?
In a year in which “quarantine” and “lock-down” have become colloquial terms, the country has...
Court-Packing, Term Limits, and More: The Debate Over Reforming the Judiciary
Noah Feldman, James T. Lindgren, Carrie Campbell Severino, Ilya Shapiro, Rivka Weill, Nicholas Marr
On December 16, 2020, The Federalist Society's Federalism and Separation of Powers Practice Group hosted...
Court-Packing, Term Limits, and More: The Debate Over Reforming the Judiciary
Noah Feldman, James T. Lindgren, Carrie Campbell Severino, Ilya Shapiro, Rivka Weill, Nicholas Marr
On December 16, 2020, The Federalist Society's Federalism and Separation of Powers Practice Group hosted...