Clinical Professor, University of Texas at Austin School of Law
Steven T. Collis researches and teaches on religion and law and other First Amendment topics. He is the founding faculty director of the Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center and of Texas's Law & Religion Clinic. On the topic of religious freedom law, he is a sought-after speaker to academic and lay audiences across the United States, including foreign diplomats from countries in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and South America on behalf of the United States State Department. He has been interviewed by and quoted in various news and media outlets, including The Deseret News, Bloomberg, The Washington Times, Law360, The Salt Lake Tribune, PBS, The Denver Business Journal, Law Week Colorado, CBN News, and numerous podcasts and television shows. His scholarly work has appeared in The Michigan Law Review, The Nebraska Law Review, The University of Denver Law Review Online, and in his book Deep Conviction, which brings to life the history of free exercise law in the United States for lay audiences.
Prior to joining Texas, Steven was the Olin-Darling Research Fellow in the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School.
Earlier in his career, he was an equity partner at Holland & Hart LLP, where he chaired the firm’s nationwide religious institutions and First Amendment practice group and was a member of the firm's complex civil litigation and employment practice groups. He also taught religious liberty law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and clerked for Chief Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Steven graduated magna cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif and served as an editor on The Michigan Law Review and The Michigan Journal of Race and Law. He also holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he served as the associate editor of the literary journal Blackbird. He completed his undergraduate studies, with university honors, at Brigham Young University.
Vice President & Legal Director, National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation
Raymond J. LaJeunesse, Jr., is Vice President and Legal Director of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a non-profit legal aid organization. He was the first Staff Attorney employed by the Foundation and has more than forty-five years of experience helping workers in litigation in federal and state courts and administrative agencies over the abuses of compulsory unionism.
Mr. LaJeunesse has argued four cases in the United States Supreme Court. Those cases include Lehnert v. Ferris Faculty Ass’n, 500 U.S. 507 (1991), which limited the purposes for which compulsory union fees collected from public employees may lawfully be spent; Air Line Pilots Ass’n v. Miller, 523 U.S. 866 (1998), which established that unions cannot compel nonmembers to exhaust union-established remedies before going to court to challenge compulsory union fees; and Marquez v. Screen Actors Guild, 525 U.S. 33 (1998), in which the Court recognized that unions must notify employees that they can satisfy the “membership” requirement of “union shop” agreements by just paying fees for union bargaining activities and need not join and pay full dues to keep their jobs. He also was lead attorney in Hohe v. Casey, 956 F.2d 399 (3d Cir. 1992), in which more than $8.3 million in compulsory agency fees was recovered from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees for a class of 57,000 nonmembers.
Mr. LaJeunesse is the author of several published articles about labor law, has testified before Congressional committees several times, and was an Advisor on the Transition Team for Labor- Related Agencies, Office of the President-Elect, in 1980-81 and a legislative aide to a member of the Virginia state legislature. He is a Vice Chairman of the Federalist Society’s Labor and Employment Law Practice Group and has spoken or debated at the Society’s National Lawyers Convention and at many Lawyers and Student Chapters on such topics as Right to Work laws, compulsory unionism arrangements, the misuse of union dues for politics, union organizing tactics (“card check” vs. secret-ballot elections), and the future of the union movement.
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.
Associate Professor of Law, Emory Law
Fred Smith Jr. is associate professor at Emory University School of Law. He is a scholar of the federal judiciary, constitutional law, and local government. In 2019, he was named Emory Law's Outstanding Professor of the Year.
Smith clerked for Judge Myron Thompson of the Middle District of Alabama; Judge Barrington D. Parker Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; and Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Supreme Court. Prior to teaching, he also worked for Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore LLP in Atlanta.
Smith's research focuses on accountability, federal jurisdiction, and state sovereignty. His work has appeared, or will appear, in Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, New York University Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, among other academic journals. Notable articles include: “On Time, (In)equality, and Death,” 120 Mich. L. Rev. ___ (2021) (forthcoming); “The Constitution After Death,” 121 Colum. L. Rev. 1471 (2020); “Abstention in the Time of Ferguson,” 131 Harv. L. Rev. 2283 (2018); "Undemocratic Restraint," 69 Vand. L. Rev. 845 (2017); "Local Sovereign Immunity," 116 Colum. L. Rev. 409 (2016), and "Due Process, Republicanism, and Direct Democracy," 89 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 582 (2014). He has given lectures on related topics across the United States and internationally, including in Istanbul, Shanghai, and Warsaw. He also has been interviewed as an expert by major media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and various affiliates of National Public Radio.
In a range of volunteer capacities, Smith promotes equity and social justice. He serves on the board of Invest Atlanta, which serves as the economic and community development authority of City of Atlanta. He also serves the national board of Lambda Legal; the national board of Civil Rights Corps; and the LGBT Advisory Board of Historic Atlanta. He served as an inaugural member of Atlanta’s Mayoral LGBTQ Advisory Board. He also served as an inaugural advisory board member for the Harvard Debate Council Diversity Project, which annually trains black Atlanta youth in critical thinking and public speaking.
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, University of Notre Dame Law School
Gerard V. Bradley is Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches Legal Ethics and Constitutional Law. At Notre Dame he directs (with John Finnis) the Natural Law Institute and co-edits The American Journal of Jurisprudence, an international forum for legal philosophy. Bradley has been a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, in Princeton, New Jersey. He served for many years as President of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.
Bradley received his B.A and J.D. degrees from Cornell University, graduating Summa cum laude from the law school in 1980. After serving in the Trial Division of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office he joined the law faculty at the University of Illinois. He moved to Notre Dame in 1992. Bradley has published over one hundred scholarly articles and reviews. His most recent books are an edited collection of essays titled, Challenges to Religious Liberty in the Twenty-First Century (published by Cambridge University Press in 2012), Essays on Law, Religion, and Morality and Unquiet Americans: U.S. Catholics and the Common Good (both to be published in 2014.) He is currently working on a book about regulating obscenity in the Internet Age.
Staff Attorney, National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation
Glenn Taubman is a Staff Attorney for the National Right to Work Legal Defense and Education Foundation (1982 to the present). He was a Law Clerk for Senior Circuit Judge Warren L. Jones, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits, Jacksonville, Florida, from 1981-82, and a Staff Attorney for the U.S. District Court, Middle District of Florida, Jacksonville, Florida, from 1980-81. His Bar Admissions include: Georgia, 1980; New York, 1981; U.S. Supreme Court, 1983; District of Columbia, 1985. He regularly appears before the National Labor Relations Board and various federal courts, representing individual employees only.
He is the author of "'Neutrality Agreements' and the Destruction of Employees' Section 7 Rights" (2005) and co-author of "Union Discipline and Employee Rights," a monograph published by the National Right to Work Foundation.
A partial listing of his reported cases includes: Lucas v. NLRB, 333 F.3d 927 (9th Cir. 2003);Penrod v. NLRB, 203 F.3d 41 (D.C. Cir. 2000);Production Workers v. NLRB, 161 F.3d 1047 (7th Cir. 1998);Food & Commercial Workers Local 951 v. Mulder, 31 F.3d 365 (6th Cir. 1994);NLRB v. Office Employees Local 2, 902 F.2d 1164 (4th Cir. 1990);Tierney v. City of Toledo, 917 F.2d 927 (6th Cir. 1990);Lowary v. Lexington Local Board of Education, 902 F.2d 422 (6th Cir. 1990);Lowary v. Lexington Local Board of Education, 854 F.2d 131 (6th Cir. 1988);Tierney v. City of Toledo, 824 F.2d 1497 (6th Cir. 1987);Masiello v. US Airways, Inc., 113 F. Supp. 2d 870 (W.D.N.C. 2000);Jordan v. City of Bucyrus, 739 F. Supp. 1124 (1990),further proceedings, 754 F. Supp. 554 (N.D. Ohio 1991);Dana Corp., 341 N.L.R.B. No. 150, 2004 WL 1329345 (June 7, 2004);California Saw & Knife Works, 320 N.L.R.B. 224 (1995),enforced, 133 F.3d 1012 (7th Cir. 1998).
Deputy General Counsel, Local 32 BJ, Service Employees International Union
Brent Garren is a Deputy General Counsel of SEIU Local 32 BJ, the 145,000 member property services local in New York and the eastern seaboard. He worked for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, then UNITE, UNITE HERE and Workers United prior to Local 32 BJ, including serving as General Counsel for UNITE HERE and later Workers United.
Mr. Garren’s career has focused on the National Labor Relations Act. He is an Editor-In-Chief of How to Take a Case Before the NLRB, the leading text on NLRB procedure. He is a member of and past union co-chair of the ABA’s subcommittee on Practice and Procedure under the NLRA, part of the Labor and Employment Law Section. He has spoken about and written on the NLRA, including on remedies, voluntary recognition and NLRB jurisdiction.
He has been involved in international labor solidarity activities, including representing U.S. labor to the International Labor Organization, dealing with protection of home workers and protection of contracted labor.
He was graduated by Wayne State School of Law, summa cum laude.
Former United States Attorney General
William P. Barr was born on May 23, 1950 in New York City. Mr. Barr received his A.B. in government from Columbia University in 1971 and his M.A. in government and Chinese studies in 1973. From 1973 to 1977, he served in the Central Intelligence Agency before receiving his J.D. with highest honors from George Washington University Law School in 1977.
In 1978, Mr. Barr served as a law clerk under Judge Malcolm Wilkey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Following his clerkship, Mr. Barr joined the Washington, D.C. office of the law firm of Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge as an associate. He left the firm to work in the White House under President Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1983 on the domestic policy staff, then returned to the law firm and became a partner in 1985.
Under President George H.W. Bush, Mr. Barr served as the Deputy Attorney General from 1990 to 1991; the Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel from 1989 to 1990; and the 77th Attorney General of the United States from 1991 to 1993. While serving at the Department, Mr. Barr helped create programs and strategies to reduce violent crime and was responsible for establishing new enforcement policies in a number of areas including financial institutions, civil rights, and antitrust merger guidelines. Mr. Barr also led the Department’s response to the Savings & Loan crisis; oversaw the investigation of the Pan Am 103 bombing; directed the successful response to the Talladega prison uprising and hostage taking; and coordinated counter-terrorism activities during the First Gulf War.
From 1994 to 2000, Mr. Barr served as Executive Vice President and General Counsel for GTE Corporation. Mr. Barr then served as Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Verizon from 2000 to 2008. At both GTE and Verizon, Mr. Barr led the legal, regulatory, and government affairs activities of the companies.
After retiring from Verizon in 2008, Mr. Barr advised major corporations on government enforcement matters, as well as regulatory litigation. Mr. Barr served as Of Counsel at Kirkland & Ellis LLP in 2009 and rejoined the firm in 2017.
President Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate Mr. Barr on December 7, 2018, and he was confirmed as the 85th Attorney General of the United States by the U.S. Senate on February 14, 2019. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office. Mr. Barr joins John Crittenden (1841 and 1850-1853) as one of only two people in U.S. history to serve twice as Attorney General.
John H. Chestnut Professor of Law, Communication, and Computer & Information Science; Founding Director, Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Christopher S. Yoo is the John H. Chestnut Professor of Law and a Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and in the Computer & Information Science Department of School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also the Founding Director of the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition. He is the author of over one hundred scholarly works and has taught at over a dozen universities around the world. Professor Yoo received his A.B. from Harvard, his M.B.A. from UCLA, and his J.D. from Northwestern University. Before entering the academy, Professor Yoo clerked for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States and practiced law with the predecessor firm to Hogan Lovells under the supervision of now-Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, he taught for eight years at the Vanderbilt Law School. He is frequently called to testify before the U.S. Congress, Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice Antitrust Division, Federal Communications Commission, foreign governments, and international organizations.
David McIntosh is a leader for the principles of limited constitutional government and individual freedom. He is president of the Club for Growth, the leading advocate for economic liberty.
Former Congressman David McIntosh represented Indiana's 2nd Congressional District in the United States Congress from 1995-2001. As a Freshman, David chaired the Subcommittee on Regulatory Relief. He passed the Congressional Review Act and held extensive oversight and field hearings to build a record of public support for regulatory relief initiatives in energy, biotechnology, pharmaceutical, healthcare, transportation and technology sectors. Another issue that he championed was the elimination of the marriage penalty in the Federal Tax Code.
David served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to Attorney General Edwin Meese III, and as special assistant to President Reagan for Domestic Affairs. During the first Bush administration, he served as executive director of the President's Council on Competitiveness and assistant to the Vice President. The Competitiveness Council coordinated the cost/benefit review of major regulations and promoted legal reform measures.
David is a co-founder of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy and serves on the Board of Directors. He remains active with several free market and conservative think tanks and grassroots organizations. David has also had stints at the Hudson Institute and as a Professor of Economics at Ball State School of Business.
Prior to the Club for Growth, David was a partner at Mayer Brown, LLP in Washington, DC.
David graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1983, and Yale University, BA, cum laude, in 1980. He and his wife, Ruthie, are the proud parents of Ellie age 17 and Davey age 13.
Vice President for Global Public Policy, Amazon.com
Paul Misener is Amazon.com’s Vice President for Global Public Policy, and has served in this position for 13 years.
Both an engineer (B.S., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Princeton University, 1985) and lawyer (J.D., George Mason University, 1993; Distinguished Alumni Award, 2001), he is responsible for formulating and representing the company’s public policy positions worldwide, as well as for managing policy specialists in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
Formerly a partner in the law firm of Wiley, Rein & Fielding, Paul also served as Senior Legal Advisor to a Commissioner of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. Prior to this government service, he was Intel Corporation’s Manager of Telecommunications and Computer Technology Policy, and leader of the computer industry’s Internet Access Coalition.
In the late 1980s, Paul was a policy specialist for the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, where he was a U.S. delegate to several conferences of the International Telecommunication Union. Prior to that, he designed radio communications systems.
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The FCC Should Not Engage in Section 230 Rulemaking
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Stormans v. Wiesman: Paths to Strict Scrutiny in Religious Free Exercise Cases
Steven T. Collis
Note from the Editor: This article is about Stormans v. Wiesman, a case from the 9th...
Union Organizing and the NLRB Under President Obama
Raymond J. LaJeunesse
Note from the Editor: This paper analyzes union organizing and the NLRB under the Obama...
Does Neutrality Equal Secularism? The European Court of Human Rights Decides Lautsi v. Italy
William L. Saunders
Introduction Religion can be an intensely personal activity. However, the idea that religion is only...
The Impact of Judicial Activism on the Moral Character of Citizens
Fred Smith, Ilya Shapiro
One thing often mentioned about the Federalist Society is that it’s for judicial restraint. I’m...
New York Court of Appeals Rules on Contraception Case
Gerard V. Bradley
Seeking to advance women’s health and their overall treatment on terms equal to men, the...
Employee Free Choice Act Debate
Glenn Taubman, Brent Garren
The U.S. House of Representatives has passed, the U.S. Senate will consider, and the Bush...
Net Neutrality: Battle of the Titans
William P. Barr, Christopher S. Yoo, David M. McIntosh, Paul Misener
Introduction: I’m David McIntosh, a partner at Mayer Brown. I’ll be the moderator for today’s...