Economics Department, Loyola University New Orleans
Economics Department, Loyola University New Orleans
VCU/MCV, Department of Health Administation
Economics Department, Loyola University New Orleans
Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
Jennifer Walker Elrod is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She was nominated to the Fifth Circuit in 2007, and she served as a Circuit Judge on the court until assuming the role of Chief Judge in October 2024. Prior to serving as a Circuit Judge, Chief Judge Elrod was appointed and then twice elected Judge of the 190th District Court of Harris County, Texas, where she spent over five years presiding over more than 200 jury and non-jury trials.
Chief Judge Elrod graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was an active member of the Harvard Federalist Society, an Ames Moot Court finalist, and a Senior Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. She clerked for the Honorable Sim Lake in the Southern District of Texas. Before serving as a judge, Chief Judge Elrod worked in private practice, focusing on civil litigation, antitrust, and employment matters.
She has been repeatedly recognized for her work as a jurist, as well as for her pro bono work and contributions to the community. She has been named the 2022 Texas Review of Law & Politics’ Jurist of the Year, the 2018 Harvard Federalist Society’s Alumni of the Year, the 2016–17 Texas Association of Civil Trial and Appellate Specialists’ Appellate Judge of the Year, and the 2008 Mexican-American Bar Association of Texas’s Judge of the Year.
Chief Judge Elrod is actively engaged in the academic and legal communities. Chief Judge Elrod currently serves on the Board of Directors and as the Jurist-in-Residence at the South Texas College of Law, where she teaches civil procedure and First Amendment law. She is also a member of the American Law Institute and of the Board of Advisors for the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and she is a former member of the Board of Regents of her alma mater, Baylor University, and the Board of Visitors at Brigham Young University Law School. She previously served as the Chair of the Codes of Conduct Committee for the Judicial Conference of the United States. She has also served as the M.D. Anderson Visiting Public Service Professor at the Texas Tech University School of Law and as Jurist-in-Residence at Brigham Young University Law School, and she has taught legal writing at the University of Houston Law Center. She presented the Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Distinguished Lecture at the Washington and Lee University School of Law and is a frequent speaker on the topics of trial and appellate procedure, ethics, employment law, and constitutional law. Chief Judge Elrod also serves on the board of the Garland R. Walker Inn of Court, and co-produces an annual musical CLE, for which her pupilage group has won multiple national awards.
Chief Judge Elrod’s publications include: Trial by Siri: AI Comes to the Courtroom; Don’t Mess with Texas Judges: In Praise of the State Judiciary; For Good: Enriching Your Practice and Your Life Through Pro Bono and Community Service; Is the Jury Still Out?: A Case for the Continued Viability of the American Jury; and W(h)ither the Jury? The Diminishing Role of the Jury Trial in our Legal System.
Professor of History, Western Connecticut State University
Kevin R. C. Gutzman is the New York Times best-selling author of five books, including the new Thomas Jefferson—Revolutionary: A Radical’s Struggle to Remake America, a History Book Club Selection. Gutzman is Professor and former Chairman in the Department of History at Western Connecticut State University and a faculty member at LibertyClassroom.com . He holds a bachelor's degree (With Honors and With Special Honors in History), a master of public affairs degree, and a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin, as well as an MA and a PhD in American history from the University of Virginia.
Dr. Gutzman's first book was the New York Times best-seller The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution, which was a Main Selection of the Conservative Book Club. It is the only Jeffersonian account of American constitutional history. His second book, Virginia’s American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776-1840, explores the issue what the Revolutionaries made of the Revolution in Thomas Jefferson’s home state. After that, he co-authored Who Killed the Constitution? The Federal Government vs. American Liberty from World War I to Barack Obama with New York Times best-selling author Thomas E. Woods, Jr. His fourth book, James Madison and the Making of America, a Main Selection of the History Book Club, received positive reviews from The Wall Street Journal, The Journal of Southern History, The Washington Times, and numerous other publications. His latest book, Thomas Jefferson—Revolutionary: A Radical’s Struggle to Remake America, published on January 31, 2017, was a Selection of the History Book Club.
Gutzman's essay “Lincoln as Jeffersonian: The Colonization Chimera” appeared in Lincoln Emancipated: The President and the Politics of Race, and his “James Madison and Ratification: A Triumph Over Adversity” appeared in A Companion to James Madison and James Monroe. His scholarly articles have appeared in The Journal of Southern History, The Journal of the Early Republic, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, The Review of Politics, and The Journal of the Historical Society, among other publications. He has written a hundred book reviews for outlets scholarly and popular, and he has contributed three dozen essays to historical encyclopedias. Gutzman has written for numerous popular magazines and newspapers, including Canada’s National Post, the San Antonio Express-News, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch, among others.
Kevin R. C. Gutzman has appeared on hundreds of radio programs, such as NPR’s “Backstory With the American History Guys” and many of the most prominent commercial programs, terrestrial and satellite, as well as on national television programs including C-SPAN 2's “BookTV,” CNN's “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” Fox News's “The Glenn Beck Program” (both with Beck and with Judge Andrew Napolitano), and NewsMax TV, besides on the BBC and several local television broadcasts. He has been interviewed by reporters from major outlets such as the AP, The Washington Times, The Philadelphia Enquirer, The Washington Post, The Hartford Business Journal, The Houston Chronicle online, Investor's Business Daily, Money Magazine, Connecticut Magazine, and The New York Times, among others.
Gutzman was a featured expert in the documentary movies “John Marshall: Citizen, Statesman, Jurist” and “Nullification: The Rightful Remedy.”
Chairman, Supreme Court and Constitutional Law Practice, Baker Botts LLP
Aaron Streett is the Chairman of Baker Botts’ Supreme Court and Constitutional Law Practice. He has presented oral argument in scores of appeals, covering the U.S. Supreme Court and courts around the country—including over 40 arguments between the Fifth and D.C. Circuits alone. Mr. Streett’s practice involves virtually all substantive areas of the law, including commercial litigation, statutory interpretation, constitutional law, administrative law, securities, and jurisdictional issues. Mr. Streett maintains an active practice in the Supreme Court of the United States, having represented parties in merits cases seven times since 2010, as well as filing numerous amicus and certiorari-stage briefs. Mr. Streett was named one of only six “Appellate MVPs” for 2014 by Law360, which had previously recognized him in 2011 as one of the top five appellate “Rising Stars” under age 40. Mr. Streett has been featured on National Law Journal’s Appellate Hot List three times in recent years and in 2021 was named Houston’s “Lawyer of the Year” for Appellate Practice by Best Lawyers magazine. Mr. Streett is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Fifth Circuit Bar Association and previously served as President of the Houston Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society. Mr. Streett speaks regularly on the Supreme Court and constitutional law to attorneys and law students around the country. Following graduation from Hillsdale College and University of Texas School of Law, Mr. Streett served as a law clerk to the Honorable David B. Sentelle of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and to the Honorable William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States.
Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA School of Law
Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), as well as the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA School of Law. He recently retired from teaching at UCLA, after 30 years there, and is now focusing on research.
Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (8th ed. 2023), and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed. 2016), as well as over 100 academic law journal articles, mostly on First Amendment law. He is a member of The American Law Institute; the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Free Speech Law; and the creator and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a leading legal blog founded in 2002 (hosted at the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017 and now at Reason Magazine).
Legalizing Drugs, ALL Drugs
Charlottesville, VirginiaThe Welfare State and Socialized Medicine: Fair or Foul?
Affirmative Action: How & Why It All Went Wrong
Coastal Sustainability in Louisiana – Charting a New Course
A Critique of Medical Socialism
“Reflections Upon Joining the Least Dangerous Branch"
Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of Liberty in America
Barwatch Bulletin -- February 16, 2009
House of Delegates Considers RecommendationsThe ABA's House of Delegates met today to vote on recommendations...
Boumediene v. Bush: Should Guantanamo Detainees Have Habeus Corpus Rights in US Federal Courts?
The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope