Partner, HWG LLP
Patricia Paoletta is a partner with the law firm of HWG LLP, where she specializes in telecommunications, trade and technology policy. Ms. Paoletta provides advice on regulatory, trade and legislative policy to clients before the FCC, Congress and the Administration. Her clients include providers of content, cloud, mobile broadband, VoIP, international telecommunications, small cells, cognitive radio, public safety and homeland security solutions. She serves on Advisory Boards for several entities engaged in information services, communications and technology.
Ms. Paoletta has accrued considerable experience with telecommunications trade and policy in the public sector. From 1990 to 1995, she was senior advisor to the International Bureau Chief and Office Director at the Federal Communications Commission. In the mid 1990s, Ms. Paoletta served as Director of Telecommunications Trade Policy in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Executive Office of the President, where she worked on the WTO Information Technology Agreement (ITA) and the Basic Telecommunications Agreement. After USTR, Ms. Paoletta served as Majority Counsel to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. She then moved to Level 3 Communications, as Vice President, Government Relations.
Ms. Paoletta is on the Steering Committee of the Transatlantic Roundtable on Telecommunications and Information Technology of the European Institute. She is a member of the USTR Alumni Association, Washington International Trade Association, the Federal Communications Bar Association (FCBA), and Women in Technology. Ms. Paoletta has served on the Board of Advisors for the Inter-American Dialogue's Latin America Telecom Advisor, Co-Chairman of the American Bar Association International Communications Committee, and as a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Technology Policy Committee.
Ms. Paoletta served as a delegate in 2012 to the ITU-R's Study Group 6 Working Party 6A Meeting and in 2009 and 2010 to the ITU-R's Study Group I Working Party IB Meetings; the 2009 meetings of CITEL (the Committee on International Telecommunications at the Organization of American States) PCC-II; the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) World Telecommunications Standards Assembly (2000); the ITU Internet Protocol Telephony Experts Group and the ITU World Telecommunications Policy Forum in 2001; as Chairman of the National Reliability and Interoperability Council (NRIC) Steering Committee (2000-2001); as Board Member for the Voice on the Net Coalition (2001); as Co-Chairman of the FCBA's Annual Seminar Committee (2009-2011); as a member of the FCBA's Ad Hoc Speakers Committee (2006-2007); as Co-Chairman for the FCBA International Practice Committee (2001-2002 and 2005-2006); and as a Co-Chairman of the FCBA Legislative Practice Committee (1999-2000).
Ella A. and Ernest H. Fisher Professor of Law, Ohio Northern University Claude W. Pettit College of Law
Professor Lewis joined the Ohio Northern faculty in August, 2006. Lewis flew F-14's for the United States Navy in Operation Desert Shield, conducted strike planning for Desert Storm and was deployed to the Persian Gulf to enforce the no-fly zone over Iraq. He was a Topgun graduate in 1992 and was featured in a NOVA documentary on Topgun and aircraft carriers.
After his naval service, Lewis graduated from Harvard Law School, cum laude, was a management consultant with McKinsey and Company, and served as a litigation associate with McGuireWoods, LLP, in Norfolk, Virginia.
Professor Lewis has published more than a dozen articles and essays on various aspects of the law of war and the conflict between the US and al Qaeda. His work has been cited by the Seventh, Ninth and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeals. He has testified before Congress on the legality of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen and on the civil liberties tradeoffs associated with trying some Al Qaeda members or terrorist suspects before military commissions. His op-eds have appeared in numerous media outlets including the LA Times and the New York Post and he has appeared on Public Radio International to discuss the increasing use of armed drones in warfare. He has delivered scores of presentations and panel presentations before military and law school audiences alike including presentations to the international Military Operations Law conference in Queensland, Australia, the US Army's JAG School in Charlottesville, VA and law school events at Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, Penn, Duke, Texas and Northwestern among others.
Professor Lewis received the Award for Excellence in Classroom Teaching for the 2007-08 academic year.
He currently teaches Commercial Law, International Law, a Law of War Seminar and Torts. He has also taught Corporate Finance and Accounting for Lawyers. His other teaching interests include Civil Procedure and Contracts.
Clinical Professor of Law, Dale E. Fowler School of Law, Chapman University
Senior Attorney, Pacific Legal Foundation
Brian Hodges is a Senior Attorney at PLF’s Pacific Northwest office in Bellevue, Washington. Brian focuses his practice on defending of the right of individuals to make reasonable use of their property, free of unnecessary and oppressive regulations.
In 2013, Brian second-chaired Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District before the U.S. Supreme Court, a case that placed constitutional limits on the government’s common practice of demanding that landowners fund unrelated public projects in exchange for a permit approval. And in the 2008 case, Citizens’ Alliance for Property Rights v. Sims, Brian successfully challenged a Seattle-area ordinance that required all rural property owners to dedicate at least half their land as conservation areas as a mandatory condition of any new development without any showing that rural development would impact the environment.
Brian graduated from Seattle University of Law in 2001 with honors. After which, he served as a judicial clerk at the Washington State Court of Appeals, then entered private practice where he focused on appellate advocacy for several years before joining PLF in 2006.
Brian came to the liberty movement by an uncommon route: the arts. Brian played guitar and keyboards in several Seattle-area bands before eventually studying music composition and literature at the University of Washington—earning two Bachelor’s Degrees and a Master of Arts. Through that experience, he came to firmly believe that the goal of art—indeed, the goal of any creative ambition—is to maximize individual freedom and expression, tempered by personal responsibility and ownership, rather than outside oversight or arbitrary restriction. Carrying that philosophy into law school naturally led him to fight for individual rights.
Shareholder, Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, Shreck
With more than 20 years of experience both as a first-chair litigator and in public service, Greg Brower’s practice focuses on civil and criminal litigation, as well as regulatory and enforcement actions, corporate investigations, cybersecurity matters and federal and state government relations.
Most recently, Greg served as the assistant director for the Office of Congressional Affairs at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), serving as the FBI’s chief liaison to Congress on a wide range of critical oversight and investigative matters. He previously served as the FBI’s Deputy General Counsel, managing a diverse portfolio of legal matters, including litigation, privacy, procurement, compliance and ethics. During his time as a senior FBI executive, spanning two administrations, he worked closely with high-ranking officials in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the U.S. intelligence community and with key leaders on Capitol Hill. Greg is a regular commentator and contributor on national security, legal and cybersecurity issues, regularly appearing on CNN and MSNBC, and he is the featured contributor on white collar crime and corporate compliance for the Washington Legal Foundation’s Legal Pulse blog.
Greg has a long history of public service. At the federal level, he previously served as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Nevada, and as both General Counsel and Inspector General at the U.S. Government Publishing Office. Greg also served at DOJ as Legislative Counsel in the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys. At the state level, he has served in a variety of public policy roles, including five terms in the Nevada Legislature, where he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He has also served on the Nevada Gaming Policy Committee, the Nevada Advisory Commission on the Administration of Justice, the Nevada Sentencing Commission and the Nevada Juvenile Justice Commission.
Throughout his career, Greg has served the Nevada legal community as an adjunct professor of law at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he has taught courses in national security law and trial advocacy. Before attending law school, Greg served in the U.S. Navy as a Surface Warfare Officer.
Executive Director, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
Norman Reimer is the Executive Director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). Prior to assuming this post, he practiced as a criminal defense lawyer for 28 years, most recently at Gould Reimer Walsh Goffin Cohn LLP in New York City.
Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court
The Honorable Amy Coney Barrett is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Donald Trump and was confirmed on October 27, 2020. She is the fifth woman to serve on the Court.
Justice Barrett earned her J.D., summa cum laude, from Notre Dame, where she was a Kiley Fellow, earned the Hoynes Prize, the Law School’s highest honor, and served as executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review. She clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court. As an associate at Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin in Washington, D.C., she litigated constitutional, criminal, and commercial cases in both trial and appellate courts.
In 2002, Justice Barrett joined the faculty of Notre Dame Law School. She continued to teach following her appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in November 2017. Justice Barrett also served by appointment of the Chief Justice on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure from 2010 to 2016.
Justice Barrett has published widely in the areas of federal courts, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation. Her scholarship in these fields has been published in leading journals, including the Columbia, Virginia, and Texas Law Reviews.
Professor of Law and Director, Center for the Middle East and International Law, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School
Professor of Law Eugene Kontorovich is one of the world’s preeminent experts on universal jurisdiction and maritime piracy, as well as international law and the Israel-Arab conflict. He is also the Director of Scalia Law School's Center for the Middle East and International Law. Professor Kontorovich joined the Scalia Law School from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law where he was a Professor of Law from 2011 to 2018 and an Associate Professor from 2007 to 2011. Previously, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago from 2005 to 2007 and an Assistant Professor at George Mason School of Law from 2003 to 2007.
Professor Kontorovich has published over thirty major scholarly articles and book chapters in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals in the United States and Europe, including the American Journal of International Law, International Review of Law & Economics, Stanford Law Review, California Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Virginia Law Review. His scholarship has been cited in leading foreign relations and international law
His expertise is often sought out and quoted by major news organizations such the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR News, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and numerous television and radio programs. Prof. Kontorovich’s popular writings have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, POLITICO, Commentary, Haaretz, and numerous other leading publications. He is also a regular contributor to the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy legal blog.
He attended the University of Chicago for college and law school. After law school, he clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He has been honored with a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in 2011-12, and with the Federalist Society’s prestigious Bator Award, given annually to a young scholar (under 40), for outstanding scholarship and teaching.
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.
Michael R. Klein Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Randall Kennedy is Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on contracts, criminal law, and the regulation of race relations. He was born in Columbia, South Carolina. For his education he attended St. Albans School, Princeton University, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He served as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He is a member of the bar of the District of Columbia and the Supreme Court of the United States. Awarded the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Race, Crime, and the Law, Mr Kennedy writes for a wide range of scholarly and general interest publications. His other books are For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law (2013), The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency (2011), Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal (2008), Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (2003), and Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (2002). A member of the American Law Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Association, Mr. Kennedy is also a Trustee emeritus of Princeton University.
Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
Sander has been working on questions of social and economic inequality for nearly all of his career. He was born in Washington, D.C., but spent most of his childhood in small towns in northwest Indiana. After earning a B.A. in Social Studies at Harvard, Sander in 1978 joined the federal Vista program and worked for a small neighborhood housing group on Chicago's south side. While organizing tenant unions and building receiverships, he was deeply impressed with the work of the South Shore Bank, an experimental, community-development bank owned by churches and foundations. Sander secured funding from three federal agencies and, with the Woodstock Institute, completed the first detailed study of the bank. South Shore Bank was widely imitated as an instrument for community revitalization in other urban areas over the next two decades.
Sander attended graduate school at Northwestern University from 1983 to 1988, earning degrees in law (J.D., 1988) and economics (M.A. 1985, Ph.D., 1990). In his law review comment and his dissertation, Sander sought to understand why fair housing laws had seemingly produced widespread integration in some American metropolitan areas, but very little integration in most. During much of this period, Sander served on the board of the Rogers Park Tenants Committee, and worked on the election effort and subsequent transition team of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor.
In 1989, Sander joined the faculty of the UCLA School of Law. During this period, he continued his work on housing segregation, but also pursued two new interests: the reasons behind the American legal profession’s explosive growth since the mid-1960s, and the structure and effects of law school admissions policies. With Kris Knaplund, he published in 1995 the first comparative evaluation of academic support programs used in legal education. After California voters approved Propostion 209 in 1996 – banning the use of race in various government programs, including admissions at the University of California – Sander successfully argued for the adoption of class-based preferences in the law school’s admissions, and published a study on the results of this experiment in 1997.
During the 1990s, Sander was involved in several Los Angeles civic initiatives. He served as President of the Fair Housing Congress of Southern California from 1984 to 1996; founded the Fair Housing Institute in 1996, and helped the City of Los Angeles design and implement in 1997 what was, at the time, the nation's most ambitious living wage law. Sander also persuaded regional authorities to develop outreach programs that sharply increased local usage of the Earned Income Tax Credit, generating tens of millions of dollars annually for LA's poorest working families.
Sander was one of seven UCLA faculty members and staff who launched the Program in Public Interest Law and Policy, which created a distinct curriculum aimed at public interest students. From 1998 to 2004, Sander helped to steer the "After the JD" study, the first national panel study of law school graduates. In 1998-99, Sander and others at the School of Law launched the Empirical Research Group (ERG), an entity designed to help faculty members undertake ambitious empirical projects and introduce more quantitative and methodological sophistication into their policy-related work.
In 2004, Sander published a comprehensive study of affirmative action in American law schools, focusing particularly on the ways in which large preferences imposed unexpected but substantial costs on their intended beneficiaries.
Sander teaches courses in Property, Quantitative Methods, Urban Housing, and Policy Analysis. He is married to astrophysicist Fiona Harrison, and has a son, Robert. He lives in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil Rights, University of North Carolina School of Law
Theodore M. Shaw is the Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina School of Law at Chapel Hill. Professor Shaw teaches Civil Procedure and Advanced Constitutional Law/Fourteenth Amendment. Before joining the faculty of UNC Law School, from 2008-2014 Professor Shaw taught at Columbia University Law School, where he was Professor of Professional Practice. During that time he was also “Of Counsel” to the law firm of Norton Rose Fulbright (formerly Fulbright & Jaworski, LLP). His practice involved civil litigation and representation of institutional clients on matters concerning diversity and civil rights.
Professor Shaw was the fifth Director-Counsel and President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., for which he worked in various capacities over the span of twenty-six years. He has litigated education, employment, voting rights, housing, police misconduct, capital punishment and other civil rights cases in trial and appellate courts, and in the United States Supreme Court.From 1982 until 1987, he litigated education, housing, and capital punishment cases and directed LDF's education litigation docket. In 1987, under the direction of LDF's third Director-Counsel, Julius Chambers, Mr. Shaw relocated to Los Angeles to establish LDF's Western Regional Office. In 1990, Mr. Shaw left LDF to join the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School, where he taught Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure and Civil Rights. While at Michigan, he played a key role in initiating a review of the law school's admissions practices and policies, and served on the faculty committee that promulgated the admissions program that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger.
In 1993, Mr. Shaw returned to LDF as Associate Director-Counsel, and in 2004, he became LDF's fifth Director-Counsel. Mr. Shaw's legal career began as a Trial Attorney in the Honors Program of the United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C., where he worked from 1979 until 1982.
Mr. Shaw has testified on numerous occasions before Congress and before state and local legislatures. His human rights work has taken him to Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America. In addition to teaching at Columbia and at Michigan Law School, Professor Shaw held the 1997-1998 Haywood Burns Chair at CUNY School of Law at Queens College and the 2003 Phyllis Beck Chair at Temple Law School. He was a visiting scholar at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia in 2008-2009. He is a member of the faculty of the Practicing Law Institute (PLI).
Mr. Shaw served on the Obama Transition Team after the 2008 presidential election, as team leader for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.
Engage Volume 14, Issue 3
Administrative Law & Regulation Free To Choose Medicine by Gregory Conko & Bartley J. Madden ...
The Cybersecurity Overreach: A Few Harsh Words About the President’s Cybersecurity Executive Order, Along with a Better Solution
Patricia J. Paoletta
Note from the Editor: This article is a discussion about Executive Order 13636 on cybersecurity...
Worker Centers: Charities or Labor Organizations Masquerading as Charities?—and the Impact of an IRS
Heidi Abegg
Note from the Editor: This article is a discussion about worker centers and their status...
Clearing the Air: The Real Reason Why Drones are the Weapon of Choice in Counterterrorism and Why That is a Good Thing for Civilians
Michael W. Lewis
Note from the Editor: This article is about the use of drones in counterterrorism operations. ...
Part II: Can States Require Proof of Citizenship for Voter Registration?: Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona
Anthony (Tom) Caso
Note from the Editor: This article discusses the Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona...
Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District and Its Implications for Takings Law
Brian T. Hodges
Note from the Editor: This article is about the Supreme Court's decision in Koontz v....
Maryland v. King: Possibly The Most Important Criminal Procedure Case in Decades
Greg Brower, Norman Reimer
Maryland v. King: Possibly The Most Important Criminal Procedure Case in Decades An Exchange Between...
Originalism & the Constitution
Israeli Borders & International Law
Affirmative Action on Campus Does More Harm than Good