Principal, Ely & Company, Inc.
Bert Ely has specialized in deposit insurance and banking structure issues since 1981. In 1986, he became an early predictor of the S&L crisis and a taxpayer bailout of the FSLIC. In 1991, he was the first person to correctly predict the non-crisis in commercial banking; in 1992, he predicted an eventual taxpayer bailout of the Japanese banking system.
Bert continuously monitors conditions in the banking and S&L industries, monetary policy, and the growing federalization of credit risk. He has helped to draft legislation to enact the cross-guarantee concept for privatizing banking regulation and its related deposit insurance and systemic risks. He has testified on numerous occasions before congressional committees on banking issues and he often speaks on these matters to bankers and others.
Bert first established his consulting practice in 1972. Before that, he was the chief financial officer of a public company, a consultant with Touche, Ross & Company, and an auditor with Ernst & Ernst. He received his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1968 and his Bachelor's degree in economics in 1964 from Case Western Reserve University.
President, Center for Responsible Lending
Mr. Calhoun is President of the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and policy organization dedicated to protecting homeownership and family wealth by promoting access to fair terms of credit for low-wealth families. CRL has conducted or commissioned landmark studies on the impact of predatory lending laws, worked with states on legislative issues, and pressed for regulatory changes governing mortgage and payday lending. Mr. Calhoun has testified on the federal level in both the U.S House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. He also currently serves as vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board’s Consumer Advisory Council.
CRL is an affiliate of the Center for Community Self-Help, a nonprofit community development lender, for which Mr. Calhoun has served as General Counsel. He also previously managed Self-Help’s home loan secondary market and real estate development programs. Self-Help’s mission is to create ownership and economic opportunity for women, rural residents and minority and low-wealth families through home mortgage and small business financing. It has provided over $5 billion in financing to more than 60,000 home buyers across the nation, with a loss rate of less than 0.5%.
Mr. Calhoun has specialized in consumer law for more than twenty five years. He has made presentations on predatory lending issues to many organizations, including the FDIC and the National Association of Attorneys General. He holds a B.A. in economics with honors from Duke University and a law degree from the University of North Carolina.
President, Canfield & Associates, Inc.
Anne Canfield is President of Canfield & Associates, Inc., a firm she formed in October 1996. Canfield & Associates, Inc. is a consulting firm providing strategic planning, policy advice, and representational services to major corporations on federal and state legislative and regulatory issues in the financial services, health care, tax, trade and budget policy areas. Ms. Canfield’s affiliated firm, Canfield Press, LLC, publishes The GSE Report, a publication that tracks and analyzes activities of the government-sponsored enterprises including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loans Banks, Ginnie Mae, Farmer Mac, the Postal Service, TVA, and assistance plans implemented by international governments to stabilize their financial systems. The GSE Report is distributed worldwide to public policy officials, academics, analysts, industry participants, and the media. Ms. Canfield’s firm also publishes the – Roadmap to Financial and Housing Market Stabilization Plans, a weekly publication that tracks the efforts of both the U.S.and worldwide governments to stabilize the financial system; Roadmap to the Dodd-Frank Act, a publication that tracks the requirements of the Act and the federal government’s agencies efforts to implement it; Roadmap to GSE Reform, a newer publication that tracks and compares the legislative initiatives that are being considered on Capitol Hill; The Mortgage Report, a quarterly publication that provides a comprehensive review of the legislative, regulatory and litigation challenges facing the mortgage industry; and the Washington Roundup, a weekly publication that summarizes the U.S. Government’s legislative and regulatory activities in key policy areas which are of interest to the firm’s clients. Prior to forming Canfield & Associates, Inc. Ms. Canfield was a Principal in the firm of McClure, Gerard & Neuenschwander, Inc. (MGN). Ms. Canfield joined MGN following ten years at GE/GE Capital Services. In that position, she developed and implemented corporate policy and legislative and regulatory strategies both domestically and abroad. Before joining GE Capital, Ms. Canfield had over eleven years of experience on Capitol Hill, working as a senior staff advisor for three Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and then as the senior advisor and Senate Finance Committee aide to a member of the Senate Finance Committee. Ms. Canfield received degrees from Northwestern University and the University of Paris, Paris, France.
Senior Fellow, Mises Institute
Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute, providing thought and policy leadership on financial issues and the study of financial systems. His work includes cycles of booms and busts, financial crises with their political responses, housing finance, government-sponsored enterprises, risk and uncertainty, central banking, banking and financial regulation, corporate governance, retirement finance, student loans, and the politics of finance.
He previously served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department 2019-2021. He was a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the R Street Institute 2015-2019 and 2021, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 2004-2015. Among the many aspects of his AEI work, he developed the One Page Mortgage Form to give borrowers in clear form the key information they need in order to know what they are committing themselves to. He was President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004. There he invented the Mortgage Partnership Finance program, which successfully created front-end mortgage credit risk sharing beginning in 1997. His decades of banking experience include being a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 1991.
Pollock was a director of the CME Group 2004-2019 and of Ascendium Education Group 1989-2019. He is a director and past-chairman of the Great Books Foundation and a past president of the International Union for Housing Finance.
He is the co-author of Surprised Again! - The COVID Crisis and the New Market Bubble (2022), and the author of Finance and Philosophy—Why We’re Always Surprised (2018) and Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (2011), as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony.
Pollock is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University.
His work is available on alexjpollock.com.
Executive Vice President, The Federalist Society
Dean Reuter is Executive Vice President at the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. He has served in two federal government agency Offices of the Inspector General, as Counsel to the Inspector General and Deputy Inspector General, responsible for policing the use of federal funds granted and contracted through those agencies. As such, he helped conduct and oversee criminal investigations across the country. He is the principal author of the non-fiction book, The Hidden Nazi: The Untold Story of America's Deal with the Devil, and editor of Liberty’s Nemesis: The Unchecked Expansion of the State and Confronting Terror: 9/11 and the Future of American National Security. He was appointed by the President and served as Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and recently served as an appointee on the U.S. Commission on Presidential Scholars. He is a graduate of Hood College (BA with Honors) and the University of Maryland School of Law.
Founding Partner, Cooper & Kirk PLLC
Charles J. Cooper is a founding member and the chairman of Cooper & Kirk, PLLC, “one of the Nation’s leading litigation boutiques” (Above The Law 2017). The National Law Journal recently wrote that Mr. Cooper’s “brilliant legal career has so far spanned five decades and thrust Cooper into the spotlight in some of the most historic moments of the country’s modern history.” He has argued nine cases before the United States Supreme Court and scores of appeals before each of the 13 federal courts of appeals and several state supreme courts. He has been lead trial counsel in numerous complex, weeks-long trials in federal courts throughout the country. Named by the National Law Journal as one of the 10 best litigators in Washington D.C., Mr. Cooper’s work has been reported in numerous press accounts, and he has been called a “powerhouse attorney” (Fortune 2015), “a hard-nosed litigator” (Washington Post 2017), and “one of the country’s most in-demand civil litigators and a Washington legal institution unto himself” (The American Spectator 2014).
After graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1977, where he ranked first in his class and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Alabama Law Review, Mr. Cooper began his career as a law clerk to Judge Paul Roney on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and to Justice William H. Rehnquist in 1978–79. He then practiced law in Atlanta for two years before joining the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of, among other things, appellate matters. In 1985 President Reagan appointed him to the position of Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, which is the office responsible for providing legal opinions and advice to the White House, the Attorney General, and Executive Branch departments and agencies on issues covering the full spectrum of federal constitutional, statutory, and regulatory law.
In 1988 he returned to private practice as a litigation partner in the Washington, D.C. office of McGuireWoods. From 1990 until the founding of Cooper & Kirk in 1996, he was a partner at Shaw Pittman (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman), where he headed the firm’s Constitutional and Government Litigation Group.
Mr. Cooper has represented a wide range of public and private clients in highly complex constitutional, civil rights, antitrust, healthcare, banking, intellectual property, elections, campaign finance, administrative, commercial, and government contract cases. He has led trial teams in cases that have won judgments and settlements valued in the billions of dollars and that have established ground-breaking constitutional precedents.
Much of Mr. Cooper’s practice has involved representing high-profile clients in nationally prominent matters, including: the State of Florida in a First Amendment suit brought by the Disney Company concerning its autonomous regulatory authority over its Disney World property; the Commonwealth of Virginia in a suit seeking to enjoin the removal of noncitizens from its voter rolls; 38 members of the Duke Lacrosse team falsely accused of rape by officials of Duke University and the City of Durham; Harper Lee in a copyright dispute with the heirs of Gregory Peck; high-ranking former government officials such as former Attorneys General John Ashcroft, Jeff Sessions, and William Barr, and Ambassador John Bolton; several Governors and United States Senators; over 100 Members of Congress; and many state, territorial, and local government bodies and officials. He has also represented and advised government officials and public figures in connection with sensitive private issues that needed to be, and were, resolved discreetly without becoming matters of public record.
In 1998 Chief Justice Rehnquist appointed Mr. Cooper to the Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Judicial Conference of the United States, where he served for three terms. He also served as a Public Member, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, of the National Commission on Judicial Discipline and Removal. He is a member of numerous professional associations, including the American Law Institute (since 1993) and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers (since 1996). He is also an active member of the Federalist Society and the Republican National Lawyers Association, which in 2010 named him Republican Lawyer of the Year and in 2016 honored him with its Edwin Meese III Award.
Mr. Cooper has published scores of articles and spoken extensively on constitutional and legal policy topics. He has appeared before congressional committees on 26 occasions, testifying as an expert on a wide variety of legal issues, including the Chevron doctrine of judicial deference to administrative agencies, the diversity of citizenship jurisdiction of federal courts, statehood bills for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, and the impeachment of President Clinton.
Senior Attorney, Pacific Legal Foundation
Damien Schiff is a senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation. He leads its environmental practice group, a unique initiative that draws broadly from PLF’s expertise and success in property rights and separation of powers litigation. Over the years, Damien has represented hundreds of landowners and property rights advocates to defend their liberties against heavy-handed and unwarranted environmental and land-use regulation. His litigation experience includes Sackett v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a groundbreaking decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of landowners to challenge Clean Water Act compliance orders issued by EPA, and Contoski v. Norton, PLF’s successful effort to force the federal government to make good on its promise to delist the bald eagle from the Endangered Species Act.
Besides litigation, Damien has written academic articles on a variety of subjects, including the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, greenhouse gas torts, the duty to rescue, and international water law. He has appeared on a variety of television and radio programs and has been quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harper’s Magazine, and The Economist, among other publications.
He obtained his law degree magna cum laude from the University of San Diego School of Law, and his undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Georgetown University. While at USD, he was a research assistant for Professor Bernard Siegan, a leading constitutional theorist and advocate for property rights and economic liberty. Immediately prior to joining PLF, Damien clerked for Judge (and former PLF attorney) Victor Wolski of the United States Court of Federal Claims. Damien credits the mentoring and examples of Professor Siegan and Judge Wolski for his decision to pursue a career in liberty-based public interest litigation.
Damien lives in Sacramento with his wife, two young sons, four chickens, and a cat named Princess. In his off hours he enjoys stamp collecting, Gregorian chant, and martinis—preferably at the same time.
Partner, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP
Kenneth Wainstein is a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell, where he focuses his practice on corporate internal investigations and civil and criminal enforcement proceedings. Ken spent over 20 years in a variety of law enforcement and national security positions in the government. Between 1989 and 2001, Ken served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in both the Southern District of New York and the District of Columbia, where he handled criminal prosecutions ranging from public corruption to gang prosecution cases and held a variety of supervisory positions, including Acting United States Attorney. In 2001, he was appointed Director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, where he provided oversight and support to the 94 U.S. Attorneys’ Offices. Between 2002 and 2004, Ken served as General Counsel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and then as Chief of Staff to Director Robert S. Mueller III. In 2004, Ken was appointed and then confirmed as United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, where he had the privilege to lead the largest United States Attorney’s Office in the country. In 2006, the U.S. Senate confirmed Ken as the first Assistant Attorney General for National Security. In that position, Ken established and led the new National Security Division, which consolidated DOJ’s law enforcement and intelligence activities on counterterrorism and counterintelligence matters. In 2008, after 19 years at the Justice Department, Ken was named Homeland Security Advisor by President George W. Bush. In this capacity, he coordinated the nation’s counterterrorism, homeland security, infrastructure protection, and disaster response and recovery efforts. He advised the President, convened and chaired meetings of the Cabinet Officers on the Homeland Security Council, and oversaw the inter-agency coordination process for homeland security and counterterrorism programs.
Executive Vice President, The Federalist Society
Dean Reuter is Executive Vice President at the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. He has served in two federal government agency Offices of the Inspector General, as Counsel to the Inspector General and Deputy Inspector General, responsible for policing the use of federal funds granted and contracted through those agencies. As such, he helped conduct and oversee criminal investigations across the country. He is the principal author of the non-fiction book, The Hidden Nazi: The Untold Story of America's Deal with the Devil, and editor of Liberty’s Nemesis: The Unchecked Expansion of the State and Confronting Terror: 9/11 and the Future of American National Security. He was appointed by the President and served as Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and recently served as an appointee on the U.S. Commission on Presidential Scholars. He is a graduate of Hood College (BA with Honors) and the University of Maryland School of Law.
Senior Staff Attorney, Knight First Amendment Institute
Alex Abdo is a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute. Prior to joining the Institute, he was a senior staff attorney at the ACLU. He has been at the forefront of litigation relating to NSA surveillance, encryption, anonymous speech online, government transparency, and the post-9/11 abuse of detainees in U.S. custody. In 2015, he argued the closely watched appeal that resulted in the Second Circuit invalidating the NSA’s call-records program. He graduated from Yale College and Harvard Law School. After law school, Alex clerked for the Hon. Barbara M.G. Lynn, United States District Judge for the Northern District of Texas, and for the Hon. Rosemary Barkett, United States Circuit Judge for the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Professor of Environmental Practice and Director, California Env, UC Davis School of Law
Richard M. Frank is a Professor of Environmental Practice and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center (CELPC). Formerly the executive director of the Center for Law, Energy, & the Environment (CLEE) at UC Berkeley School of Law, Frank returned to UC Davis School of Law in January 2010. In addition to leading the CELPC, he teaches classroom courses in the environmental law curriculum.
Before coming to CLEE and UC Berkeley, Professor Frank practiced law with federal and state agencies for 32 years, most of that time with the California Department of Justice. Immediately before joining Berkeley Law, he served as California's Chief Deputy Attorney General for Legal Affairs.
In 2006, Governor Schwarzenegger appointed Frank to the Delta Vision Task Force, an advisory body asked to develop policy recommendations for the Governor and Legislature, addressing environmental problems confronting the California Delta. He served in that capacity in 2007-08. In May 2009, the Chair of the California Air Resources Board appointed Frank Vice Chair of the Economic Allocation & Advisory Committee, an advisory body formed to assist the Air Resources Board in implementing California's landmark Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32).
Senior Attorney, Pacific Legal Foundation
Damien Schiff is a senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation. He leads its environmental practice group, a unique initiative that draws broadly from PLF’s expertise and success in property rights and separation of powers litigation. Over the years, Damien has represented hundreds of landowners and property rights advocates to defend their liberties against heavy-handed and unwarranted environmental and land-use regulation. His litigation experience includes Sackett v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a groundbreaking decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of landowners to challenge Clean Water Act compliance orders issued by EPA, and Contoski v. Norton, PLF’s successful effort to force the federal government to make good on its promise to delist the bald eagle from the Endangered Species Act.
Besides litigation, Damien has written academic articles on a variety of subjects, including the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, greenhouse gas torts, the duty to rescue, and international water law. He has appeared on a variety of television and radio programs and has been quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harper’s Magazine, and The Economist, among other publications.
He obtained his law degree magna cum laude from the University of San Diego School of Law, and his undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Georgetown University. While at USD, he was a research assistant for Professor Bernard Siegan, a leading constitutional theorist and advocate for property rights and economic liberty. Immediately prior to joining PLF, Damien clerked for Judge (and former PLF attorney) Victor Wolski of the United States Court of Federal Claims. Damien credits the mentoring and examples of Professor Siegan and Judge Wolski for his decision to pursue a career in liberty-based public interest litigation.
Damien lives in Sacramento with his wife, two young sons, four chickens, and a cat named Princess. In his off hours he enjoys stamp collecting, Gregorian chant, and martinis—preferably at the same time.
Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Federal Courts, Georgetown Law
Stephen I. Vladeck is a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and is a nationally recognized expert on the federal courts; the Supreme Court; national security law; and military justice.
Vladeck is author of the New York Times bestselling book, “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic,” which won the 2023 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the 2024 ABA Silver Gavel Award for Media and the Arts. Vladeck is also a highly regarded appellate advocate, having argued three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and over a dozen before various lower federal civilian and military courts. He has received numerous awards for his influential and widely cited legal scholarship, his prolific popular writing, his teaching, and his service to the legal profession—including the 2024 University of Texas President’s Research Impact Award and his selection by the Order of the Coif to serve as its Distinguished Visiting Professor for 2025.
Vladeck is CNN’s Supreme Court analyst and editor and author of “One First,” a popular weekly newsletter about the Supreme Court. Together with Bobby Chesney, Vladeck co-hosts the popular and award-winning “National Security Law Podcast.” He is also a co-author of Aspen Publishers’ leading national security law and counterterrorism law casebooks. And he is a member of the Board of Trustees of EarthJustice—the nation’s premier nonprofit public interest environmental law organization.
Vladeck graduated from Yale Law School in 2004—where he was executive editor of the Yale Law Journal and won the Harlan Fiske Stone Prize for outstanding moot court oralist and shared the Potter Stewart Prize for best moot court team performance. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the Honorable Rosemary Barkett on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He earned a B.A. summa cum laude with Highest Distinction in History and Mathematics from Amherst College in 2001—where he wrote his senior thesis on “Leipzig’s Shadow: The War Crimes Trials of the First World War and Their Implications from Nuremberg to the Present.” A native New Yorker and hopeless Mets fan, Vladeck lives in the District with his wife, Karen (Founder and Managing Partner of Risepoint Search Partners); their daughters, Madeleine and Sydney; and their eleven-year-old pug, Roxanna.
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, University of Southern California
Elizabeth Garrett was appointed provost and senior vice president for academic affairs on October 28, 2010. As the university’s second-ranking officer, she oversees the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences as well as the Keck School of Medicine of USC and 16 other professional schools, in addition to the divisions of student affairs, libraries, information technology services, research, student religious life and enrollment services. She also sits on the governing board of the USC hospitals.
As Provost, Garrett has directed substantial new efforts to hire transformative faculty members, including initiatives to recruit faculty in neuroscience, the humanities, and the social sciences, with the goal of catalyzing targeted fields of scholarship and invigorating USC’s research environment. She has also accelerated the recruitment of Provost Professors and created recruitment of the Provost’s Post-Doctoral Scholars Program in the Humanities. From 2006 to 2011 she led USC’s successful reaccreditation through the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. Garrett has also been instrumental in the integration of the new Keck Hospitals of USC and the faculty practice plans into the university, which created an academic medical center on the Health Sciences Campus. Garrett is the Frances R. and John J. Duggan Professor in the USC Gould School of Law. In addition to this primary faculty appointment, she has joint appointments in USC Dornsife College and the School of Policy, Planning, and Development, as well as a courtesy appointment in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
She serves on the Board of Directors of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at USC and, in August 2009, was appointed one of five commissioners on the California Fair Political Practices Commission, the state’s independent political oversight agency. Then-president George W. Bush appointed her to serve on the nine-member bipartisan Tax Reform Panel in 2005. She previously served as director of the USC-Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics.
Garrett previously served as USC’s vice president for academic planning and budget, a position she had held since June 2006.
Garrett’s primary scholarly interests are legislative process, direct democracy, the federal budget process, democratic institutions, statutory interpretation, administrative law and tax policy. The author of more than 50 articles, book chapters and essays, she is co-author of the fourth edition of the leading casebook on legislation and statutory interpretation, Cases and Materials on Legislation: Statutes and the Creation of Public Policy, and co-editor of Statutory Interpretation Stories and Fiscal Challenges: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Budget Policy.
Before joining the faculty of USC, she was a professor of law at the University of Chicago, where she also served as deputy dean for academic affairs, and she has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, the University of Virginia Law School, Central European University in Budapest, and the Interdisciplinary Center Law School in Israel. Before entering academics, she clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court, and she served as legal counsel and legislative director for Senator David L. Boren (D-Okla.). She received her B.A. in History with special distinction from the University of Oklahoma and her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.
Garrett is a fellow of the American Law Institute, a life fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and a member of the Pacific Council for International Policy. In 2011 she was elected a Harold Lasswell Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She also serves on the editorial board of Election Law Journal, and is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the United States 2011.
Managing Attorney of the Washington Office, Institute for Justice
William R. Maurer is the Managing Attorney of the Washington state office of the Institute for Justice, which engages in litigation in the areas of economic liberty, private property rights, educational choice, & freedom of speech.
Maurer is an advocate against the criminalization of poverty and the governmental use of the criminal and civil enforcement systems to raise revenue. He was lead counsel in a class action challenging the use of tickets to raise revenue in the city of Pagedale, Missouri. The suit resulted in a federal consent decree that reformed the city’s ticketing and municipal court system. He regularly speaks, teaches, and writes about the abuse of fines and fees in the criminal justice system. He was a participant in summits on taxation by citation put on by the White House and Department of Justice during the Obama Administration. His work on the issue includes serving as an advisory board member of the Fines and Fees Justice Center.
In addition to his work on criminal and civil justice reform, Maurer is a First Amendment litigator. In 2011, he successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that Arizona’s punitive campaign financing regime was unconstitutional. Before the Washington Supreme Court, he successfully argued against efforts to classify radio commentary as a contribution under the state’s campaign finance law.
His cases and advocacy have been covered in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and other major media outlets.
Maurer was named a “Washington Superlawyer” by Washington Law & Politics Magazine for several years. He is a chapter author in numerous legal reference works and has written several articles for law reviews and legal publications across the country.
Prior to joining IJ-WA, Maurer clerked for Washington Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders and then practiced law at Perkins Coie LLP. Maurer received his law degree in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he was an editor of the Wisconsin Law Review. He received his BA from Bard College in 1989.
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.
Partner, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Miguel A. Estrada is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
Mr. Estrada has represented clients before federal and state courts throughout the country in a broad range of matters. He has argued 24 cases before the United States Supreme Court, and briefed many others. He has also argued dozens of appeals in the lower federal courts.
Best Lawyers® recognized Mr. Estrada as a 2020 Lawyer of the Year in Intellectual Property Litigation and as a Lawyer of the Year in Appellate Practice. He has been recognized by Benchmark Litigation as a 2020 U.S. Appellate Litigation “Star”. In 2014, The American Lawyer named Mr. Estrada a “Litigator of the Year,” praising his “brains and tenacity” and noting he is the lawyer to call for “a tough, potentially unwinnable case.” From 2014-2021, Chambers & Partners has named him as one of a handful of attorneys that it ranked in the top tier among the nation’s leading appellate lawyers. Chambers & Partners noted that “clients are impressed by his intellect and ability, with one saying, ‘His papers are just blindingly clear in what they say and devastating in how they marshal the arguments.’” The Atlantic described his oral argument in a 2014 high-profile separation-of-powers case as “one of the most dazzling arguments the marble chamber has heard in many years.”
Mr. Estrada was selected by his peers for inclusion in the 2020 edition of The Best Lawyers in America® in the area of Appellate Law, in addition to previous recognition by the publication in the specialties of Bet-the-Company Litigation, Commercial Litigation and Criminal Defense: White Collar, Intellectual Property Litigation, and Regulatory Enforcement Litigation in the areas of SEC, Telecom, and Energy. In 2017, he was elected as a member of the American Law Institute. In 2021, Mr. Estrada was named among the Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America. In 2004, Legal Times named him one of the top 12 appellate litigators in the D.C. area, noting that “people who follow appellate practice in Washington have known for several years that Estrada . . . is one of the best around.” Also in 2004, Washingtonian Magazine named him one of the top constitutional law lawyers “who could become one of the legends of the Supreme Court bar.”
Mr. Estrada joined Gibson Dunn in 1997, after serving for five years as Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States. He previously served as Assistant U.S. Attorney and Deputy Chief of the Appellate Section, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York. In those capacities, Mr. Estrada represented the government in numerous jury trials and in many appeals before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Mr. Estrada practiced corporate law in New York with Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
Mr. Estrada is a Trustee of the Supreme Court Historical Society. He was formerly a member of the Board of Visitors of Harvard Law School.
Mr. Estrada served as a law clerk to the Honorable Anthony M. Kennedy in the U.S. Supreme Court from 1988 to 1989 and to the Honorable Amalya L. Kearse in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1986 to 1987. He received a J.D. degree magna cum laude in 1986 from Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the Harvard Law Review. Mr. Estrada graduated with an A.B. degree magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1983 from Columbia College, New York. He is fluent in Spanish and proficient in French.
Representative Supreme Court matters include:
In 2011, the Supreme Court appointed Mr. Estrada to brief and argue two criminal cases –Dorsey v. United States and Hill v. United States – in which the Solicitor General declined to defend the judgments of the court of appeals. Mr. Estrada was appointed to argue the position that the Solicitor General had declined to defend.
Mr. Estrada was also part of the team that successfully presented then Governor Bush’s position to the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore (2000). Other cases that Mr. Estrada handled in the Supreme Court include Granholm v. Heald (2005) (dormant Commerce Clause and Twenty-First Amendment), Vermont Agency of Natural Resources v. United States ex rel. Stevens (2000) (False Claims Act, Article III standing and Eleventh Amendment immunity), Old Chief v. United States (1997) (rules of evidence), United States v. Mezzanatto (1995) (evidence and plea bargaining), United States v. Robertson (1995) (constitutional limits on Congress’s Commerce Clause powers), Citizens Bank of Maryland v. Strumpf (1995) (bankruptcy law), and NOW, Inc. v. Scheidler (1994) (RICO).
Recent Court of Appeals matters include:
In addition, Mr. Estrada is lead appellate counsel to Vivendi S.A. in two securities-fraud appeals from jury verdicts that are currently pending in the Second Circuit, and to the National Association of Broadcasters in a challenge to certain procedures promulgated by the FCC in connection with the upcoming Spectrum Auction. Mr. Estrada also recently presented argument before the D.C. Circuit on behalf of the tobacco industry in a first amendment challenge to certain compelled disclosures that were imposed as part of the government’s long-running civil RICO case against the industry.
Other matters:
Summer Happy Hour
Risk Retention on Mortgages: Boon or Costly Mistake? - Podcast
Bert Ely, Michael Calhoun, Anne Canfield, Alex J. Pollock, Dean Reuter
One of the major issues under the Dodd-Frank Act is required credit risk retention on...
The Reach of Agency Authority: Sackett v. EPA
An Attack on Separation of Powers and Federal Judicial Power? An Analysis of the Constitutionality of Section 18 of the America Invents Act
Charles J. Cooper, Vincent J. Colatriano
Note from the Editor: This paper analyzes constitutional challenges to Section 18 of the recently...
Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency: Compliance Orders and the Right of Judicial Review
Damien Michael Schiff
The United States Supreme Court’s decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency1 promises to be important...
Clapper v. Amnesty International
Limits of Surveillance Warrants - Podcast
Kenneth L. Wainstein, Dean Reuter, Alex Abdo
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has featured prominently in contemporary debates over the prosecution...
Recall Elections
Union Organizing Made Easier: The Obama NLRB
2012 Supreme Court Review
Raleigh, North Carolina