Justice, Supreme Court of Texas
Justice Kyle D. Hawkins was appointed to the Supreme Court of Texas by Governor Greg Abbott in October 2025.
Justice Hawkins previously served in the U.S. Department of Justice as Counselor to the Solicitor General, where he represented the United States before the U.S. Supreme Court. Previously, he served as the Texas Solicitor General, the state’s chief appellate advocate charged with representing the state, its agencies, and its officers in state and federal appellate courts. Earlier in his career, he served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and for Judge Edith H. Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. As an appellate practitioner, Justice Hawkins argued five cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, nine in the Texas Supreme Court, and dozens more in other federal and state appellate courts.
In addition to his government service, Justice Hawkins served as a partner in the Dallas and Houston offices of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, and he chaired the Texas appellate practice of Lehotsky Keller Cohn LLP, a national litigation boutique. Justice Hawkins has served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law.
Justice Hawkins lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and four children.
District Judge, State of Texas
Cory Liu is a state district judge in Austin, Texas. He previously served as assistant general counsel to Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Mr. Liu clerked for Judge Andrew Oldham on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Judge Danny Boggs on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago.
Managing Principal, Broadmoor Consulting, LLC
Todd H. Baker is a former banking executive and law firm partner whose career trajectory led him from corporate law to C-suite strategic leadership roles at several of the largest domestic and international banks and roles as an academic, consultant, writer, speaker and commentator on banking, financial technology, consumer financial access and regulation issues. His deep knowledge of strategy, corporate governance, regulatory & public policy and competitive dynamics is combined with an extensive network of industry and government contacts built over long and varied career.
Mr. Baker is a Senior Fellow at the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law and Public Policy at Columbia Business School and Columbia Law School, where he works on innovation and the digital transformation of financial services, with a special interest in emerging business models for both traditional banks and non-bank "FinTech" financial services providers. He also teaches an advanced financial technology seminar for law and business students at Columbia and Stanford Law Schools. During 2016-2018, Mr. Baker was a Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research interests and published papers at Harvard include work on the role of FinTech and employers in providing alternatives to payday loans and other types of short-term, small-dollar credit for low-income working Americans in the digital age.
Mr. Baker is a member of the board of directors and chair of the board credit committee at Accion Opportunity Fund, the nation's leading nonprofit small business lender, a member of the Academic Research Council at the Urban Institute and a Limited Partner Advisor at Nyca Partners, a leading fintech-focused venture capital firm. Mr. Baker has written for publications including the Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and the American Banker, speaks frequently at industry conferences and is widely quoted in the financial and technology press as an industry expert.
Mr. Baker is best known in business circles for driving strategic change in large financial services organizations and a long history of leading high-profile M&A and capital markets transactions. He has also built and managed effective and diverse teams in the areas of strategic planning, competitive intelligence, performance management, investor relations and venture capital. Mr. Baker served as the Managing Director and Head of Americas Corporate Development for MUFG Americas Holdings, the Americas banking operations of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG). In this role, Mr. Baker managed MUFG Americas’ acquisition and divestiture activities in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. Before taking that position, Mr. Baker was Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategy & Development for Union Bank NA, the U.S. commercial and retail banking operation of MUFG, where he led the company’s strategic planning, corporate development and performance management activities. Prior to joining Union Bank, Mr. Baker served as Executive Director of Corporate Development for TD Bank, N.A., where he was a member of the Managing Committee and had responsibility for leading Toronto-based TD Bank Financial Group’s acquisition activities in the U.S. market, and Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategy & Development at Washington Mutual, Inc. where, at various times, he served on the Executive Committee and had responsibility for acquisitions & divestitures, strategic planning, investor relations, venture capital investing and competitive intelligence.
Prior to his executive roles, Baker was a partner with the international law firms Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and Morrison & Foerster LLP, where he represented financial services, technology, corporate and investment banking clients in corporate and board governance matters, mergers and acquisitions, public and private securities offerings, securitizations and compliance issues and was recognized as the leading financial services M&A and securities attorney on the West Coast. His law clients included, among others, BankAmerica Corp., Transamerica Corp., Intel, Montgomery Securities, Hewlett-Packard, First Nationwide Financial, Washington Mutual Inc., Global Center, Nomura Securities, Lehman Brothers, Visa International, CIBC and Security Pacific Corp.
Partner, King & Spalding
A partner in the firm’s Government Advocacy and Public Policy group, J.C. helps companies and trade associations navigate legal, political and regulatory issues commonly associated with doing business in Europe and the United States. He is recognized by clients for his strong, bipartisan relationships with Members of Congress, State Attorneys General, congressional staff and senior government officials across key regulatory and executive branch agencies. He is trusted for his ability to rapidly synthesize complex information and communicate its strategic implications to policymakers and senior institutional stakeholders as well as his candid evaluation of options and potential for success.
As former counsel to the Senate Banking Committee, J.C has developed a deep expertise in financial services, fintech, and emerging technology policy. He has a proven track record of influencing federal legislation, regulatory frameworks, and agency rulemaking impacting digital assets, banking, payments, and technology platforms. J.C. regularly interfaces with financial regulators on a wide array of policy and institution-specific issues, and as co-chair of the firm’s State Attorneys General practice, delivers results on high-impact legal work at the intersection of law, policy and regulation.
J.C. is skilled in developing and executing comprehensive advocacy strategies, shaping legislative language, and positioning clients to successfully navigate complex and evolving policy environments at the federal, state and international levels. As President of the Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum, he has briefed policymakers throughout Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Indo-Pacific. JC also advises international clients seeking to invest, expand, or operate in the United States.
President George W. Bush appointed J.C. to a six-year term as U.S. representative to the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Mayor Muriel Bowser also appointed J.C. to the District of Columbia; Board of Elections, in which capacity he also served on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Standards Board. He is currently chairman of the Board of Visitors of The Catholic University Columbus School of Law and President of the Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum, where he is a regular speaker on cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence and critical minerals.
Earlier in his career, J.C. established the Boggs Scholarship for Public Service at the University of Delaware in honor of his grandfather and namesake, former U.S. Congressman, Senator and Governor of Delaware, J. Caleb Boggs. He has also served on numerous corporate and non-profit boards, including Jobs for Delaware Graduates (Chairman); The Reserve Trust Company (Vice Chairman), Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship Network (Secretary), Republican National Lawyers Association (President), Kimball Union Academy (Chairman of the Committee on Trustees), and AAA Mid-Atlantic.
J.C. enjoys open-water swimming and is member of U.S. Masters Swimming and the historic Serpentine Swimming Club situated in London's Hyde Park. He has competed in swimming events across all 50 states, ten Canadian provinces and around the world.
Retired, Winston & Strawn LLP
Jerry Loeser is of counsel in the Chicago office of Winston & Strawn, and his practice focuses on banking regulation. He has extensive experience in counseling financial services clients on, among other things, bank acquisitions, privacy, financial modernization, the USA PATRIOT Act, Basel II and III, lending limits, capital, trust, affiliate transactions, and Federal Reserve, OCC, FDIC, and CFPB regulations.
Prior to working at large corporate law firms, Jerry was chief regulatory and compliance counsel for Comerica Bank, where he also served as senior vice president and deputy general counsel and as general counsel of its retail bank division. Before that, he served as chief regulatory in-house counsel at Wells Fargo & Co. Jerry began his legal career advising the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C.
Partner, Norton Rose Fulbright
Steven Lofchie advises financial institutions on regulatory issues and financial instruments.
In his regulatory practice, Steven counsels clients on securities laws, the CEA, and related bankruptcy issues. His transactional practice focuses on securities credit and derivative transactions.
Steven is the founder and manager of an acclaimed legal website (now renamed Fried Frank Regulatory Intelligence) that has been endorsed by former chairpersons of both the SEC and CFTC. Subscribers to the website include government regulators and major buy- and sell-side firms.
Chambers USA has ranked Steven in Band 1 for eight years running, for both financial services regulation and derivatives. He is the only lawyer in the country to be top-ranked in both of those categories. Steven was also part of the team that was named 2020 Regulatory Team of the Year by IFLR Americas. The Best Lawyers in America recognized Steven as “Lawyer of the Year” for Administrative/Regulatory Law in New York in 2017, and U.S. News and World Report ranked him as the best regulatory lawyer in New York for 2014. In 2012, a derivatives transaction developed by Steven was cited as the best international structured product of the year by International Financial Law Review.
U.S. Senate, Wyoming
Cynthia Lummis was sworn into the United States Senate on January 3, 2021, becoming the first woman to serve as United States Senator from the great State of Wyoming.
Born on a cattle ranch in Laramie County, Senator Lummis has spent her entire career fighting for Wyoming families, communities, businesses and values. From the halls of the Wyoming House to the halls of the U.S. House, her time in public service has always been focused on advocating for Wyoming’s future.
First elected to the U.S. House in 2008, Senator Lummis quickly earned her reputation as a no-nonsense conservative and principled policymaker. She was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group consisting of the most unflinching conservative Members of the House of Representatives. She fought throughout her tenure in Congress to rein in spending and reduce the federal deficit, working with the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and ultimately co-sponsoring several bipartisan budget proposals.
In the House of Representatives, Senator Lummis effectively elevated western issues, pushing through the first Interior and Environment (EPA) Appropriations bill to pass the House in seven years under her chairmanship. This marked a significant milestone for the Western Caucus and the rural communities across the West they represent. She also worked to keep public lands open to the public and available for multiple use. She successfully passed the National Forest System Trails Stewardship Act in 2016, a bipartisan effort led by Cynthia to maintain over 157,000 miles of trails within our national forests.
Senator Lummis is a dedicated champion of Wyoming’s mineral and energy resources. In Washington, she fought off attacks from the environmental left while advocating for market opportunities both at home and abroad. She is the proud godmother of the ANSAC Wyoming, a commercial shipping vessel transporting trona from the U.S. to Southeast Asia and is the recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the Washington Coal Club.
Prior to serving in the House of Representatives, Senator Lummis spent eight years as Wyoming State Treasurer and 14 years as a member of the Wyoming State House and Senate. She also worked as general counsel to Wyoming Governor Jim Geringer and Director of the Office of State Lands and Investments, as well as a law clerk at the Wyoming Supreme Court.
After departing U.S. House of Representatives in 2016, Senator Lummis operated her family’s cattle ranches, and the Sweetgrass development in Laramie County, with her brother and sister. She is a three-time graduate of the University of Wyoming in animal science, biology and law. She and her late-husband, Al Wiederspahn, have one daughter, Annaliese, son-in-law Will Cole and grandsons Gus and Al.
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.
Senior Counsel & Director of the Center for Religious Schools, Alliance Defending Freedom
Gregory S. Baylor serves as senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, where he is the director of the Center for Religious Schools and senior counsel with the Center for Public Policy.
Since joining ADF in 2009, Baylor has focused on defending and advancing the religious freedom of faith-based educational institutions through advice, education, legislative and public advocacy, and representation in disputes. He has testified about religious liberty issues three times before congressional committees and numerous times before state legislative committees.
Greg serves on the board of directors of the International Alliance for Christian Education, the board of directors of the Association for Biblical Higher Education, the board of directors of the Association for Christian Schools International, the board of advisors of the Museum of the Bible, and advisory board of the Center for Academic Faithfulness and Flourishing.
Greg earned his Juris Doctor in 1990 from Duke University School of Law, where he graduated Order of the Coif, with high honors, and served on the editorial board of the Duke Law Journal. He received his bachelor’s degree in Honors English in 1987 from Dartmouth College. Following graduation from law school, he served as law clerk to the Hon. Jerry E. Smith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He practiced labor and employment law at two large international law firms for three years before joining the staff of Christian Legal Society’s Center for Law and Religious Freedom, where he served for 15 years prior to joining ADF. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife (a medical doctor) and two daughters.
President, Alabama Center for Law and Liberty
Matthew Clark graduated from the Liberty University School of Law in 2012 in the top 10% of his class, and he had served on both the law review editorial board and moot court board. From 2013-2016, Clark worked on the Alabama Supreme Court, beginning as a law clerk but being promoted to a staff attorney after one year. From 2016 until 2021, Clark worked at the Foundation for Moral Law in Montgomery, practicing constitutional law and focusing on religious liberty, the right to life, and promoting a strict interpretation of the United States Constitution according to the intent of its framers.
After joining ACLL in March of 2021, Clark sued the Biden administration over its OSHA vaccine mandate, took it all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and won. Clark also successfully got UAB Health to rescind its vaccine mandate for its employees, guaranteeing that their jobs would be safe so that they could continue to provide much-needed medical services to those in need. Clark also successfully led a campaign of multiple legal and public policy organizations to pressure the Montgomery City Council to vote down an LGBT ordinance that would punish Christians with religious objections to endorsing, encouraging, or enabling conduct that they find sinful. Through his amicus advocacy, Clark has also asked the United States Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade, protect the right of citizens to carry firearms for self-defense outside their homes, recognize the right of government employees to pray in public, and return Congress’s commerce power to the very limited role that the Framers intended for it to have.
Clark is admitted to the state bars of Alabama and Virginia. He is also admitted to the bars of the United States Supreme Court, the United States Courts of Appeals for the Second, Third, Sixth, Eleventh, and D.C. Circuits, and the United States District Courts for the Northern, Middle, and Southern Districts of Alabama. He is also a member of the Federalist Society’s Religious Liberty Executive Committee and an officer in his local Federalist Society Chapter. In 2021 and 2022, he was also a member of Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill’s Voter Fraud Task Force. He also occasionally lectures at Faulkner University on constitutional law.
Clark is married to his wife Laura, who is also an attorney, has an LLM in Alternative Dispute Resolution from the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, and volunteers her time to assist ACLL. They have one child and are members of Vaughn Park Church in Montgomery.
R. B. Price and Isabelle Wade & Paul C. Lyda Professor Emeritus of Law, University of Missouri School of Law
Carl H. Esbeck is R.B. Price Professor and Isabelle Wade & Paul C. Lyda Professor of Law emeritus at the University of Missouri. After attending Cornell University School of Law where he served as an editor on the Cornell Law Review, he held a judicial clerkship with the Honorable Howard C. Bratton, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in New Mexico.
Professor Esbeck publishes widely in the area of religious liberty and church-state relations. He is recognized as the progenitor of "Charitable Choice," an integral part of the 1996 Federal Welfare Reform Act, later made a part of the faith-based initiative and equal-treatment regulations under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In addition, he has taken the lead in recognizing that the modern Supreme Court has applied the Establishment Clause not as a personal right, but as a structural limit on the government's authority in disputes involving church governance. While on leave from 1999 to 2002, Professor Esbeck directed the Center for Law & Religious Freedom (CLRF) and later served as Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice. While directing the CLRF, Professor Esbeck was a central part of the congressional advocacy behind the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA). While at the Department of Justice one of his duties was to direct a task force to remove barriers to the equal-treatment of faith-based organizations applying for social service grants. He is the author of Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776 - 1833 (U. of MO Press, 2019).
Managing Principal, Broadmoor Consulting, LLC
Todd H. Baker is a former banking executive and law firm partner whose career trajectory led him from corporate law to C-suite strategic leadership roles at several of the largest domestic and international banks and roles as an academic, consultant, writer, speaker and commentator on banking, financial technology, consumer financial access and regulation issues. His deep knowledge of strategy, corporate governance, regulatory & public policy and competitive dynamics is combined with an extensive network of industry and government contacts built over long and varied career.
Mr. Baker is a Senior Fellow at the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law and Public Policy at Columbia Business School and Columbia Law School, where he works on innovation and the digital transformation of financial services, with a special interest in emerging business models for both traditional banks and non-bank "FinTech" financial services providers. He also teaches an advanced financial technology seminar for law and business students at Columbia and Stanford Law Schools. During 2016-2018, Mr. Baker was a Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research interests and published papers at Harvard include work on the role of FinTech and employers in providing alternatives to payday loans and other types of short-term, small-dollar credit for low-income working Americans in the digital age.
Mr. Baker is a member of the board of directors and chair of the board credit committee at Accion Opportunity Fund, the nation's leading nonprofit small business lender, a member of the Academic Research Council at the Urban Institute and a Limited Partner Advisor at Nyca Partners, a leading fintech-focused venture capital firm. Mr. Baker has written for publications including the Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and the American Banker, speaks frequently at industry conferences and is widely quoted in the financial and technology press as an industry expert.
Mr. Baker is best known in business circles for driving strategic change in large financial services organizations and a long history of leading high-profile M&A and capital markets transactions. He has also built and managed effective and diverse teams in the areas of strategic planning, competitive intelligence, performance management, investor relations and venture capital. Mr. Baker served as the Managing Director and Head of Americas Corporate Development for MUFG Americas Holdings, the Americas banking operations of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG). In this role, Mr. Baker managed MUFG Americas’ acquisition and divestiture activities in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. Before taking that position, Mr. Baker was Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategy & Development for Union Bank NA, the U.S. commercial and retail banking operation of MUFG, where he led the company’s strategic planning, corporate development and performance management activities. Prior to joining Union Bank, Mr. Baker served as Executive Director of Corporate Development for TD Bank, N.A., where he was a member of the Managing Committee and had responsibility for leading Toronto-based TD Bank Financial Group’s acquisition activities in the U.S. market, and Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategy & Development at Washington Mutual, Inc. where, at various times, he served on the Executive Committee and had responsibility for acquisitions & divestitures, strategic planning, investor relations, venture capital investing and competitive intelligence.
Prior to his executive roles, Baker was a partner with the international law firms Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and Morrison & Foerster LLP, where he represented financial services, technology, corporate and investment banking clients in corporate and board governance matters, mergers and acquisitions, public and private securities offerings, securitizations and compliance issues and was recognized as the leading financial services M&A and securities attorney on the West Coast. His law clients included, among others, BankAmerica Corp., Transamerica Corp., Intel, Montgomery Securities, Hewlett-Packard, First Nationwide Financial, Washington Mutual Inc., Global Center, Nomura Securities, Lehman Brothers, Visa International, CIBC and Security Pacific Corp.
Partner, King & Spalding
A partner in the firm’s Government Advocacy and Public Policy group, J.C. helps companies and trade associations navigate legal, political and regulatory issues commonly associated with doing business in Europe and the United States. He is recognized by clients for his strong, bipartisan relationships with Members of Congress, State Attorneys General, congressional staff and senior government officials across key regulatory and executive branch agencies. He is trusted for his ability to rapidly synthesize complex information and communicate its strategic implications to policymakers and senior institutional stakeholders as well as his candid evaluation of options and potential for success.
As former counsel to the Senate Banking Committee, J.C has developed a deep expertise in financial services, fintech, and emerging technology policy. He has a proven track record of influencing federal legislation, regulatory frameworks, and agency rulemaking impacting digital assets, banking, payments, and technology platforms. J.C. regularly interfaces with financial regulators on a wide array of policy and institution-specific issues, and as co-chair of the firm’s State Attorneys General practice, delivers results on high-impact legal work at the intersection of law, policy and regulation.
J.C. is skilled in developing and executing comprehensive advocacy strategies, shaping legislative language, and positioning clients to successfully navigate complex and evolving policy environments at the federal, state and international levels. As President of the Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum, he has briefed policymakers throughout Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Indo-Pacific. JC also advises international clients seeking to invest, expand, or operate in the United States.
President George W. Bush appointed J.C. to a six-year term as U.S. representative to the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Mayor Muriel Bowser also appointed J.C. to the District of Columbia; Board of Elections, in which capacity he also served on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Standards Board. He is currently chairman of the Board of Visitors of The Catholic University Columbus School of Law and President of the Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum, where he is a regular speaker on cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence and critical minerals.
Earlier in his career, J.C. established the Boggs Scholarship for Public Service at the University of Delaware in honor of his grandfather and namesake, former U.S. Congressman, Senator and Governor of Delaware, J. Caleb Boggs. He has also served on numerous corporate and non-profit boards, including Jobs for Delaware Graduates (Chairman); The Reserve Trust Company (Vice Chairman), Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship Network (Secretary), Republican National Lawyers Association (President), Kimball Union Academy (Chairman of the Committee on Trustees), and AAA Mid-Atlantic.
J.C. enjoys open-water swimming and is member of U.S. Masters Swimming and the historic Serpentine Swimming Club situated in London's Hyde Park. He has competed in swimming events across all 50 states, ten Canadian provinces and around the world.
Retired, Winston & Strawn LLP
Jerry Loeser is of counsel in the Chicago office of Winston & Strawn, and his practice focuses on banking regulation. He has extensive experience in counseling financial services clients on, among other things, bank acquisitions, privacy, financial modernization, the USA PATRIOT Act, Basel II and III, lending limits, capital, trust, affiliate transactions, and Federal Reserve, OCC, FDIC, and CFPB regulations.
Prior to working at large corporate law firms, Jerry was chief regulatory and compliance counsel for Comerica Bank, where he also served as senior vice president and deputy general counsel and as general counsel of its retail bank division. Before that, he served as chief regulatory in-house counsel at Wells Fargo & Co. Jerry began his legal career advising the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C.
Partner, Norton Rose Fulbright
Steven Lofchie advises financial institutions on regulatory issues and financial instruments.
In his regulatory practice, Steven counsels clients on securities laws, the CEA, and related bankruptcy issues. His transactional practice focuses on securities credit and derivative transactions.
Steven is the founder and manager of an acclaimed legal website (now renamed Fried Frank Regulatory Intelligence) that has been endorsed by former chairpersons of both the SEC and CFTC. Subscribers to the website include government regulators and major buy- and sell-side firms.
Chambers USA has ranked Steven in Band 1 for eight years running, for both financial services regulation and derivatives. He is the only lawyer in the country to be top-ranked in both of those categories. Steven was also part of the team that was named 2020 Regulatory Team of the Year by IFLR Americas. The Best Lawyers in America recognized Steven as “Lawyer of the Year” for Administrative/Regulatory Law in New York in 2017, and U.S. News and World Report ranked him as the best regulatory lawyer in New York for 2014. In 2012, a derivatives transaction developed by Steven was cited as the best international structured product of the year by International Financial Law Review.
U.S. Senate, Wyoming
Cynthia Lummis was sworn into the United States Senate on January 3, 2021, becoming the first woman to serve as United States Senator from the great State of Wyoming.
Born on a cattle ranch in Laramie County, Senator Lummis has spent her entire career fighting for Wyoming families, communities, businesses and values. From the halls of the Wyoming House to the halls of the U.S. House, her time in public service has always been focused on advocating for Wyoming’s future.
First elected to the U.S. House in 2008, Senator Lummis quickly earned her reputation as a no-nonsense conservative and principled policymaker. She was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group consisting of the most unflinching conservative Members of the House of Representatives. She fought throughout her tenure in Congress to rein in spending and reduce the federal deficit, working with the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and ultimately co-sponsoring several bipartisan budget proposals.
In the House of Representatives, Senator Lummis effectively elevated western issues, pushing through the first Interior and Environment (EPA) Appropriations bill to pass the House in seven years under her chairmanship. This marked a significant milestone for the Western Caucus and the rural communities across the West they represent. She also worked to keep public lands open to the public and available for multiple use. She successfully passed the National Forest System Trails Stewardship Act in 2016, a bipartisan effort led by Cynthia to maintain over 157,000 miles of trails within our national forests.
Senator Lummis is a dedicated champion of Wyoming’s mineral and energy resources. In Washington, she fought off attacks from the environmental left while advocating for market opportunities both at home and abroad. She is the proud godmother of the ANSAC Wyoming, a commercial shipping vessel transporting trona from the U.S. to Southeast Asia and is the recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the Washington Coal Club.
Prior to serving in the House of Representatives, Senator Lummis spent eight years as Wyoming State Treasurer and 14 years as a member of the Wyoming State House and Senate. She also worked as general counsel to Wyoming Governor Jim Geringer and Director of the Office of State Lands and Investments, as well as a law clerk at the Wyoming Supreme Court.
After departing U.S. House of Representatives in 2016, Senator Lummis operated her family’s cattle ranches, and the Sweetgrass development in Laramie County, with her brother and sister. She is a three-time graduate of the University of Wyoming in animal science, biology and law. She and her late-husband, Al Wiederspahn, have one daughter, Annaliese, son-in-law Will Cole and grandsons Gus and Al.
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.
Managing Principal, Broadmoor Consulting, LLC
Todd H. Baker is a former banking executive and law firm partner whose career trajectory led him from corporate law to C-suite strategic leadership roles at several of the largest domestic and international banks and roles as an academic, consultant, writer, speaker and commentator on banking, financial technology, consumer financial access and regulation issues. His deep knowledge of strategy, corporate governance, regulatory & public policy and competitive dynamics is combined with an extensive network of industry and government contacts built over long and varied career.
Mr. Baker is a Senior Fellow at the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law and Public Policy at Columbia Business School and Columbia Law School, where he works on innovation and the digital transformation of financial services, with a special interest in emerging business models for both traditional banks and non-bank "FinTech" financial services providers. He also teaches an advanced financial technology seminar for law and business students at Columbia and Stanford Law Schools. During 2016-2018, Mr. Baker was a Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research interests and published papers at Harvard include work on the role of FinTech and employers in providing alternatives to payday loans and other types of short-term, small-dollar credit for low-income working Americans in the digital age.
Mr. Baker is a member of the board of directors and chair of the board credit committee at Accion Opportunity Fund, the nation's leading nonprofit small business lender, a member of the Academic Research Council at the Urban Institute and a Limited Partner Advisor at Nyca Partners, a leading fintech-focused venture capital firm. Mr. Baker has written for publications including the Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and the American Banker, speaks frequently at industry conferences and is widely quoted in the financial and technology press as an industry expert.
Mr. Baker is best known in business circles for driving strategic change in large financial services organizations and a long history of leading high-profile M&A and capital markets transactions. He has also built and managed effective and diverse teams in the areas of strategic planning, competitive intelligence, performance management, investor relations and venture capital. Mr. Baker served as the Managing Director and Head of Americas Corporate Development for MUFG Americas Holdings, the Americas banking operations of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG). In this role, Mr. Baker managed MUFG Americas’ acquisition and divestiture activities in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. Before taking that position, Mr. Baker was Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategy & Development for Union Bank NA, the U.S. commercial and retail banking operation of MUFG, where he led the company’s strategic planning, corporate development and performance management activities. Prior to joining Union Bank, Mr. Baker served as Executive Director of Corporate Development for TD Bank, N.A., where he was a member of the Managing Committee and had responsibility for leading Toronto-based TD Bank Financial Group’s acquisition activities in the U.S. market, and Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategy & Development at Washington Mutual, Inc. where, at various times, he served on the Executive Committee and had responsibility for acquisitions & divestitures, strategic planning, investor relations, venture capital investing and competitive intelligence.
Prior to his executive roles, Baker was a partner with the international law firms Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and Morrison & Foerster LLP, where he represented financial services, technology, corporate and investment banking clients in corporate and board governance matters, mergers and acquisitions, public and private securities offerings, securitizations and compliance issues and was recognized as the leading financial services M&A and securities attorney on the West Coast. His law clients included, among others, BankAmerica Corp., Transamerica Corp., Intel, Montgomery Securities, Hewlett-Packard, First Nationwide Financial, Washington Mutual Inc., Global Center, Nomura Securities, Lehman Brothers, Visa International, CIBC and Security Pacific Corp.
Partner, King & Spalding
A partner in the firm’s Government Advocacy and Public Policy group, J.C. helps companies and trade associations navigate legal, political and regulatory issues commonly associated with doing business in Europe and the United States. He is recognized by clients for his strong, bipartisan relationships with Members of Congress, State Attorneys General, congressional staff and senior government officials across key regulatory and executive branch agencies. He is trusted for his ability to rapidly synthesize complex information and communicate its strategic implications to policymakers and senior institutional stakeholders as well as his candid evaluation of options and potential for success.
As former counsel to the Senate Banking Committee, J.C has developed a deep expertise in financial services, fintech, and emerging technology policy. He has a proven track record of influencing federal legislation, regulatory frameworks, and agency rulemaking impacting digital assets, banking, payments, and technology platforms. J.C. regularly interfaces with financial regulators on a wide array of policy and institution-specific issues, and as co-chair of the firm’s State Attorneys General practice, delivers results on high-impact legal work at the intersection of law, policy and regulation.
J.C. is skilled in developing and executing comprehensive advocacy strategies, shaping legislative language, and positioning clients to successfully navigate complex and evolving policy environments at the federal, state and international levels. As President of the Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum, he has briefed policymakers throughout Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Indo-Pacific. JC also advises international clients seeking to invest, expand, or operate in the United States.
President George W. Bush appointed J.C. to a six-year term as U.S. representative to the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Mayor Muriel Bowser also appointed J.C. to the District of Columbia; Board of Elections, in which capacity he also served on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Standards Board. He is currently chairman of the Board of Visitors of The Catholic University Columbus School of Law and President of the Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum, where he is a regular speaker on cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence and critical minerals.
Earlier in his career, J.C. established the Boggs Scholarship for Public Service at the University of Delaware in honor of his grandfather and namesake, former U.S. Congressman, Senator and Governor of Delaware, J. Caleb Boggs. He has also served on numerous corporate and non-profit boards, including Jobs for Delaware Graduates (Chairman); The Reserve Trust Company (Vice Chairman), Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship Network (Secretary), Republican National Lawyers Association (President), Kimball Union Academy (Chairman of the Committee on Trustees), and AAA Mid-Atlantic.
J.C. enjoys open-water swimming and is member of U.S. Masters Swimming and the historic Serpentine Swimming Club situated in London's Hyde Park. He has competed in swimming events across all 50 states, ten Canadian provinces and around the world.
Retired, Winston & Strawn LLP
Jerry Loeser is of counsel in the Chicago office of Winston & Strawn, and his practice focuses on banking regulation. He has extensive experience in counseling financial services clients on, among other things, bank acquisitions, privacy, financial modernization, the USA PATRIOT Act, Basel II and III, lending limits, capital, trust, affiliate transactions, and Federal Reserve, OCC, FDIC, and CFPB regulations.
Prior to working at large corporate law firms, Jerry was chief regulatory and compliance counsel for Comerica Bank, where he also served as senior vice president and deputy general counsel and as general counsel of its retail bank division. Before that, he served as chief regulatory in-house counsel at Wells Fargo & Co. Jerry began his legal career advising the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C.
Partner, Norton Rose Fulbright
Steven Lofchie advises financial institutions on regulatory issues and financial instruments.
In his regulatory practice, Steven counsels clients on securities laws, the CEA, and related bankruptcy issues. His transactional practice focuses on securities credit and derivative transactions.
Steven is the founder and manager of an acclaimed legal website (now renamed Fried Frank Regulatory Intelligence) that has been endorsed by former chairpersons of both the SEC and CFTC. Subscribers to the website include government regulators and major buy- and sell-side firms.
Chambers USA has ranked Steven in Band 1 for eight years running, for both financial services regulation and derivatives. He is the only lawyer in the country to be top-ranked in both of those categories. Steven was also part of the team that was named 2020 Regulatory Team of the Year by IFLR Americas. The Best Lawyers in America recognized Steven as “Lawyer of the Year” for Administrative/Regulatory Law in New York in 2017, and U.S. News and World Report ranked him as the best regulatory lawyer in New York for 2014. In 2012, a derivatives transaction developed by Steven was cited as the best international structured product of the year by International Financial Law Review.
U.S. Senate, Wyoming
Cynthia Lummis was sworn into the United States Senate on January 3, 2021, becoming the first woman to serve as United States Senator from the great State of Wyoming.
Born on a cattle ranch in Laramie County, Senator Lummis has spent her entire career fighting for Wyoming families, communities, businesses and values. From the halls of the Wyoming House to the halls of the U.S. House, her time in public service has always been focused on advocating for Wyoming’s future.
First elected to the U.S. House in 2008, Senator Lummis quickly earned her reputation as a no-nonsense conservative and principled policymaker. She was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group consisting of the most unflinching conservative Members of the House of Representatives. She fought throughout her tenure in Congress to rein in spending and reduce the federal deficit, working with the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and ultimately co-sponsoring several bipartisan budget proposals.
In the House of Representatives, Senator Lummis effectively elevated western issues, pushing through the first Interior and Environment (EPA) Appropriations bill to pass the House in seven years under her chairmanship. This marked a significant milestone for the Western Caucus and the rural communities across the West they represent. She also worked to keep public lands open to the public and available for multiple use. She successfully passed the National Forest System Trails Stewardship Act in 2016, a bipartisan effort led by Cynthia to maintain over 157,000 miles of trails within our national forests.
Senator Lummis is a dedicated champion of Wyoming’s mineral and energy resources. In Washington, she fought off attacks from the environmental left while advocating for market opportunities both at home and abroad. She is the proud godmother of the ANSAC Wyoming, a commercial shipping vessel transporting trona from the U.S. to Southeast Asia and is the recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the Washington Coal Club.
Prior to serving in the House of Representatives, Senator Lummis spent eight years as Wyoming State Treasurer and 14 years as a member of the Wyoming State House and Senate. She also worked as general counsel to Wyoming Governor Jim Geringer and Director of the Office of State Lands and Investments, as well as a law clerk at the Wyoming Supreme Court.
After departing U.S. House of Representatives in 2016, Senator Lummis operated her family’s cattle ranches, and the Sweetgrass development in Laramie County, with her brother and sister. She is a three-time graduate of the University of Wyoming in animal science, biology and law. She and her late-husband, Al Wiederspahn, have one daughter, Annaliese, son-in-law Will Cole and grandsons Gus and Al.
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.
Senior Counsel & Director of the Center for Religious Schools, Alliance Defending Freedom
Gregory S. Baylor serves as senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, where he is the director of the Center for Religious Schools and senior counsel with the Center for Public Policy.
Since joining ADF in 2009, Baylor has focused on defending and advancing the religious freedom of faith-based educational institutions through advice, education, legislative and public advocacy, and representation in disputes. He has testified about religious liberty issues three times before congressional committees and numerous times before state legislative committees.
Greg serves on the board of directors of the International Alliance for Christian Education, the board of directors of the Association for Biblical Higher Education, the board of directors of the Association for Christian Schools International, the board of advisors of the Museum of the Bible, and advisory board of the Center for Academic Faithfulness and Flourishing.
Greg earned his Juris Doctor in 1990 from Duke University School of Law, where he graduated Order of the Coif, with high honors, and served on the editorial board of the Duke Law Journal. He received his bachelor’s degree in Honors English in 1987 from Dartmouth College. Following graduation from law school, he served as law clerk to the Hon. Jerry E. Smith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He practiced labor and employment law at two large international law firms for three years before joining the staff of Christian Legal Society’s Center for Law and Religious Freedom, where he served for 15 years prior to joining ADF. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife (a medical doctor) and two daughters.
President, Alabama Center for Law and Liberty
Matthew Clark graduated from the Liberty University School of Law in 2012 in the top 10% of his class, and he had served on both the law review editorial board and moot court board. From 2013-2016, Clark worked on the Alabama Supreme Court, beginning as a law clerk but being promoted to a staff attorney after one year. From 2016 until 2021, Clark worked at the Foundation for Moral Law in Montgomery, practicing constitutional law and focusing on religious liberty, the right to life, and promoting a strict interpretation of the United States Constitution according to the intent of its framers.
After joining ACLL in March of 2021, Clark sued the Biden administration over its OSHA vaccine mandate, took it all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and won. Clark also successfully got UAB Health to rescind its vaccine mandate for its employees, guaranteeing that their jobs would be safe so that they could continue to provide much-needed medical services to those in need. Clark also successfully led a campaign of multiple legal and public policy organizations to pressure the Montgomery City Council to vote down an LGBT ordinance that would punish Christians with religious objections to endorsing, encouraging, or enabling conduct that they find sinful. Through his amicus advocacy, Clark has also asked the United States Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade, protect the right of citizens to carry firearms for self-defense outside their homes, recognize the right of government employees to pray in public, and return Congress’s commerce power to the very limited role that the Framers intended for it to have.
Clark is admitted to the state bars of Alabama and Virginia. He is also admitted to the bars of the United States Supreme Court, the United States Courts of Appeals for the Second, Third, Sixth, Eleventh, and D.C. Circuits, and the United States District Courts for the Northern, Middle, and Southern Districts of Alabama. He is also a member of the Federalist Society’s Religious Liberty Executive Committee and an officer in his local Federalist Society Chapter. In 2021 and 2022, he was also a member of Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill’s Voter Fraud Task Force. He also occasionally lectures at Faulkner University on constitutional law.
Clark is married to his wife Laura, who is also an attorney, has an LLM in Alternative Dispute Resolution from the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, and volunteers her time to assist ACLL. They have one child and are members of Vaughn Park Church in Montgomery.
R. B. Price and Isabelle Wade & Paul C. Lyda Professor Emeritus of Law, University of Missouri School of Law
Carl H. Esbeck is R.B. Price Professor and Isabelle Wade & Paul C. Lyda Professor of Law emeritus at the University of Missouri. After attending Cornell University School of Law where he served as an editor on the Cornell Law Review, he held a judicial clerkship with the Honorable Howard C. Bratton, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in New Mexico.
Professor Esbeck publishes widely in the area of religious liberty and church-state relations. He is recognized as the progenitor of "Charitable Choice," an integral part of the 1996 Federal Welfare Reform Act, later made a part of the faith-based initiative and equal-treatment regulations under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In addition, he has taken the lead in recognizing that the modern Supreme Court has applied the Establishment Clause not as a personal right, but as a structural limit on the government's authority in disputes involving church governance. While on leave from 1999 to 2002, Professor Esbeck directed the Center for Law & Religious Freedom (CLRF) and later served as Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice. While directing the CLRF, Professor Esbeck was a central part of the congressional advocacy behind the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA). While at the Department of Justice one of his duties was to direct a task force to remove barriers to the equal-treatment of faith-based organizations applying for social service grants. He is the author of Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776 - 1833 (U. of MO Press, 2019).
Senior Counsel & Director of the Center for Religious Schools, Alliance Defending Freedom
Gregory S. Baylor serves as senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, where he is the director of the Center for Religious Schools and senior counsel with the Center for Public Policy.
Since joining ADF in 2009, Baylor has focused on defending and advancing the religious freedom of faith-based educational institutions through advice, education, legislative and public advocacy, and representation in disputes. He has testified about religious liberty issues three times before congressional committees and numerous times before state legislative committees.
Greg serves on the board of directors of the International Alliance for Christian Education, the board of directors of the Association for Biblical Higher Education, the board of directors of the Association for Christian Schools International, the board of advisors of the Museum of the Bible, and advisory board of the Center for Academic Faithfulness and Flourishing.
Greg earned his Juris Doctor in 1990 from Duke University School of Law, where he graduated Order of the Coif, with high honors, and served on the editorial board of the Duke Law Journal. He received his bachelor’s degree in Honors English in 1987 from Dartmouth College. Following graduation from law school, he served as law clerk to the Hon. Jerry E. Smith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He practiced labor and employment law at two large international law firms for three years before joining the staff of Christian Legal Society’s Center for Law and Religious Freedom, where he served for 15 years prior to joining ADF. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife (a medical doctor) and two daughters.
President, Alabama Center for Law and Liberty
Matthew Clark graduated from the Liberty University School of Law in 2012 in the top 10% of his class, and he had served on both the law review editorial board and moot court board. From 2013-2016, Clark worked on the Alabama Supreme Court, beginning as a law clerk but being promoted to a staff attorney after one year. From 2016 until 2021, Clark worked at the Foundation for Moral Law in Montgomery, practicing constitutional law and focusing on religious liberty, the right to life, and promoting a strict interpretation of the United States Constitution according to the intent of its framers.
After joining ACLL in March of 2021, Clark sued the Biden administration over its OSHA vaccine mandate, took it all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and won. Clark also successfully got UAB Health to rescind its vaccine mandate for its employees, guaranteeing that their jobs would be safe so that they could continue to provide much-needed medical services to those in need. Clark also successfully led a campaign of multiple legal and public policy organizations to pressure the Montgomery City Council to vote down an LGBT ordinance that would punish Christians with religious objections to endorsing, encouraging, or enabling conduct that they find sinful. Through his amicus advocacy, Clark has also asked the United States Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade, protect the right of citizens to carry firearms for self-defense outside their homes, recognize the right of government employees to pray in public, and return Congress’s commerce power to the very limited role that the Framers intended for it to have.
Clark is admitted to the state bars of Alabama and Virginia. He is also admitted to the bars of the United States Supreme Court, the United States Courts of Appeals for the Second, Third, Sixth, Eleventh, and D.C. Circuits, and the United States District Courts for the Northern, Middle, and Southern Districts of Alabama. He is also a member of the Federalist Society’s Religious Liberty Executive Committee and an officer in his local Federalist Society Chapter. In 2021 and 2022, he was also a member of Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill’s Voter Fraud Task Force. He also occasionally lectures at Faulkner University on constitutional law.
Clark is married to his wife Laura, who is also an attorney, has an LLM in Alternative Dispute Resolution from the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, and volunteers her time to assist ACLL. They have one child and are members of Vaughn Park Church in Montgomery.
R. B. Price and Isabelle Wade & Paul C. Lyda Professor Emeritus of Law, University of Missouri School of Law
Carl H. Esbeck is R.B. Price Professor and Isabelle Wade & Paul C. Lyda Professor of Law emeritus at the University of Missouri. After attending Cornell University School of Law where he served as an editor on the Cornell Law Review, he held a judicial clerkship with the Honorable Howard C. Bratton, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in New Mexico.
Professor Esbeck publishes widely in the area of religious liberty and church-state relations. He is recognized as the progenitor of "Charitable Choice," an integral part of the 1996 Federal Welfare Reform Act, later made a part of the faith-based initiative and equal-treatment regulations under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In addition, he has taken the lead in recognizing that the modern Supreme Court has applied the Establishment Clause not as a personal right, but as a structural limit on the government's authority in disputes involving church governance. While on leave from 1999 to 2002, Professor Esbeck directed the Center for Law & Religious Freedom (CLRF) and later served as Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice. While directing the CLRF, Professor Esbeck was a central part of the congressional advocacy behind the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA). While at the Department of Justice one of his duties was to direct a task force to remove barriers to the equal-treatment of faith-based organizations applying for social service grants. He is the author of Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776 - 1833 (U. of MO Press, 2019).
Attorney General, Missouri
Andrew Bailey was appointed Attorney General for the State of Missouri on November 23rd, 2022.
Bailey earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia. After graduation, he joined the United States Army as an officer. He was deployed twice in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was awarded two Army Achievement Medals, an Army Commendation Medal, a Combat Action Badge, and two Bronze Star Medals for his service.
In 2009, he returned from deployment and enrolled at the University of Missouri School of Law.
Bailey joined the Missouri Governor’s Office as Deputy General Counsel in 2019 and has served as General Counsel since 2021. He has also served as a Missouri Assistant Attorney General, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney for the Warren County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, and as General Counsel for the Missouri Department of Corrections.
Bailey and his wife, Jessica, have four children.
Attorney General, Missouri
Andrew Bailey was appointed Attorney General for the State of Missouri on November 23rd, 2022.
Bailey earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia. After graduation, he joined the United States Army as an officer. He was deployed twice in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was awarded two Army Achievement Medals, an Army Commendation Medal, a Combat Action Badge, and two Bronze Star Medals for his service.
In 2009, he returned from deployment and enrolled at the University of Missouri School of Law.
Bailey joined the Missouri Governor’s Office as Deputy General Counsel in 2019 and has served as General Counsel since 2021. He has also served as a Missouri Assistant Attorney General, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney for the Warren County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, and as General Counsel for the Missouri Department of Corrections.
Bailey and his wife, Jessica, have four children.
Founder, TGH Litigation LLC
Before forming TGH Litigation, Andy Hirth served as Deputy General Counsel in the Missouri Attorney General's Office, where he represented the people of Missouri in many of the state's highest-profile cases. During his six and a half years with the AGO, Andy defended numerous Missouri statutes from constitutional challenge, including the Macks Creek Law and the Inter-District School Transfer Law; represented Missouri in a $1.14 billion contract dispute between 46 states and more than 30 major tobacco companies; got Missouri's natural resources damage suit over the Bridgeton Landfill fire remanded to state court; and challenged regulations imposed on Missouri farms and businesses by the federal government and the state of California.
Andy graduated cum laude from the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law in 2005, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Missouri Law Review and was inducted into the Order of the Coif. Andy founded and served as president of the University of Missouri-Columbia Student Chapter of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy. He received a Burton Award for Legal Achievement and the Judge Shepard Barclay Prize for the graduating law student "who has attained the highest standing in scholarship and moral leadership."
After law school, Andy clerked for the Hon. Nanette K. Laughrey, United States District Judge for the Western District of Missouri and spent three years in private practice at Jenner & Block LLP in Chicago, Illinois. As an associate in the firm's Commercial Litigation and Supreme Court and Appellate Practice Groups, Andy represented a national over-the-road trucking company in an EEOC enforcement action alleging a pattern and practice of sexual harassment; defended a national media company from defamation and tortious interference claims by a former radio personality; and challenged the death sentence of an inmate in Florida. In 2010, Andy returned to Missouri to work for Attorney General Chris Koster.
Andy has taught Constitutional Law as an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law. He holds a Juris Doctor and a Master's degree in English from the University of Missouri - Columbia.
Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, United States Department of Justice
Jesus A. Osete previously served as General Counsel to the Hon. John R. Ashcroft, Secretary of State of Missouri. Mr. Osete previously served as Deputy Solicitor General of Missouri and Deputy Attorney General for Special Litigation. He has presented oral argument in the U.S. Supreme Court. Before joining the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, Mr. Osete worked at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP in the Appellate and Supreme Court Group. He also clerked for the Hon. Bobby E. Shepherd of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and the Hon. Chief Justice Zel M. Fischer of the Supreme Court of Missouri. Mr. Osete received his J.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, where he served as Senior Executive Editor of the Washington University Law Review. Before law school, Mr. Osete worked for the late Senator John McCain in the United States Senate, and received an A.B. in political science and pre-law from the University of Arizona.
Mr. Osete serves as Trustee for the Supreme Court of Missouri Historical Society and served as Vice-Chair of the Missouri Bar Appellate Practice Committee. In 2018, he was one of approximately forty individuals in the United States selected to attend the Originalism Summer Seminar at the Georgetown University Law Center. In 2019, he was one of twelve young lawyers in Missouri selected to participate in the MissouriBar’s Leadership Academy.
Partner and Co-Chair, Appellate and Supreme Court Group, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner
Barbara is a co-chair of the Appellate and Supreme Court Group at BCLP. She is an experienced trial and appellate litigator who counsels clients through their most sensitive and challenging litigation issues, and she routinely handles politically sensitive matters and aggressively advocates for early and complete victory. Her diverse client base—she has represented politicians, fortune 500 companies, foreign sovereigns, and boards of directors—share one thing in common: They need a strong advocate, and they want to win.
Barbara practices—and wins—at all levels of the federal and state courts. Before the United States Supreme Court, Barbara has represented clients filing petitions for certiorari, opposing certiorari, and she has filed merits briefs. She has also represented amici at the certiorari and merits stages.
At the trial court level, she routinely briefs and argues complex dispositive motions in anticipation of defending those victories on appeal. She also has first chair trial experience. On complex trial teams, she has acted as appellate preservation counsel. An experienced appellate advocate, Barbara has notched victories in state and federal appellate courts, including at the United States Supreme Court.
Because some of her clients prefer confidential ADR to public civil litigation, Barbara also has alternative dispute resolution experience, including winning a major arbitration victory for a petitioner-client and successfully mediating a case that (before her involvement) had previously been pending in the court system for more than a decade.
As an example of Barbara’s value-add, she recently crafted a novel standing argument that she briefed and won on a motion to dismiss a putative class action challenging a $198 million transaction in federal court. By winning on a motion to dismiss, she saved her client the time and cost of discovery. Barbara then successfully defended the victory on appeal—after briefing, the petitioner agreed to voluntarily dismiss the appeal and the case ended.
Among other issues, she has litigated questions of constitutional law, statutory construction, administrative law, securities law, labor and employment, white collar crime, ERISA, bankruptcy, and sovereign debt.
Before joining BCLP, Barbara served as a law clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. on the United States Supreme Court and Judge Thomas B. Griffith on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She also previously practiced at a Supreme Court litigation boutique, where she represented clients before the United States Supreme Court and various federal courts of appeal.
In her free time, Barbara teaches a class on the United States Supreme Court as an adjunct law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She also serves on the Steering Committee for the St. Louis Chapter of the Federalist Society.
Barbara earned her J.D. from Stanford Law School, where she was the Editor-in-Chief of the Stanford Journal of Law, Business, and Finance, the President of the Federalist Society, and a member of the law school’s student government. While in law school, Barbara was a moot court semi-finalist and a teaching assistant at Stanford Law School and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
Prior to attending law school, Barbara spent two years in the White House Counsel’s Office working for President George W. Bush. She graduated magna cum laude and with honors, from Wake Forest University, with a B.A. in economics and political science.
Working in Texas State Government
Austin Lawyers Chapter, Texas Young Lawyers Chapter
Austin, TXCryptocurrency Regulation in the Aftermath of FTX
Todd H. Baker, J. C. Boggs, Julius L. Loeser, Steven Lofchie, Cynthia Lummis, Alex J. Pollock
The collapse of FTX has intensified the debate about how cryptocurrencies should be regulated, including...
Cryptocurrency Regulation in the Aftermath of FTX
Todd H. Baker, J. C. Boggs, Julius L. Loeser, Steven Lofchie, Cynthia Lummis, Alex J. Pollock
The collapse of FTX has intensified the debate about how cryptocurrencies should be regulated, including...
Cryptocurrency Regulation in the Aftermath of FTX
TeleforumThe Respect for Marriage Act & Religious Liberty: At Odds or Unaffected?
Gregory Baylor, Matt Clark, Carl H. Esbeck
In December 2022, Congress passed and President Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA)....
The Respect for Marriage Act & Religious Liberty: At Odds or Unaffected?
Gregory Baylor, Matt Clark, Carl H. Esbeck
In December 2022, Congress passed and President Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA)....
The Respect for Marriage Act & Religious Liberty: At Odds or Unaffected?
TeleforumKeynote Address: "Why We Are Fighting to Protect Free Speech in Missouri v. Biden"
Andrew Bailey
Featuring: The Honorable Andrew Bailey, Attorney General, State of Missouri Attorney General Bailey will offer...
Keynote Address: "Why We Are Fighting to Protect Free Speech in Missouri v. Biden"
Andrew Bailey
Featuring: The Honorable Andrew Bailey, Attorney General, State of Missouri Attorney General Bailey will offer...
Panel 3: Post-Dobbs Abortion Legislation in Missouri
J. Andrew Hirth, Jesus A. Osete, Barbara Smith Tyson
The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs returned the abortion question–whether and how to regulate abortion...