Associate, Baker & Hostetler LLP
Renee Knudsen is an associate at Baker & Hostetler LLP. She is a member of the Appellate and Major Motions practice group, where she works on high-stakes constitutional and administrative law issues, among other subjects. She has experience working on appeals in nearly every federal court of appeals and regularly drafts briefs to every level of the federal judiciary.
Before joining BakerHostetler, Renee clerked for Judge Leslie Southwick on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for Judge Claude Hilton on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Renee graduated summa cum laude from Regent University School of Law, where she served as a Managing Editor for law review and was an award-winning moot court advocate.
Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School
Christopher J. Walker is a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining Michigan law faculty in 2022, he spent a decade teaching at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. He previously clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court, worked on the Civil Appellate Staff at the U.S. Department of Justice, and served on the Senate Judiciary Committee staff for the Gorsuch Supreme Court confirmation. Professor Walker’s research focuses on administrative law, regulation, and law and policy at the agency level. Outside the law school, he chaired the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice in 2020-21 and served as one of forty Public Members of the Administrative Conference of the United States from 2016-2022, and he continues to serve in both organizations in various capacities. He also works of counsel at the U.S. Chamber Litigation Center. In 2022, he received the Federalist Society’s Joseph Story Award.
Senior Vice President for Legal Studies, Cato Institute
Clark Neily is senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute. His areas of interest include constitutional law, overcriminalization, civil forfeiture, police accountability, and gun rights. Neily is the author of Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and National Review Online, as well as various law reviews, including the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, George Mason Law Review, Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, NYU Journal of Law and Liberty, and Texas Review of Law and Politics. Neily is a frequent guest speaker and lecturer for the Federalist Society, Institute for Humane Studies, and American Constitution Society.
Before joining Cato in 2017, Neily was a senior attorney and constitutional litigator at the Institute for Justice and director of the Institute’s Center for Judicial Engagement. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law, where he teaches constitutional litigation and public-interest law.
Neily served as co-counsel in District of Columbia v. Heller, the historic case in which the Supreme Court held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun for self-defense.
Neily began his legal career as a law clerk to Judge Royce Lamberth on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. After that he spent four years in the trial department of the Dallas-based firm Thompson & Knight. Neily received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Texas, where he was Chief Articles Editor of the Texas Law Review.
Associate Dean for Faculty and Intellectual Life, Ohio State University Moritz College of Law
Ric Simmons is the Associate Dean for Faculty and Intellectual Life and the Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law at Moritz. He teaches Evidence, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and Computer Crime and Surveillance.
An accomplished legal scholar, Professor Simmons’ research focuses on the intersection of the Fourth Amendment and new technology. He has written about the use of big data in the criminal justice system, searches of cell phones and other electronic devices, and hyper-intrusive surveillance devices. He has also written about the privatization of the criminal justice system and the role of the prosecutor. Professor Simmons is the author of Smart Surveillance: How to Interpret the Fourth Amendment in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge Press 2019), and Private Criminal Justice: How Private Parties are Enforcing Criminal Law and Transforming Our Justice System (2023), and he has co-authored four casebooks and two hornbooks. His scholarship has also appeared in leading legal journals, including the Duke Law Journal, the Boston University Law Review, and the George Washington Law Review.
Before coming to Moritz, Simmons was an acting assistant professor at New York University School of Law. Before that, he clerked for the Honorable Laughlin E. Waters of the Central District of California and then served for four years as an assistant district attorney for New York County.
Professor Simmons is a national expert on the grand jury and served on the Ohio Supreme Court’s Grand Jury Task Force. He has also been a recipient of the Ohio State University Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching and has won the Morgan E. Shipman Outstanding Professor Award six times.
Happy Hour for Lawyers and Law Students
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Renee M. Knudsen
In Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association v. Morton,[1] the Ohio Supreme Court sanctioned an attorney for...
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