Senior Fellow in Constitutional Jurisprudence, Independence Institute
Professor Robert G. Natelson is a constitutional scholar and author.
Rob’s constitutional scholarship has been cited repeatedly by justices and parties at the U.S. Supreme Court—as well as by federal appeals courts, and at least 18 state supreme courts.
Rob’s research into the Constitution’s original meaning has carried him to libraries throughout the United States and in Britain, including four months at Oxford University. His books and articles span many different parts of the Constitution, including groundbreaking studies of the Necessary and Proper Clause, the Indian Commerce Clause, federalism, Founding-Era interpretation, regulation of elections, and the amendment process of Article V. He created the first-ever online bibliography for 18th century materials used in constitutional research. He is a contributing author to the Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court of the United States (on Magna Carta). He contributed eight essays to the third edition of the Heritage Guide to the Constitution: five on the amendment procedure and one each on the Guarantee Clause, the Postal Clause, and the Recess Appointments Clause.
U.S. Supreme Court justices have relied explicitly on Rob’s research in 41 citations in 13 separate cases.
Legal Director, The Center for the Rights of Abused Children
Tim Keller is a lawyer who works to ensure all abused and abandoned children are safe and have access to their constitutionally guaranteed rights.
As senior vice president and legal director at the Center for the Rights of Abused Children, Tim’s public interest legal work seeks to defend the constitutional rights of children to be safe from abuse, to prompt timely placement with permanent parents, and to assure a child’s representation by legal counsel. In addition to constitutional litigation, Tim oversees the lawyers in the Center for the Rights of Abused Children’s one-of-a-kind pro bono Children’s Law Clinic and guides its policy initiatives.
When he and his wife, Lisa, hosted a teenage exchange student from Brazil several years ago, they realized how much they enjoyed helping a child thrive. The two felt called to help more kids. Over the following years, Tim and Lisa would become foster parents. Today, they enjoy offering respite care for children in foster care.
Intensely motivated by his time fostering children who’d been abused and neglected, Tim sees his work to ensure children have a constitutional right to counsel as a matter of life and death. As such, he’s particularly proud that in 2021 the Center for the Rights of Abused Children secured the rights of all children in Arizona’s foster system to be represented by legal counsel.
Before joining the Center for the Rights of Abused Children, Tim worked for nearly 20 years at the Institute for Justice. He served as lead counsel in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, a U.S. Supreme Court victory that protected Arizona’s pioneering school scholarship program. Tim also led the team that secured a U.S. Supreme Court victory in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, which prevents states from discriminating against religious families and schools in educational choice programs. He has also litigated economic liberty and property rights cases in state and federal courts.
Tim earned his bachelor’s and law degrees from Arizona State University. He clerked for Robert D. Myers, at the time the presiding judge of the Maricopa County Superior Court, and for Ann A. Scott Timmer on the Arizona Court of Appeals.
Tim and Lisa live in Chandler, Ariz., with their four sons, Daniel, Benjamin, Ethan and Noah, and a miniature schnauzer named Gus who has more than 12,000 Instagram followers. The Kellers have traveled to 49 of the 50 United States, and are always looking for recommendations for new card or board games for family game nights.
Vice President, Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law, Advancing American Freedom
John G. Malcolm oversees Advancing American Freedom’s work to increase understanding of the Constitution and the rule of law as Vice President of the organization’s Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law. Malcolm brings to the challenge a wealth of legal expertise and experience in both the public and private sectors.
Prior to joining Advancing American Freedom in 2025, Malcolm was the Vice President of the Institute for Constitutional Government and the Director of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation. Prior to joining Heritage in 2012, Malcolm was general counsel at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, as well as a distinguished practitioner in residence at Pepperdine Law School. From 2004 to 2009, Malcolm was executive vice president and director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association.
Malcolm served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division from 2001 to 2004, where he oversaw sections on computer crime and intellectual property, domestic security, child exploitation and obscenity, and special investigations. Immediately prior to that, he was a founding partner in the Atlanta law firm of Malcolm & Schroeder, LLP.
From 1990 to 1997, Malcolm was an assistant U.S. attorney in Atlanta, assigned to the fraud and public corruption section, and also an associate independent counsel, investigating fraud and abuse in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was honored with the Director’s Award for Superior Performance for his work in connection with the successful prosecution of Walter Leroy Moody Jr., who assassinated an 11th Circuit judge and the head of the Savannah chapter of the NAACP.
A graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia College, Malcolm began his career as a law clerk to a federal district court judge and a federal appellate court judge, and as an associate at the Atlanta-based law firm of Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan (new Eversheds Sutherland).
Malcolm, who resides in Washington, D.C., serves on the Board of Trustees of the Washington National Opera and is a Senate-confirmed member of the Board of Directors of the Legal Services Corporation, the largest funder of civil legal aid in the United States.
Deputy District Attorney, Philadelphia District Attorney's Office
Ronald Eisenberg heads the Law Division of the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office. The 60 lawyers in the division handle appeals, habeas corpus and civil litigation, and legislative matters. Mr. Eisenberg has appeared at all levels of the state and federal court system, and has argued several cases in the United States Supreme Court.
Mr. Eisenberg is a member of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Investigating Grand Jury Task Force and the Advisory Committee for the Pennsylvania Suggested Standard Criminal Jury Instructions. He has represented his office on the Pennsylvania Advisory Committee on Wrongful Convictions, was an adjunct professor at Temple University School of Law, teaching legal writing and research, and has served on the Pennsylvania Criminal Rules and Appellate Rules Committees. He is a past president and current board member of the Association of Government Attorneys in Capital Litigation, a national organization of capital prosecutors.
Mr. Eisenberg received his bachelor's degree from Haverford College in 1978 and his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1981.
J.D., University of Pennsylvania
B.A., Haverford College
Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; Co-Director, Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State
Adam J. White is the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State.
Mr. White practiced constitutional and administrative law, particularly in the regulation of energy and financial markets. He started his legal career as a law clerk for Judge David B. Sentelle at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
Mr. White has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Affairs, Commentary, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and Notre Dame Law Review, among other publications. He is a regular contributor to the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice and Comment blog, and for many years, he was one of the Weekly Standard’s lead writers on constitutional law and the Supreme Court.
Mr. White has testified often before Congress, including before the Senate’s Committees on the Judiciary; Commerce, Science, and Transportation; and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and before the House’s Judiciary and Financial Services Committees. In 2018, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary called him to testify in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings to advise senators on Kavanaugh’s approach to administrative law.
In 2021, he served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, where he criticized “Court packing” and other efforts to restructure the Supreme Court. In 2017, he was appointed to serve on the Administrative Conference of the United States. He also serves on the leadership council for the American Bar Association’s Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section, which he will chair in 2023–24. Before joining AEI, he was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Mr. White has a JD from Harvard Law School and a bachelor of business administration from the College of Business at the University of Iowa.
United States Senator, Ohio
JD Vance is a United States Senator for the great state of Ohio. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022 and sworn into office on January 3rd, 2023.
JD was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, a once flourishing American manufacturing town where Ohioans could live content, middle-class lives on single incomes. Over time, many of those good jobs disappeared, and JD’s family suffered the effects along with many others.
Turbulence was common at home and at school. His grandmother, called Mamaw, was his saving grace. Her tough love and discipline kept him on the straight and narrow. A “blue dog” Democrat, she owned 19 handguns and nurtured a deep Christian faith in herself and her family. She died in 2005, shortly after JD enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.
JD went on to serve our nation in the Iraq War, then graduated from The Ohio State University and Yale Law School. He wrote a bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, which was turned into a Netflix movie. He also started a business dedicated to growing jobs and opportunity in the American heartland.
Professor Emeritus of Law, Indiana University; Co-Author, The Law of Lawyering
After graduating with honors from Harvard College in 1966, and from Rutgers Law School with highest honors in 1969, W. William Hodes began practice in a small civil rights and personal injury firm in New Orleans, where he had lived as a child. During the next eight years, he worked in Newark, New Jersey, first for the Kenneth Gibson administration, and then as senior staff attorney for the Education Law Center, a public interest law firm funded by the Ford Foundation.
In 1979, Hodes returned to the legal academy, first as a Bigelow Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, and then as a Professor of Law at the Indiana University School of Law in Indianapolis. For the next twenty years, Professor Hodes taught in the areas of Civil Procedure, Constitutonal Law, Federal Courts, Administrative Law, and Professional Responsibility. He gained a national reputation as a scholar, consultant, and expert witness in the areas of Legal Ethics and Professional Responsbility, as they were then known.
Beginning in 1985 however, those subjects began to be known as "The Law of Lawyering," after a book of that name was published, co-authored by Professor Hodes and Professor Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr., who had served as the Reporter to the Kutak Commission that developed the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. The treatise, which is now in its fourth edition and updated twice a year by Hodes and new co-author Peter R. Jarvis of Portland, Oregon, has become a mainstay resource for both the practicing bar and the academic community, and is often cited in court and ethics committee opinions.
While in the academy, Professor Hodes took two unusual sabbatical leaves. In the Spring of 1989, Hodes, who had spent his junior high school years in Beijing and is still fluent in Chinese, was a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at the China University of Politics and Law, teaching a course in American Civil Procedure and conducting research into Chinese People's Mediation. (The course was suspended in April, when the events leading to the June 4th Tiananmen Massacre began to unfold, and Professor Hodes began to accompany his students on protest marches.)
During the October 1996 Term of the United States Supreme Court, Professor Hodes served as law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had been his Civil Procedure and Conflicts of Law professor some thirty years earlier, during her Rutgers days. According to knowledgeable sources, Hodes was the oldest person to have served as a law clerk since the early 19th Century.
In 1999, W. William Hodes retired from law teaching (at age 56) in order to establish the William Hodes Professional Corporation, which was later renamed The William Hodes Law Firm; he became Professor Emeritus of Law at Indiana University as the new century began. Through this solo practice, Hodes can now devote full time to providing representation, consultation, expert testimony, legal opinions, and other counsel and assistance to lawyers in the areas of The Law of Lawyering, and Constitutional, Appellate, Supreme Court, and other complex litigation.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
Eric Murphy has been a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit since March 2019. He previously served as the ninth State Solicitor of Ohio. In that role, Eric briefed and argued appellate cases on behalf of Ohio and its state agencies and officers in the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and the Ohio Supreme Court. Before his appointment as State Solicitor, Eric practiced appellate litigation at Jones Day. After graduation from law school, he served as a law clerk for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States, and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He received his law degree from the University of Chicago and his undergraduate degree from Miami University.
Tazewell Taylor Professor of Law and William H. Cabell Research Professor, William & Mary Law School
Jonathan H. Adler joined the William & Mary law faculty as the Tazwell Taylor Professor of Law and William H. Cabell Research Professor in 2025. Prior to joining the faculty, he was the inaugural Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law and the founding Director of the Coleman P. Burke Center for Environmental Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
Professor Adler is the author or editor of seven books, including Climate Liberalism: Perspectives on Liberty, Property and Pollution (Palgrave, 2023), Marijuana Federalism: Uncle Sam and Mary Jane (Brookings Institution Press, 2020), Business and the Roberts Court (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Rebuilding the Ark: New Perspectives on Endangered Species Act Reform (AEI Press, 2011).
His articles have appeared in publications ranging from the Harvard Environmental Law Review and Yale Journal on Regulation to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post. He has testified before Congress a dozen times, and his work has been cited in the U.S. Supreme Court. A 2024 study identified Professor Adler as the seventh most cited legal academic in administrative and environmental law from 2019 to 2023.
Professor Adler is a contributing editor to Civitas Outlook and a regular contributor to the popular legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy. A regular commentator on constitutional and regulatory issues, he has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, ranging from the PBS Newshour and National Public Radio to the Fox News Channel and Entertainment Tonight.
Professor Adler is a senior fellow at the Property & Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana. In 2018, Professor Adler was elected to membership in the American Law Institute and helped co-found the organization Checks and Balances. In 2024, Professor Adler was appointed a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States.
Professor Adler clerked for the Honorable David B. Sentelle on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
President, Americas and Global Chief Legal Officer, Merkle Science
Mary Beth Buchanan is currently President, Americas and Global Chief Legal Officer at Merkle Science. She was former General Counsel for Kraken Cryptocurrency Exchange. She was a partner at Bryan Cave LLP in the firm’s White Collar Defense and Investigations and Securities Litigation and Enforcement Client Service Groups. She concentrated her practice on white collar criminal defense, SEC and FINRA enforcement matters, corporate and accounting fraud, internal investigations, corporate compliance, foreign corrupt practices violations, Congressional investigations and complex civil litigation.
Ms. Buchanan served as the United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania from September 2001 to November 2009, having been appointed by President George W. Bush. She is the only woman in Pennsylvania's history to be presidentially appointed to this position. As the United States Attorney, Ms. Buchanan oversaw the prosecution of more than 5,000 cases, including corporate and securities fraud, bank fraud, foreign corrupt practices, false claims, money laundering, health care fraud, public corruption and a broad range of violent crimes. Prior to that time, Ms. Buchanan spent more than 13 years as an Assistant United States Attorney litigating criminal, civil and appellate cases.
During her tenure as the United States Attorney, Ms. Buchanan also held several posts at the DOJ, including serving as the director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, acting director of the DOJ’s Office on Violence Against Women and chair of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee. Ms. Buchanan also served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission's Organizational Guidelines Advisory Committee, which made recommendations to the Commission for amendments to the Sentencing Guidelines for Business Organizations.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
Eric Murphy has been a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit since March 2019. He previously served as the ninth State Solicitor of Ohio. In that role, Eric briefed and argued appellate cases on behalf of Ohio and its state agencies and officers in the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and the Ohio Supreme Court. Before his appointment as State Solicitor, Eric practiced appellate litigation at Jones Day. After graduation from law school, he served as a law clerk for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States, and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He received his law degree from the University of Chicago and his undergraduate degree from Miami University.
Why Nineteenth Century Bans on “Sectarian” Aid Are Facially Unconstitutional: New Evidence on Plain Meaning
Robert G. Natelson
Note from the Editor: This article presents original research on the nineteenth century meaning of...
Ethics CLE Teleforum 2017
Recent Developments Impacting the Ethical Practice of Law
TeleforumSupreme Court Review and Preview
Columbus, OhioThe Federalist Paper, Summer 2017
The Federalist Society has been bringing you expert commentary on and analysis of the just-concluded...
Federal Special Education Law and State School Choice Programs
Timothy Keller, Nat Malkus
Note from the Editor: In this article, Nat Malkus and Tim Keller outline the federal...
Morally Innocent, Legally Guilty: The Case for Mens Rea Reform
John G. Malcolm
Note from the Editor: This article discusses the concept of mens rea, argues that too...
Jenkins v. Hutton & Virginia v. LeBlanc - Post-Decision SCOTUScast
Ronald Eisenberg
In June, the Supreme Court issued per curiam opinions in two habeas cases: Jenkins v....
Has Federalism Gone to Pot?
Burlington, VermontUnited States Supreme Court Review and Preview
Cincinnati, OhioHillbilly Elegy - Podcast
Adam White, JD Vance
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class...