Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, University of Southern California
Elizabeth Garrett was appointed provost and senior vice president for academic affairs on October 28, 2010. As the university’s second-ranking officer, she oversees the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences as well as the Keck School of Medicine of USC and 16 other professional schools, in addition to the divisions of student affairs, libraries, information technology services, research, student religious life and enrollment services. She also sits on the governing board of the USC hospitals.
As Provost, Garrett has directed substantial new efforts to hire transformative faculty members, including initiatives to recruit faculty in neuroscience, the humanities, and the social sciences, with the goal of catalyzing targeted fields of scholarship and invigorating USC’s research environment. She has also accelerated the recruitment of Provost Professors and created recruitment of the Provost’s Post-Doctoral Scholars Program in the Humanities. From 2006 to 2011 she led USC’s successful reaccreditation through the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. Garrett has also been instrumental in the integration of the new Keck Hospitals of USC and the faculty practice plans into the university, which created an academic medical center on the Health Sciences Campus. Garrett is the Frances R. and John J. Duggan Professor in the USC Gould School of Law. In addition to this primary faculty appointment, she has joint appointments in USC Dornsife College and the School of Policy, Planning, and Development, as well as a courtesy appointment in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
She serves on the Board of Directors of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at USC and, in August 2009, was appointed one of five commissioners on the California Fair Political Practices Commission, the state’s independent political oversight agency. Then-president George W. Bush appointed her to serve on the nine-member bipartisan Tax Reform Panel in 2005. She previously served as director of the USC-Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics.
Garrett previously served as USC’s vice president for academic planning and budget, a position she had held since June 2006.
Garrett’s primary scholarly interests are legislative process, direct democracy, the federal budget process, democratic institutions, statutory interpretation, administrative law and tax policy. The author of more than 50 articles, book chapters and essays, she is co-author of the fourth edition of the leading casebook on legislation and statutory interpretation, Cases and Materials on Legislation: Statutes and the Creation of Public Policy, and co-editor of Statutory Interpretation Stories and Fiscal Challenges: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Budget Policy.
Before joining the faculty of USC, she was a professor of law at the University of Chicago, where she also served as deputy dean for academic affairs, and she has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, the University of Virginia Law School, Central European University in Budapest, and the Interdisciplinary Center Law School in Israel. Before entering academics, she clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court, and she served as legal counsel and legislative director for Senator David L. Boren (D-Okla.). She received her B.A. in History with special distinction from the University of Oklahoma and her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.
Garrett is a fellow of the American Law Institute, a life fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and a member of the Pacific Council for International Policy. In 2011 she was elected a Harold Lasswell Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She also serves on the editorial board of Election Law Journal, and is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the United States 2011.
Managing Attorney of the Washington Office, Institute for Justice
William R. Maurer is the Managing Attorney of the Washington state office of the Institute for Justice, which engages in litigation in the areas of economic liberty, private property rights, educational choice, & freedom of speech.
Maurer is an advocate against the criminalization of poverty and the governmental use of the criminal and civil enforcement systems to raise revenue. He was lead counsel in a class action challenging the use of tickets to raise revenue in the city of Pagedale, Missouri. The suit resulted in a federal consent decree that reformed the city’s ticketing and municipal court system. He regularly speaks, teaches, and writes about the abuse of fines and fees in the criminal justice system. He was a participant in summits on taxation by citation put on by the White House and Department of Justice during the Obama Administration. His work on the issue includes serving as an advisory board member of the Fines and Fees Justice Center.
In addition to his work on criminal and civil justice reform, Maurer is a First Amendment litigator. In 2011, he successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that Arizona’s punitive campaign financing regime was unconstitutional. Before the Washington Supreme Court, he successfully argued against efforts to classify radio commentary as a contribution under the state’s campaign finance law.
His cases and advocacy have been covered in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and other major media outlets.
Maurer was named a “Washington Superlawyer” by Washington Law & Politics Magazine for several years. He is a chapter author in numerous legal reference works and has written several articles for law reviews and legal publications across the country.
Prior to joining IJ-WA, Maurer clerked for Washington Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders and then practiced law at Perkins Coie LLP. Maurer received his law degree in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he was an editor of the Wisconsin Law Review. He received his BA from Bard College in 1989.
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