Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law and Director, Classical Liberal Institute, New York University School of Law; Director, Classical Liberal Institute, Civitas Institute University of Texas at Austin
Richard A. Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, at New York University, a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas Austin, and a senior Lecturer, the University of Chicago. He received an LL.D., h.c . from the University of Ghent, 2003 , and an LLD h.c . from the University of Siegen in 2018 and the Bradley Prize in 2011. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985. He has edited both the Journal of Legal Studies (1981-1991) and the Journal of Law and Economics (1991-2001). He is also a founder and director of the Classical Liberal Institute at NYU Law School. His most recent book is The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (2014). His other books include Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain ( 1985); Bargaining with the State (1993); Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995); Principles for a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty and the Common Good (1998); Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Theory of Classical Liberalism (2003); Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration and the Rule of Law (2011), and most recently, The Myth of Birthright citizenship—and Beyond (2026). He has taught courses in , administrative law, antitrust, constitutional, contracts, environmental law, land use planning; real property, torts and water law. He has written and spoken extensively on a wide range of topics, and is writes a regular column for Defining Ideas.
Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law
Erwin Chemerinsky became the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law on July 1, 2017, when he joined the faculty as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law.
Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law, with a joint appointment in Political Science. Before that he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2008, and from 1983-2004 was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, including as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. He also has taught at DePaul College of Law and UCLA Law School.
He is the author of eleven books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. His most recent books are, We the People: A Progressive Reading of the Constitution for the Twenty-First Century (Picador Macmillan) published in November 2018, and two books published by Yale University Press in 2017, Closing the Courthouse Doors: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable and Free Speech on Campus (with Howard Gillman).
He also is the author of more than 200 law review articles. He writes a regular column for the Sacramento Bee, monthly columns for the ABA Journal and the Daily Journal, and frequent op-eds in newspapers across the country. He frequently argues appellate cases, including in the United States Supreme Court.
In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017, National Jurist magazine again named Dean Chemerinsky as the most influential person in legal education in the United States.
Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law, Emeritus, Cornell Law School
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Judge O’Scannlain was appointed United States Circuit Judge for the Ninth Circuit by President Reagan on September 26, 1986. He received a J.D. degree in 1963 from Harvard Law School and a B.A. in 1957 from St. John’s University. He also earned the LL.M. (Judicial Process) degree at University of Virginia Law School in 1992. He was awarded the LL.D. (honoris causa) degree by the University of Notre Dame in 2002, the LL.D. (honoris causa) degree by Lewis & Clark College in 2003 and the LL.D. (honoris causa) degree by the University of Portland in 2011.
As a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Judge O’Scannlain has participated in over 6,000 federal cases and has written hundreds of published opinions on a broad range of subjects including constitutional law, international law, securities law, administrative law, and criminal law. He hears appeals in San Francisco (court headquarters), as well as in Los Angeles (Pasadena), Portland, Seattle, Anchorage and Honolulu. The late Chief Justice Rehnquist appointed Judge O'Scannlain to the Federal Judicial Center's Advisory Committee on Appellate Judge Education. In 2009, Chief Justice Roberts appointed Judge O’Scannlain to the International Judicial Relations Committee of the U.S. Judicial Conference and subsequently appointed him Chairman in 2010.
President George W. Bush appointed Judge O’Scannlain to the Board of Trustees of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation in 2004. Pope Benedict XVI conferred the Order of Saint Gregory the Great on Judge and Mrs. O’Scannlain in 2007.
Judge O’Scannlain’s professional interests also include judicial administration and reform, and continuing legal education. Judge O’Scannlain is former Chair of the Judicial Division of the American Bar Association and has previously chaired the ABA’s Appellate Judges Conference, its Committee on Appellate Practice, and its 9th Appellate Practice Institute. He has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on several occasions, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, and the Commission on Structural Alternatives for the Federal Courts of Appeals on the subject of court reorganization. In addition to serving as a faculty member at numerous federal appellate practice seminars for judges and attorneys, including New York University Law School’s Institute for Judicial Administration, Judge O’Scannlain is an Adjunct Professor at Lewis & Clark Law School where he teaches a seminar on the Supreme Court. He has served as a Moot Court Judge at distinguished law schools across the United States including Harvard, Yale Stanford, Boalt Hall (Berkeley Law), Virginia, Cornell, Notre Dame, Fordham, Alabama, University of Southern California, King Hall (U.C. Davis) and Loyola Marymount University and in China at Xiamen and Renmin Universities.
Between graduation from Harvard and investiture as a federal judge, Judge O’Scannlain was primarily engaged in private law practice. Between 1969 and 1974, he was consecutively the Deputy Attorney General of Oregon, the Public Utility Commissioner of Oregon, and Director of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. He retired from the U.S. Army Reserve in 1978 as a Major after 23 years Reserve and National Guard service, including four years as an enlisted man.
A first generation Irish-American son of immigrant parents from Sligo and Derry, Judge O’Scannlain is married to the former Maura Nolan and has eight children: Sean, Jane, Brendan, Kevin, Megan, Christopher, Anne, and Kate, and nineteen grandchildren. His chambers are in the Pioneer Courthouse in Portland, Oregon.
S. Walter Richey Professor of Corporate Law, University of Minnesota Law School
Professor Richard W. Painter received his B.A., summa cum laude, in history from Harvard University and his J.D. from Yale University, where he was an editor of the Yale Journal on Regulation. Following law school, he clerked for Judge John T. Noonan Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and later practiced at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York City and Finn Dixon & Herling in Stamford, Connecticut.
He has served as a tenured member of the law faculty at the University of Oregon School of Law and the University of Illinois College of Law, where he was the Guy Raymond and Mildred Van Voorhis Jones Professor of Law from 2002 to 2005.
From February 2005 to July 2007, he was Associate Counsel to the President in the White House Counsel's office, serving as the chief ethics lawyer for the President, White House employees and senior nominees to Senate-confirmed positions in the Executive Branch. He is a member of the American Law Institute and is an advisor for the new ALI Principles of Government Ethics. He has also been active in the Professional Responsibility Section of the American Bar Association.
Professor Painter has also been active in law reform efforts aimed at deterring securities fraud and improving ethics of corporate managers and lawyers. A key provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requiring the SEC to issue rules of professional responsibility for securities lawyers was based on earlier proposals Professor Painter made in law review articles and to the ABA and the SEC. He has given dozens of lectures on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to law schools, bar associations, and learned societies, such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Painter has on four separate occasions provided invited testimony before committees of the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate on securities litigation and/or the role of attorneys in corporate governance.
His book, Getting the Government America Deserves: How Ethics Reform Can Make a Difference, was published by Oxford University Press in January 2009. He has written op-eds on government ethics for various publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and he has been interviewed several times on government ethics and corporate ethics by national news organizations, including appearances on Lawrence O'Donnell (MSNBC), Anderson Cooper 360 (CNN), CNN News, Fox News, National Public Radio All Things Considered, and Minnesota Public Radio News. In 2011, he testified before the U.S. House Government Oversight Committee on partisan political activity by government officials and reform of the Hatch Act. Professor Painter has also given expert testimony in cases involving securities transactions and the professional responsibility of lawyers. He testified as a defense witness in SEC. v. The Reserve Money Market Fund (SDNY, November 2012), a jury trial of an SEC enforcement action against the founders of the world's oldest money market fund that ended with a defense verdict on all of the fraud counts.
Professor Painter is the author of two casebooks: Securities Litigation and Enforcement (with Margaret Sachs and Donna Nagy; West 2003; Second Edition, 2007; Third Edition 2011) and Professional and Personal Responsibilities of the Lawyer (with Judge John T. Noonan Jr.; Foundation 1997; Second Edition, 2001; Third Edition 2011). He has written dozens of articles, book reviews, and essays, including a series of papers and a forthcoming book with Minnesota colleague Claire Hill on the personal responsibility of investment bankers.
Doy & Dee Henley Chair and Distinguished Professor of Jurisprude, Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law
Ronald D. Rotunda was the Doy & Dee Henley Chair and Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence, at Chapman University, the Dale E. Fowler School of Law. He joined the faculty in 2008. Before that, he was University Professor and Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law. From 2002 to 2006, he was the George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law. Before that, he was the Albert E. Jenner, Jr. Professor of Law, at the University of Illinois. He was a magna cum laude graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he was a member of Harvard Law Review. He joined the University of Illinois faculty in 1974 after clerking for Judge Walter R. Mansfield of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, practicing law in Washington, D.C., and serving as assistant majority counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee. He has co-authored the most widely used course book on legal ethics, Problems and Materials on Professional Responsibility(Foundation Press, 12th ed. 2014) and was the author of a leading course book on constitutional law, Modern Constitutional Law (West Academic Co., 11th ed. 2015)(Abridged & Unabridged editions). He was the coauthor of, Legal Ethics: The Lawyer's Deskbook on Professional Responsibility (ABA- West/Thompson Reuters Publishing, St. Paul, Minnesota, 2016-2017 ed.) (Jointly published by the ABA and West/Thompson Reuters Publishing) (with John Dzienkowski). Rotunda also co-authored (with John Nowak) the six-volume Treatise on Constitutional Law (West/Thompson Reuters Publishing, 5th ed. 2012)(with annual updates), and a one volume Treatise on Constitutional Law (West Academic, 8th ed. 2010). He was also the author of several other books and more than 500 articles in various law reviews, journals, newspapers, and books in this country and abroad. His works have been translated into French, Portuguese German, Romanian, Czech, Russian, Japanese, and Korean. These books and articles have been cited more than 2000 times by law reviews, by state and federal courts at every level, from trial courts to the U.S. Supreme Court, and by foreign courts in Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America. He has been interviewed on radio and television on legal issues, both in this country and abroad. In 1993 he was the Constitutional Law Adviser to the Supreme National Council of Cambodia and assisted that country in writing its first democratic constitution. He has consulted with various new democracies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, including Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine, on their proposed constitutions and judicial codes. He chaired the subcommittee that drafted the American Bar Association's Model Rules for Lawyer Disciplinary Enforcement; was a member of the Publications Board of the A.B.A. Center for Professional Responsibility from 1994 to 2016; was a member of the A.B.A. Standing Committee on Professional Discipline (1991-1997); and was Liaison to the A.B.A. Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility (1994-1997). He was a Fulbright Professor in Venezuela in 1986 and a Fulbright Research Scholar in Italy in 1981. In 1996 he assisted the Czech Republic in drafting the first Rules of Ethics for lawyers in that country. During the Spring, 1999 semester, he was Visiting Professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, holding the John S. Stone Endowed Chair of Law. During the summer and fall of 2000, he was the Visiting Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, in Washington, DC. In the fall of 2001, he was visiting professor at George Mason University School of Law. During November-December, 2002, he was Visiting Scholar, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Faculty of Law, Leuven, Belgium. In May, 2004, and December, 2005, he was visiting lecturer at the Institute of Law and Economics, Institut für Recht und Ökonomik, at the University of Hamburg. From early June 2004 to May 2005, he was the Special Counsel to the Department of Defense. He was on the Panel of Contributing Editors that produced, Black's Law Dictionary (West/Thompson Reuters Publishing, 8th ed. 2004; Thomson-Reuters, 10th ed. 2014). From 2005-2006, he was a member of the Task Force on Judicial Functions of the Commission on Virginia Courts in the 21st Century: To Benefit All, to Exclude None.
In May, 2000, American Law Media, publisher of The American Lawyer, the National Law Journal, and the Legal Times picked Professor Rotunda as one of the ten most influential Illinois Lawyers. Also in 2000, a lengthy study that the University of Chicago Press published, which sought to determine the influence, productivity, and reputations of law professors over the last several decades, listed Professor Rotunda as the 17th highest in the nation. The 2002-2003 New Educational Quality Ranking of U.S. Law Schools (EQR) [the last year for which such records are available] ranks Professor Rotunda as the eleventh most cited of all law faculty in the United States. Seehttp://www.leiterrankings.com/faculty/2002faculty_impact_cites.shtml.
In July, 2007, he was one of the main speakers at the International Judicial Conference hosted by the United States Embassy, the Supreme Court of Latvia, and the Latvian Ministry of Justice. The other main speakers were Justice Samuel Alito, the President of Latvia, the Prime Minister of Latvia, the Chief Justice of Latvia, and the Minister of Justice of Latvia. On February 27, 2008, President George W. Bush nominated Ronald D. Rotunda to become a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) for an initial four-year term and sent his nomination to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs for confirmation hearings on the nominees. He was selected the Best Lawyer in Washington, DC, in 2009 in Ethics and Professional Responsibility Law, as published in November 2008 in the Washington Post in association with the Legal Times. When he moved to California, he was also selected as one of the Best Lawyers in Southern California, in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, also in Ethics and Professional Responsibility Law as published in the Los Angeles Times, U.S. News, and American Law Media. On June 17, 2009, he became a Commissioner of the Fair Political Practices Commission, a state regulatory agency (analogous to the Federal Election Commission) that is California's independent political watchdog. He served until January 31, 2013, when his term expired. In 2012, he became a Distinguished International Research Fellow at the World Engagement Institute, a non-profit, multidisciplinary and academically-based non-governmental organization with the mission to facilitate professional global engagement for international development and poverty reduction http://www.weinstitute.org/fellows.html. In 2012, Chapman University honored him with The Chapman University Excellence In Scholarly/Creative Work Award, 2011-2012. Since 2014, he has been a member of the Editorial Board of, The International Journal of Sustainable Human Security (IJSHS), a peer-reviewed publication of the World Engagement Institute (WEI). Rotunda was a Member of the Editorial Board of ABA's Journal of Legal Education (2014 to 2016).
The Supreme Court Tackles Patent Reform: Inter Partes Review Under the AIA Undermines the Structural Protections Offered by Article III Courts
Richard A. Epstein
Note from the Editor: This article criticizes Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion in Oil States. It...
Engage Volume 6, Issue 1, May 2005
ADMINISTRATIVE LAW & REGULATION Supreme Court Decision: Regulatory Takings by Louis K. Fisher & Esther...
Judges & the Press
2000 National Lawyers Convention
Washington, DC