CEO and Director, National Jewish Advocacy Center
Rabbi Dr. Mark Goldfeder, Esq. is the CEO and Director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, Inc. He has served as the founding Editor of the Cambridge University Press Series on Law and Judaism, a Trustee of the Center for Israel Education, and, by Presidential appointment, as a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Council.
Goldfeder has taught law across the country and around the world as Senior Lecturer at Emory University School of Law, Spruill Family Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Director of the Restoring Religious Freedom Project, and as a visiting professor at Georgia State University School of Law, Florida Southern College, University of Padua (Italy), Scuola Galileana (Italy), IDC’s Radzyner Law School (Israel) and Bar Ilan Law School (Israel).
Goldfeder holds two rabbinic ordinations (yoreh yoreh; Yeshiva University and Rivavot Ephraim) and two judicial ordinations (yadin yadin; Rav Gedaliah Dov Schwartz, Av Beth Din, Rabbinical Council of America and Chicago Rabbinical Council, and Rav Dovid Schochet, President, Toronto Rabbinical Council).
Goldfeder’s work focuses on law and religion, constitutional law, and international law. He publishes widely in those areas, including both academically and in popular publications like CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Forbes, and other major media outlets. He is also co-author of the five-volume treatise Religious Organizations and the Law (Westlaw). Goldfeder handles cases involving antisemitism issues around the country, and lectures and writes widely on those topics. He has worked with local, state, and federal legislators on measures to support the Jewish community, and has defended students, professors, businesses, and nonprofits targeted for their support of the Jewish State. He has worked on cases at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, and has successfully represented clients including American and Israeli nonprofits in federal litigation.
In 2017, he received the Opher Aviran Stand with Israel Award from Hillel, and in 2018, the Jon Barkan Israel Advocacy Award from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in recognition of his work. He received his Doctorate and LLM degrees from Emory University and his Juris Doctor degree from NYU School of Law. He received his Bachelor of Arts at Yeshiva University in Journalism.
Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies, Manhattan Institute
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Previously he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute.
Shapiro is the author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (2025) and Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020), coauthor of Religious Liberties for Corporations? (2014), and editor of 11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review (2008-18). He has contributed to a variety of academic, popular, and professional publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, and Newsweek. He also regularly provides commentary for various media outlets, writes the Shapiro’s Gavel newsletter on Substack, and once appeared on the Colbert Report.
Shapiro has testified many times before Congress and state legislatures and has filed more than 500 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court. He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, is a member of the board of fellows of the Jewish Policy Center, was an inaugural Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute, and has been an adjunct law professor at the George Washington University and University of Mississippi. He is also the chairman of the board of advisers of the Mississippi Justice Institute, a barrister in the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court, and a former member of the Virginia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Earlier in his career, Shapiro was a special assistant/adviser to the Multi-National Force in Iraq on rule-of-law issues and practiced at Patton Boggs and Cleary Gottlieb. Before entering private practice, he clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He holds an AB from Princeton University, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School.
John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita, New York Law School; Former President, American Civil Liberties Union
Nadine Strossen, New York Law School Professor Emerita and Senior Fellow at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), was national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. An internationally acclaimed free speech scholar and advocate, who regularly addresses diverse audiences and provides media commentary around the world, Strossen is also the Host and Project Consultant for Free To Speak, a 3-hour documentary film series distributed on public television in 2023. Her books about free speech include: Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know® (Oxford University Press 2023); HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press 2018); and Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (Scribner 1995), which was republished with a new Preface in 2024 as part of the NYU Classics Series. Her many honors and awards include the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Judy Blume Lifetime Achievement Award for Free Speech. She serves on the Advisory Boards of several organizations that do free speech work, including: ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), Heterodox Academy, National Coalition Against Censorship, and the University of Austin.
Professor and D’Alemberte Chair in Constitutional Law, Florida State University College of Law
Alexander Tsesis is the D’Alemberte chair in constitutional law at the Florida State University College of Law. He is also the general editor of the Cambridge Studies on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Oxford Theoretical Foundations in Law. Tsesis’ scholarship and teaching focus on a breadth of subjects, including constitutional law, civil rights, constitutional reconstruction, interpretive methodology, free speech theory, and legal history.
Tsesis’ most recent book is Free Speech in the Balance (Cambridge University Press 2020). His previous books include Constitutional Ethos: Liberal Equality for the Common Good (Oxford University Press 2017) and For Liberty and Equality: The Life and Times of the Declaration of Independence (Oxford University Press 2012), We Shall Overcome: A History of Civil Rights and the Law (Yale University Press 2008), The Thirteenth Amendment and American Freedom (New York University Press 2004), and Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paved the Way for Harmful Social Movements (New York University Press 2002). He also edited a collection of essays in Promises of Liberty (Columbia University Press 2010). The subjects of his articles range from cyber speech, constitutional interpretation, civil rights law, and human rights. They have appeared or will appear in a variety of law reviews across the country, including the Boston University Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Southern California Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and Vanderbilt Law Review.
Clinical Professor of Law, Emory Law School
As Director of the International Humanitarian Law Clinic, Laurie Blank teaches international humanitarian law and works directly with students to provide assistance to international tribunals, non-governmental organizations, and law firms around the world on cutting-edge issues in humanitarian law and human rights. Professor Blank is the co-author of International Law and Armed Conflict: Fundamental Principles and Contemporary Challenges in the Law of War, a casebook on the law of war (with G. Noone, Aspen Publishing 2013). She is also the co-director of a multi-year project on military training programs in the law of war and the co-author of Law of War Training: Resources for Military and Civilian Leaders (USIP 2008, with G. Noone, second edition 2013). In addition, she is the series editor of the ICRC’s teaching supplements on IHL, a member of the American Bar Association’s Advisory Committee to the Standing Committee on Law and National Security, and a member of the Public Interest Law and Policy Group’s High Level Working Group on Piracy. Before coming to Emory, Professor Blank was a program officer in the Rule of Law Program at the United States Institute of Peace. At USIP, she directed the Experts’ Working Group on International Humanitarian Law, in particular a multi-year project focusing on New Actors in the Implementation and Enforcement of International Humanitarian Law.
She is the author of numerous articles and opinion pieces on topics in international humanitarian law, including, most recently, "Extending Positive Identification from People to Places: Terrorism, Armed Conflict and the Identification of Military Objectives" (Utah Law Review); "Losing the Forest for the Trees: Syria, Law and the Pragmatics of Conflict Recognition" (Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law); "Targeted Strikes: The Consequences of Blurring the Armed Conflict and Self-Defense Justifications" (William Mitchell Law Review); "After Top Gun: How Drone Strikes Impact the Law of War" (University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law); "A Square Peg in a Round Hole: Stretching Law of War Detention Too Far" (Rutgers Law Review); "Defining the Battlefield in Contemporary Conflict and Counterterrorism: Understanding the Parameters of the Zone of Combat" (Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law); and "The Application of IHL in the Goldstone Report: A Critical Commentary" (Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law).
Addressing Antisemitism in Higher Education
Mark Goldfeder, Ilya Shapiro, Nadine Strossen, Alexander Tsesis
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The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and Russia Today
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