Jonathan Urick is senior associate chief counsel at the U.S. Chamber Litigation Center, the litigation arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Urick handles a variety of litigation matters for the Chamber.

Urick rejoined the Chamber after helping launch the national litigation boutique Lehotsky Keller LLP, where he represented large corporations and trade associations as one of the firm’s early partners. He previously served as senior counsel for the Chamber Litigation Center, primarily covering arbitration and class-action issues.

Before his first stint at the Chamber, Urick practiced law at McGuireWoods LLP on the firm’s appeals and issues team. With a diverse commercial-litigation practice focused on appeals and dispositive motions, Urick represented a variety of businesses across federal and state courts.

Urick served as a law clerk at all three levels of the federal judiciary: For Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and Judge Amul Thapar, then a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.

Urick graduated Order of the Coif from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he served as Articles Development Editor of the Virginia Law Review. He received his undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Delaware.

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Stephanie Holmes

Founder, BrighterSideHR, LLC

Biography

Stephanie Holmes is an experienced labor and employment lawyer. She started her legal career at a large, international law firm where she represented employers in a wide variety of labor and employment matters, ranging from single plaintiff to complex class action cases. She then worked as an in-house counsel for a Fortune 500 company for almost a decade. As in-house counsel, Stephanie handled all labor and employment matters in both union and non-union environments. She worked closely with HR, business leaders, and executives on a myriad of employment issues, including policy development and implementation, workplace investigations, hiring processes, reorganizations, training, and questions around the ADA, FMLA, Title VII, FLSA, ADEA, and other federal and state laws.

Stephanie received her B.A. in Political Science and American Studies from Illinois Wesleyan University and her J.D. from The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law. She is also a trained mediator through the Northwestern University School of Professional Studies and has years of experience helping resolve workplace conflict. Coming from a family of small business owners, Stephanie decided to start her own company and transitioned to consulting.

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Jonathan D. Urick

Senior Associate Chief Counsel, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Litigation Center

Biography

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Christina Sandefur

Executive Vice President, Goldwater Institute

Biography

Christina Sandefur is the Executive Vice President at the Goldwater Institute. She develops policies and litigates cases advancing healthcare freedom, free enterprise, private property rights, free speech, and taxpayer rights.

Christina is a co-drafter of the Right to Try initiative, now federal law, which protects terminally ill patients' right to try safe investigational treatments that have been prescribed by their physician but are not yet FDA-approved. She has won important victories for property rights in Arizona and works nationally to promote the Institute's Private Property Rights Protection Act, a state-level reform that requires government to pay owners when regulations destroy property rights and reduce property values.

Christina is the co-author of the book Cornerstone of Liberty: Private Property Rights in 21st Century America (2016). She is a frequent guest on national television and radio programs, has provided expert legal testimony to various legislative committees, and is a frequent speaker at conferences. She is the recipient of the 2018 Buckley Award in recognition of her leadership in the freedom movement, and she is an Advisory Board Member of the Network of enlightened Women. Christina serves on the board of the Phoenix Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society and is a member of the executive committee for the Federalist Society's Regulatory Transparency Project: FDA & Health.

Christina is a graduate of Michigan State University College of Law and Hillsdale College.

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Lisa Branch

Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit

Biography

On March 20, 2018, Judge Elizabeth L. Branch (Lisa) was sworn in as a United States Circuit Judge for the Eleventh Circuit.

Judge Branch attended and graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina (B.A., cum laude, 1990), and Emory University School of Law (J.D., with distinction, 1994).

After graduating from law school, Judge Branch served as a federal law clerk to The Honorable J. Owen Forrester of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia from 1994 to 1996. Following her clerkship, Judge Branch joined the litigation department of Smith, Gambrell & Russell, LLP in Atlanta as an associate and then a partner.

From 2004 to 2008, Judge Branch was a senior official in the Administration of President George W. Bush in Washington, D.C. She served first as the Associate General Counsel for Rules and Legislation at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and then as the Counselor to the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the U. S. Office of Management and Budget.

She returned to Smith Gambrell in 2008 as a litigation partner. Judge Branch then was appointed to the Court of Appeals of Georgia by Governor Nathan Deal, taking office on September 4, 2012, where she served until March 19, 2018.

Judge Branch is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Atlanta Lawyers Chapter for the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies.

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Mary Anne Case

Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School

Biography

Mary Anne Case is the Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. A graduate of Yale College and the Harvard Law School, she studied at the University of Munich; litigated for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; and was professor of law and Class of 1966 Research Professor at the University of Virginia before joining the Chicago faculty. She has also served as a visiting professor at New York University in 1996-97 and 1999, a Bosch Public Policy Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2004, a Crane Fellow in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University in 2006-07, a Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School in 2013, a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute in 2016, and a Guest Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2018.

Subjects Case has taught include feminist jurisprudence, constitutional law, regulation of sexuality, marriage, family law, sex discrimination, religious freedom, and European legal systems. She is the convener of the Workshop on Regulating Family, Sex, and Gender and board member of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. While diverse research interests include German contract law, theological anthropology, and the First Amendment, her scholarship to date has concentrated on the regulation of sex, gender, sexuality, religion, and family; and the early history of feminism.

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David D. Cole

Hon. George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy, Georgetown Law

Biography

David Cole is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy and former National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He writes about and teaches constitutional law, freedom of speech, and constitutional criminal procedure. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and is the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation.

David has published widely in law journals and the popular press, including The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Stanford Law Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. He is the author or editor of ten books, several of which have won awards. Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror, published in 2007, and co-authored with Jules Lobel, won the Palmer Civil Liberties Prize for best book on national security and civil liberties. Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism received the American Book Award in 2004. No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Boston Book Review and best book on an issue of national policy in1999 by the American Political Science Association.

David received his bachelor’s degree and law degree from Yale University. He worked as a staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights from 1985 to 1990. He has continued to litigate as a professor and, from 2017 to 2024, as National Legal Director of the ACLU. He has litigated many significant constitutional cases at the Supreme Court, including Texas v. Johnson (1989), which extended First Amendment protection to flag burning; Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), which held that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity are prohibited forms of sex discrimination under Title VII; Mahanoy Area Sch. Dist. v. B.L. (2021), which protected student online speech from school discipline; and National Rifle Association v. Vullo (2024), which held that government officials violate the First Amendment when they use their regulatory authority to coerce private parties to blacklist a disfavored political group.

David has received two honorary degrees and numerous awards for his work, including the inaugural Norman Dorsen Presidential Prize from the ACLU for lifetime commitment to civil liberties. The late New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis called David “one of the country’s great legal voices for civil liberties today.” Nat Hentoff called him “a one-man Committee of Correspondence in the tradition of patriot Sam Adams.”

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Sherif Girgis

Associate Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame Law School

Biography

Sherif Girgis joined Notre Dame Law School in 2021. Prior to joining Notre Dame Law, Sherif practiced law at Jones Day in Washington, D.C., where he focused on appellate and complex civil litigation. Before that, Girgis served as a law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, Jr., of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Thomas B. Griffith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Now completing his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton, Girgis earned his J.D. at Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and won the Felix S. Cohen Prize for best paper in legal philosophy. Before law school, he earned a master's degree (B.Phil.) in philosophy from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and his bachelor's degree in philosophy from Princeton, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude. Girgis is coauthor of What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, cited in a dissent in United States v. Windsor, and Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination, released by Oxford University Press in 2017. His work at the intersection of philosophy and law--including criminal law, constitutional liberties, and jurisprudence--has appeared in academic and popular venues including the Yale Law Journal, the Virginia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, the Cambridge Companion to Philosophy of Law, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

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Carrie Campbell Severino

President, JCN

Lisa Branch

Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit

Biography

On March 20, 2018, Judge Elizabeth L. Branch (Lisa) was sworn in as a United States Circuit Judge for the Eleventh Circuit.

Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit

Biography

On March 20, 2018, Judge Elizabeth L. Branch (Lisa) was sworn in as a United States Circuit Judge for the Eleventh Circuit.

President, JCN

Biography

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