Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture
Judge Stephen Alexander Vaden was appointed as the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture on July 7, 2025. Alongside Secretary Brooke L. Rollins, Deputy Secretary Vaden leads the Department’s operations and implements policies that support America’s food and farm systems. A native of Union City, Tennessee, Deputy Secretary Vaden brings expertise in agricultural policy, law, and rural development. Previously, he served as a judge on the U.S. Court of International Trade and as General Counsel of USDA. Throughout Deputy Secretary Vaden’s time as General Counsel, he led successful Supreme Court litigation, advanced regulatory reform, and supported the implementation of the 2018 Farm Bill. He is a graduate of Yale Law School and Vanderbilt University. A public servant with strong agricultural roots, Deputy Secretary Vaden is committed to revitalizing rural America and ensuring an abundant, affordable, and safe U.S. food supply.
Partner, FisherBroyles LLP
Paul Beard II is an environmental and land-use partner with FisherBroyles LLP.
JD/MPP student, NYU School of Law and the Harvard Kennedy School
Daniel Cheung was a 2015 summer law clerk with Alston & Bird and is presently a JD/MPP student at the NYU School of Law and the Harvard Kennedy School.
Senior Attorney, Pacific Legal Foundation
Brian Hodges is a Senior Attorney at PLF’s Pacific Northwest office in Bellevue, Washington. Brian focuses his practice on defending of the right of individuals to make reasonable use of their property, free of unnecessary and oppressive regulations.
In 2013, Brian second-chaired Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District before the U.S. Supreme Court, a case that placed constitutional limits on the government’s common practice of demanding that landowners fund unrelated public projects in exchange for a permit approval. And in the 2008 case, Citizens’ Alliance for Property Rights v. Sims, Brian successfully challenged a Seattle-area ordinance that required all rural property owners to dedicate at least half their land as conservation areas as a mandatory condition of any new development without any showing that rural development would impact the environment.
Brian graduated from Seattle University of Law in 2001 with honors. After which, he served as a judicial clerk at the Washington State Court of Appeals, then entered private practice where he focused on appellate advocacy for several years before joining PLF in 2006.
Brian came to the liberty movement by an uncommon route: the arts. Brian played guitar and keyboards in several Seattle-area bands before eventually studying music composition and literature at the University of Washington—earning two Bachelor’s Degrees and a Master of Arts. Through that experience, he came to firmly believe that the goal of art—indeed, the goal of any creative ambition—is to maximize individual freedom and expression, tempered by personal responsibility and ownership, rather than outside oversight or arbitrary restriction. Carrying that philosophy into law school naturally led him to fight for individual rights.
Senior Attorney, Pacific Legal Foundation
Chris Kieser practices in PLF’s property rights and equality before the law practice groups.
His property rights clients include Cedar Point Nursery, which challenged a California regulation requiring them to allow union organizers to invade their private property, as well as Randall and Kimberley Pavlock, who are fighting back against Indiana’s beachfront land grab along Lake Michigan.
Under equality before the law, Chris represents coalitions of Asian-American parents challenging discriminatory admissions policies for selective K-12 schools in New York City; Montgomery County, Maryland; and Fairfax County, Virginia. He also represents a parent organization in Connecticut challenging a racial quota that prevents many Black and Hispanic students from enrolling at the state’s magnet schools.
Chris has published law review articles in the William & Mary Environmental Law Review and the Federalist Society Review. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Daily News, National Review, The Blaze, the Daily Journal, and SCOTUSblog.
Chris clerked for the Honorable Daniel A. Manion of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the Honorable Thomas D. Schroeder of the United States District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina. He holds a B.A., cum laude, from the University of Notre Dame, and graduated magna cum laude from Notre Dame Law School in 2013. At Notre Dame, he was an articles editor of the Notre Dame Law Review.
Growing up on Long Island, Chris developed a deep passion for limited government and individual liberty, arguing with his more numerous progressive classmates. This experience made him deeply skeptical that government tinkering at the expense of individual rights ever works, whether it be denying a property owner the use of his land or a student a seat at her desired school because of her race. He chose PLF because it is the national leader in litigation that furthers individual liberty.
When he’s not working, you’re likely to find Chris rooting for the Mets and Fighting Irish or debating some arcane point of law (because apparently that doesn’t happen enough at work).
Chris is currently licensed to practice in California and admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States, the United States Courts of Appeal for the Second, Seventh, and Ninth Circuits, and the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern and Central Districts of California, the Northern District of Indiana, and the Northern District of Illinois.
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.
President, The Ethics and Public Policy Center
Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., is the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. In May 2025, Anderson was appointed by President Trump to the Religious Liberty Commission.
He is the author or co-author of five books, including the just-released Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing. Previous books include When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, and Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination. He is the co-editor of A Liberalism Safe for Catholicism? Perspectives from “The Review of Politics.”
Anderson’s research has been cited by two U.S. Supreme Court justices, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, in two Supreme Court cases.
He received his bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, and he received his doctoral degree in political philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. His dissertation was titled: “Neither Liberal Nor Libertarian: A Natural Law Approach to Social Justice and Economic Rights.”
Anderson has made appearances on ABC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, and Fox News. His work has been published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the Harvard Health Policy Review, the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, First Things, the Claremont Review of Books, and National Review.
He is the John Paul II Teaching Fellow in Social Thought at the University of Dallas, a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University, and a Fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, as well as the Founding Editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey.
For 9 years he was the William E. Simon senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and has served as an adjunct professor of philosophy and political science at Christendom College, and a Visiting Fellow at the Veritas Center at Franciscan University. He has also served as an assistant editor of First Things.
Vice President for Litigation, Institute for Free Speech
Alan joined the Institute for Free Speech as Vice President for Litigation in February 2021. In this role, Alan directs the Institute’s litigation and legal advocacy, leads our in-house legal team, and manages and works to expand our network of volunteer attorneys.
Prior to joining the Institute, Alan litigated complex federal matters for twenty years, in his own practice and as a partner in various Washington-area firms. He argued and won landmark constitutional cases in the United States Supreme Court and has appeared before numerous appellate and district courts throughout the country. Alan often speaks at law schools and continuing legal education seminars. He also teaches strategic/public interest litigation as an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.
Alan began his career clerking for the Hon. Terrence W. Boyle, United States District Judge for the Eastern District of North Carolina. He has also served as a Deputy Attorney General for the State of California, a litigation associate at the Washington office of Sidley Austin, and as counsel to the United States Senate Judiciary Committee.
Alan earned his J.D. at Georgetown (1995) and his B.A. at Cornell University (1992). He is an active member in good standing of the Virginia, District of Columbia, and California bars, the Bar of the United States Supreme Court, and various federal appellate and district court bars.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
Andrew Oldham is a Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Before ascending to the bench, Judge Oldham served as General Counsel to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, where he advised the Governor on a range of issues under federal and state law and managed litigation in which the Governor was an interested party. Before that he served as Deputy Solicitor General for the State of Texas, where he represented Texas in federal courts across the country, including twice before the United States Supreme Court. Before moving to Texas, Judge Oldham was an attorney at Kellogg Hansen Todd Figel & Frederick in Washington, D.C. His practice focused on appellate litigation in federal courts of appeals throughout the country. Before entering private practice, Judge Oldham served as a law clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., at the Supreme Court of the United States and to Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He also worked as an attorney-adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2006 to 2008. Judge Oldham earned a B.A. from the University of Virginia with highest honors, a Truman Scholarship for graduate school, an M. Phil., first class (with distinction), from Cambridge University, and a J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School.
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