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.
Executive Director, Fair Use Project, The Center for Internet an, Stanford Law School
Tony Falzone is the Executive Director of the Fair Use Project and a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School. As an intellectual property litigator, he has defended artists, writers, publishers, filmmakers, musicians, record labels and video game makers against copyright, trademark, rights of publicity and other intellectual property claims.
Tony represents conductor Lawrence Golan in his challenge to Congress's constitutional power to remove works from the public domain, which he argued before the Supreme Court of the United States. He also represented visual artist Shepard Fairey in copyright litigation against The Associated Press over Fairey's "Obama Hope" posters, and represented RDR Books as trial counsel in its copyright and Lanham Act dispute with J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers over the Harry Potter Lexicon. This follows notable victories on behalf of the producers and distributors of the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed in litigation against Yoko Ono Lennon and EMI Records, on behalf of Professor Carol Shloss in her lawsuit against the Estate of James Joyce, and on behalf of electronic musician BT in a copyright infringement case in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Tony has also represented a wide array of organizations as amicus curiae in federal appeals courts throughout the country, including The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Creative Commons, and the American Library Association. In addition to litigating, Tony teaches at Stanford Law School.
He also advises documentary filmmakers, writers, artists and other content creators on fair use and other intellectual property issues. Tony has been recognized by the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journal as one of the "Top 100 Lawyers in California" and one of the "50 Leading IP Litigators in California." Prior to his work at Stanford, Tony was a litigation partner in the San Francisco office of Bingham McCutchen. He is a 1997 graduate of Harvard Law School, and was a law clerk to the Hon. Barry T. Moskowitz, U.S. District Judge, Southern District of California.
President, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; Lecturer in, Stanford Law School
Larry Kramer joined Stanford Law School in 2004 as Richard E. Lang Professor of Law and Dean. As the school’s 12th dean, he has spearheaded significant educational reforms, including dramatically expanding joint degree programs as part of a multidisciplinary approach to legal studies, enlarging the clinical education program to promote reflective lawyering, revamping programs to foster a public service ethos, and building the international law program to support a growing emphasis on globalization in legal practice.
Dean Kramer has written and taught in such varied fields as constitutional law, conflict of laws, civil procedure, federalism and its history, and the role of courts in society. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Law Institute. In December 2008, Equal Justice Works named Dean Kramer to its Board of Directors. He has appointments (by courtesy) with the Stanford University Department of History and with the Graduate School of Business. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Dean Kramer served as Associate Dean for Research and Academics and Russell D. Niles Professor of Law at New York University School of Law; professor of law at the University of Chicago and University of Michigan law schools; and consultant for Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw LLP. Early in his career, Dean Kramer clerked for Justice William J. Brennan Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Henry J. Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
William H. Neukom Professor of Law, Stanford University Law School
Mark Lemley is the William H. Neukom Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, the Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, and the Director of Stanford's LLM Program in Law, Science and Technology. He teaches intellectual property, computer and Internet law, patent law, and antitrust. He is the author of seven books (most in multiple editions) and 123 articles on these and related subjects, including the two-volume treatise IP and Antitrust. His works have been cited more than 130 times by courts, including seven United States Supreme Court opinions, and over 9,000 times in books and law review articles. His articles have been reprinted throughout the world, and translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Italian, and Danish. He has taught intellectual property law to federal and state judges at numerous Federal Judicial Center and ABA programs, has testified seven times before Congress and numerous times before the California legislature, the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Modernization Commission on patent, trade secret, antitrust and constitutional law matters, and has filed numerous amicus briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court, the California Supreme Court, and the federal circuit courts of appeals.
Mark is a founding partner of Durie Tangri LLP. He litigates and counsels clients in all areas of intellectual property, antitrust, and Internet law. He has argued six Federal appellate cases and numerous district court cases, and represented clients including Comcast, Genentech, Google, Grokster, Hummer Winblad, Impax, Intel, NetFlix, Palm, TiVo, and the University of Colorado Foundation in over 80 cases in two decades as as lawyer.
Mark is the founder and a board member of Lex Machina, Inc., a startup company providing data and analytics around IP disputes to law firms, companies, courts, and policy-makers.
Mark has been named California Lawyer's Attorney of the Year (2005), Best Lawyers’ San Francisco IP Lawyer of the Year (2010), and a Young Global Leader by the Davos World Economic Forum (2007). In 2009 he received the California State Bar’s inaugural IP Vanguard award. In 2002 he was chosen Boalt's Young Alumnus of the Year. He has been recognized as one of the top 50 litigators in the country under 45 by the American Lawyer (2007), one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the nation by the National Law Journal (2006), one of the 10 most admired attorneys in IP (2010) by IP360, one of the 25 most influential people in IP (2010) by the American Lawyer, one of the top intellectual property lawyers in California (2003, 2007, 2009, 2010), and one of the 100 most influential lawyers in California (2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2011) by the Daily Journal, among other honors.
After graduating from law school, Mark clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and has practiced law in Silicon Valley with Brown & Bain and with Fish & Richardson and in San Francisco with Keker & Van Nest. Until January 2000, he was the Marrs McLean Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law, and until June 2004 he was the Elizabeth Josslyn Boalt Professor of Law at the Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California at Berkeley.
Co-Founder, PayPal and Partner, Founders Fund
Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He cofounded PayPal, led it as CEO, and took it public; he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director; and he cofounded Palantir Technologies, where he serves as chairman. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies including SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young entrepreneurs, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking. He is also the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
Executive Vice President and General Counsel, National Football League
Ted Ullyot serves as Executive Vice President and General Counsel for the National Football League and is the founder of Highway 50 Ventures, LLC, an investment and advisory firm. A lawyer by background, Ullyot was General Counsel of Facebook from 2008 to 2013. He served in the administration of President George W. Bush, including in the White House as an Associate Counsel and as Deputy Staff Secretary, and in the Justice Department as Chief of Staff to Attorney General Gonzales.
Ullyot began his career as a law clerk, first for Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He was a litigation partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP.
At other points in his career, Ullyot served as General Counsel of ESL Investments, Inc.; as General Counsel of AOL Time Warner Europe; as a board member at AutoZone Inc.; and as a partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
He is a member of the board of visitors of the Federalist Society; a member of the University of Chicago Law School Council; and a board member of the U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society.
Ullyot graduated from the University of Chicago Law School, after doing his undergraduate work at Harvard. He and his family live in Northern California.
Professor, University of Minnesota Law School
Ilan Wurman is the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches administrative law and constitutional law. He previously taught at Arizona State University. He writes primarily on the Fourteenth Amendment, administrative law, separation of powers, and constitutionalism. His academic writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Minnesota Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the Texas Law Review among other journals.
Professor Wurman is the author of a casebook, Administrative Law Theory and Fundamentals: An Integrated Approach (Foundation Press 2d ed. 2024). He is also the author of A Debt Against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism (Cambridge 2017), and The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment (Cambridge 2020). His next book, The Constitution of 1789: A New Introduction, is also forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Professor Wurman practices law with the firm Tully Bailey. He has litigated a variety of administrative law and constitutional law cases, including cases involving COVID-19 restrictions, transmission lines, and Appointments Clause challenges. He also devised winning public nuisance theories to force city governments to address the increasingly challenging public camping crises throughout the country.
United States Senator, Utah
Elected in 2010 as Utah's 16th Senator, Mike Lee has spent his career defending the basic liberties of Americans and Utahns as a tireless advocate for our founding constitutional principles.
Senator Lee acquired a deep respect for the Constitution early on. His father, Rex Lee, who served as the Solicitor General under President Ronald Reagan, would often discuss varied aspects of judicial and constitutional doctrine around the kitchen table, from Due Process to the uses of Executive Plenary Power. He attended most of his father's arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, giving him a unique, hands-on experience and understanding of government up close.
Lee graduated from Brigham Young University with a Bachelor of Science in Political Science, and served as BYU's Student Body President in his senior year. He graduated from BYU's Law School in 1997 and went on to serve as law clerk to Judge Dee Benson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, and then with future Supreme Court Justice Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr. on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Lee spent several years as an attorney with the law firm Sidley & Austin specializing in appellate and Supreme Court litigation, and then served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Salt Lake City arguing cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Lee served the state of Utah as Governor Jon Huntsman's General Counsel and was later honored to reunite with Justice Alito, now on the Supreme Court, for a one-year clerkship. He returned to private practice in 2007.
Throughout his career, Lee earned a reputation as an outstanding practitioner of the law based on his sound judgment, abilities in the courtroom, and thorough understanding of the Constitution.
Today, Lee fights to preserve America's proud founding document in the United States Senate. He advocates efforts to support constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, individual liberty, and economic prosperity.
Lee is a member of the Judiciary Committee, and serves as Chairman of the Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights Subcommittee protecting business competition and personal freedom.
He also oversees issues critical to Utah as the Chairman of the Water and Power Subcommittee of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. He serves on the Commerce Committee and the Joint Economic Committee, as well.
In the 114th Congress, Lee also began his tenure as Chairman of the Senate Steering Committee, where he works with his Republican colleagues in the Senate to introduce bold and innovative solutions to issues facing the American people.
Lee and his wife Sharon live in Alpine, Utah, with their three children. He is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and served a two-year mission for the Church in the Texas Rio Grande Valley.
United States Senator, Texas
Ted Cruz represents 28 million Texans in the U.S. Senate as a passionate fighter for limited government and economic growth. He has authored 39 legislative measures signed into law. Recent victories include expanding 529 college savings accounts to allow parents to save for K–12 public, private, and religious education, leading the effort to repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate, imposing sanctions on terrorists who use civilians as human shields, designating North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, reauthorizing and reforming NASA, ensuring the availability of additional records to help solve civil rights cold cases, supporting thousands of Texas jobs, and leading the fight to confirm principled constitutionalists to our courts.
Senator Cruz is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, a former law clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and former solicitor general of Texas. He has argued nine cases before the Supreme Court. In November of 2018, he was re-elected to the Senate by the people of Texas.
Chief Political Correspondent and Senior Writer, News.com
Vice President & General Counsel, Google
President, The Free State Foundation
Randolph J. May is Founder and President of The Free State Foundation. The Free State Foundation is an independent, non-profit free market-oriented think tank founded in 2006.
From October 1999-May 2006, May was a Senior Fellow and Director of Communications Policy Studies at The Progress & Freedom Foundation, a Washington, DC-based think tank. Prior to joining PFF, he practiced communications, administrative, and regulatory law as a partner at major national law firms. From 1978 to 1981, May served as Assistant General Counsel and Associate General Counsel at the Federal Communication Commission.
May has held numerous leadership positions in bar associations. He is a past Chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. Mr. May also has served as a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States and currently is a Senior Fellow at ACUS.
Mr. May has published more than two hundred articles and essays on communications, administrative and constitutional law topics. He is author of A Call for a Radical New Communications Policy: Proposals for Free Market Reform, and co-author of #CommActUpdate: A Communications Law Fit for the Digital Age and The Constitutional Foundations of Intellectual Property. Mr. May is editor of two books, Communications Law and Policy in the Digital Age: The Next Five Years and New Directions in Communications Policy. In addition, he is the co-editor of two other books, Net Neutrality or Net Neutering: Should Broadband Internet Services Be Regulated? and Communications Deregulation and FCC Reform. In the past, Mr. May has written regular columns on legal and regulatory affairs for Legal Times and the National Law Journal, leading national legal periodicals.
He received his A.B. from Duke University and his J.D. from Duke Law School, where he serves as a member of the Board of Visitors.
Professor of Law, Southern Illinois University School of Law
Professor Mark F. Schultz joined the faculty in 2003. He teaches and writes primarily in the area of intellectual property.
Professor Schultz is a frequent author and speaker known for his work on the law and economics of the global intellectual property system. In one of his most influential projects, he worked with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to construct a groundbreaking global trade secret protection index (the TSPI). The TSPI is influencing policy discussions on this cutting-edge topic in capitals around the world. Other recent projects have included an empirical study that quantified for the first time the backlogs in patent offices worldwide, a report on how patented innovation is meeting global health challenges, and the construction of a new global index of copyright strength.
Professor Schultz is an influential voice in public policy debates regarding intellectual property. He has testified before the U.S. Congress on copyright law at the invitation of the House Judiciary Committee and has briefed the staff of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on trade secret legislation. He speaks frequently around the world about the connection between secure and effective intellectual property rights and flourishing national economies and individual lives, with invitations from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the U.S. Trade Representative, and the U.S. Copyright Office, as well as numerous academic institutions, think tanks, and industry groups. He served as an NGO delegate to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) for several years during the WIPO Development Agenda talks. He is also one of the organizers of an ongoing multilateral diplomatic dialogue on best practices in national trade secret laws, and is co-founder of the Center for Protection of Intellectual Property (CPIP) at George Mason University in Washington, D.C.
Among the awards and recognition he has received for his scholarship was the School of Law's Outstanding Scholar of the Year award in 2008. He has been a distinguished visiting scholar at the University of Botswana and a visiting professor at DePaul University College of Law.
Professor Schultz graduated with honors from the George Washington University School of Law. Following law school, he was a judicial clerk for the Hon. Daniel M. Friedman of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., and the Hon. Eric G. Bruggink of the United States Court of Federal Claims. Prior to joining academia, he practiced law for a decade, serving as outside general counsel to several tech startups and helping technology companies to expand their businesses and commercialize their intellectual property in dozens of countries. He holds a B.A. in International Economics from George Washington University and has done PhD level coursework in development economics at Southern Illinois University.
He is active in leadership roles in local and national organizations. He has served as chair of the Federalist Society's Intellectual Property Practice Group and the AALS Section on Internet and Computer Law. He is an officer of the American Bar Association's International IP Committee of the International Law Section and the American Intellectual Property Law Association’s Trade Secret Law Committee. He currently is chair of the Academic Advisory Board of the Copyright Alliance.
Professor Schultz teaches Copyright Law, Trade Secret Law, Trademark Law, and a senior seminar on Intellectual Property and Global Development. He established and directs both the Specialization in Intellectual Property Law and the IP Semester in Practice Externship Program. He also co-founded a Legal Globalization Class, offered every other year, that takes students to South Africa and Botswana after spending a semester learning about the legal system, culture, history, and politics of southern Africa. The popular course is a once-in-a-lifetime experience that introduces students to leading lawyers, judges, government officials, and human rights advocates, taking them from Cape Town to Johannesburg to Gaborone as well as many popular destinations including game reserves, national parks, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Cradle of Humankind.
Chief Executive Officer, Foliofn
Panel 4: Technology and Regulation
2012 National Student Symposium
Stanford, CAFew and Defined: Saving the Republic Through Constitutionally Limited Government
Menlo Park, CaliforniaGovernment--Friend or Foe of E-Commerce? - Transcript
Ted Cruz, Declan McCullagh, Kent Walker, Randolph May, Mark F. Schultz
This panel was presented at the Federalist Society's conference, "Fight The Future? Government Regulation and...
Corporate Governance and the Web
Steven M.H Wallman
Let me start with some questions to set the framework for thinking through this issue...