Managing Member, Aviation Perspectives LLC
Professor of Constitutional Law, Pepperdine University School of Law
One of America's best known scholars and popular commentators on the law, Professor Douglas W. Kmiec holds the endowed chair in constitutional law at Pepperdine Law School. He came to this position after serving several years as dean and St. Thomas More Professor of Law at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and for nearly two decades, on the law faculty at the University of Notre Dame. As dean at Catholic University, Professor Kmiec did what many said would be impossible; he greatly increased academic quality and student selectivity at the same time he deepened the school's religious commitment. During his tenure, the law school moved into the upper tier of the U.S. News ranking from tier three. At Notre Dame, he was director of Notre Dame's Center on Law & Government, and the founder of its Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy. Beyond the university setting, Kmiec served Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush during 1985-89 as constitutional legal counsel (Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Department of Justice).
A wide-ranging writer and engaging speaker, Professor Kmiec writes a syndicated column for the Catholic News Service, and for several years wrote a regular column in the Chicago Tribune. He is also a frequent contributor to the pages of the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and other periodicals. He is the co-author (with legal historian Stephen Presser of Northwestern) of three books on the Constitution -- The American Constitutional Order; Individual Rights and the American Constitution and The History, Structure and Philosophy of the American Constitution. Another recent book, Cease-Fire on the Family (Crisis Books/Notre Dame) attracted scholarly and popular acclaim for proposing realistic ways for families to "end the culture war" by renewing personal virtue and civic responsibility within itself. He has also written The Attorney General's Lawyer (Praeger 1992), and several respected legal treatises.
Professor Kmiec's scholarly research spans legal and non-legal subjects, from the Constitution and the federal system, to land use and the organization of America society. He is a frequent guest on national news programs, such as Nightline, the Newshour, and NPR's Talk of the Nation, analyzing constitutional questions.
A White House Fellow (1982-83), Professor Kmiec is one of a few individuals who has received the Distinguished Service Award from two cabinet departments —the Department of Justice in 1987 and Housing and Urban Development in 1983. In 1988, he was awarded the Edmund J. Randolph Award by the attorney general. He has lectured on the U.S. Constitution in Asia as a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar.
An honors graduate of Northwestern, Professor Kmiec received his law degree from the University of Southern California, where he served on the Law Review and received the Legion Lex Commencement Prize for Legal Writing. He is a member of the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court and the state bars of Illinois and California.
B.A., with honors, Northwestern University, 1973
J.D., University of Southern California, 1976
Author and FoxNews.com Contributor
John R. Lott, Jr. is an economist who has held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice and was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission during 1988 and 1989. He has published over 100 articles in academic journals. He also is the author of six books including More Guns, Less Crime, Freedomnomics, The Bias Against Guns, and Are Predatory Commitments Credible? He has just released another book entitled "Debacle: Obama's war on jobs and growth and what we can do now to regain our future." Lott is a FoxNews.com contributor and a weekly columnist for them. Opinion pieces by Prof. Lott have appeared in such places as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, USA Today, and The Chicago Tribune. He has appeared on such television programs as the ABC and NBC National Evening News broadcasts, Fox News, "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," and the "Today Show." He received his Ph.D. in economics from UCLA in 1984.
Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
Sander has been working on questions of social and economic inequality for nearly all of his career. He was born in Washington, D.C., but spent most of his childhood in small towns in northwest Indiana. After earning a B.A. in Social Studies at Harvard, Sander in 1978 joined the federal Vista program and worked for a small neighborhood housing group on Chicago's south side. While organizing tenant unions and building receiverships, he was deeply impressed with the work of the South Shore Bank, an experimental, community-development bank owned by churches and foundations. Sander secured funding from three federal agencies and, with the Woodstock Institute, completed the first detailed study of the bank. South Shore Bank was widely imitated as an instrument for community revitalization in other urban areas over the next two decades.
Sander attended graduate school at Northwestern University from 1983 to 1988, earning degrees in law (J.D., 1988) and economics (M.A. 1985, Ph.D., 1990). In his law review comment and his dissertation, Sander sought to understand why fair housing laws had seemingly produced widespread integration in some American metropolitan areas, but very little integration in most. During much of this period, Sander served on the board of the Rogers Park Tenants Committee, and worked on the election effort and subsequent transition team of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor.
In 1989, Sander joined the faculty of the UCLA School of Law. During this period, he continued his work on housing segregation, but also pursued two new interests: the reasons behind the American legal profession’s explosive growth since the mid-1960s, and the structure and effects of law school admissions policies. With Kris Knaplund, he published in 1995 the first comparative evaluation of academic support programs used in legal education. After California voters approved Propostion 209 in 1996 – banning the use of race in various government programs, including admissions at the University of California – Sander successfully argued for the adoption of class-based preferences in the law school’s admissions, and published a study on the results of this experiment in 1997.
During the 1990s, Sander was involved in several Los Angeles civic initiatives. He served as President of the Fair Housing Congress of Southern California from 1984 to 1996; founded the Fair Housing Institute in 1996, and helped the City of Los Angeles design and implement in 1997 what was, at the time, the nation's most ambitious living wage law. Sander also persuaded regional authorities to develop outreach programs that sharply increased local usage of the Earned Income Tax Credit, generating tens of millions of dollars annually for LA's poorest working families.
Sander was one of seven UCLA faculty members and staff who launched the Program in Public Interest Law and Policy, which created a distinct curriculum aimed at public interest students. From 1998 to 2004, Sander helped to steer the "After the JD" study, the first national panel study of law school graduates. In 1998-99, Sander and others at the School of Law launched the Empirical Research Group (ERG), an entity designed to help faculty members undertake ambitious empirical projects and introduce more quantitative and methodological sophistication into their policy-related work.
In 2004, Sander published a comprehensive study of affirmative action in American law schools, focusing particularly on the ways in which large preferences imposed unexpected but substantial costs on their intended beneficiaries.
Sander teaches courses in Property, Quantitative Methods, Urban Housing, and Policy Analysis. He is married to astrophysicist Fiona Harrison, and has a son, Robert. He lives in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Unintended Consequences of Overregulation
Racial Preferences in Law Schools
2005 National Lawyers Convention
Washington, DC