Clayton J. and Henry R. Barber Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and Co-Chairman, Board of Directors, The Federalist Society
STEVEN GOW CALABRESI is the Clayton J. & Henry R. Barber Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. He has also co-taught in the Fall semester at Yale Law School from 2013 to the present. Calabresi clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and Judges Robert H. Bork and Ralph K. Winter. He was a Special Assistant to Attorney General Meese from 1985 to 1987 and worked with Ken Cribb as his deputy in 1987 on the second floor of the West Wing of the Reagan White House. Calabresi has written books on presidential power and comparative constitutional law and the origins of judicial review. He and Gary Lawson are the co-editors of a casebook on U.S. Constitutional Law, and Calabresi is also the co-editor of a casebook on comparative constitutional law. He has written over seventy law review articles since 1990.
E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Chair in Law, University of Richmond School of Law
Professor Kurt Lash teaches and writes about constitutional law. Founder and director of the Richmond Program on the American Constitution, Professor Lash has published widely on the subjects of constitutional law and constitutional history, including The Fourteenth Amendment and the Privileges or Immunities of American Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2014), The Lost History of the Ninth Amendment (Oxford University Press, 2009), and The American First Amendment in the Twenty-first Century: Cases and Materials(with William W. Van Alstyne) (5th ed., Foundation Press, 2014). An elected member of the American Law Institute, Professor Lash’s work has appeared in numerous legal journals including the Stanford Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, andNotre Dame Law Review. He has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University School of Law and is the former director of the University of Illinois College of Law Program in Constitutional Theory, History, and Law.
Associate Chief Justice, Utah Supreme Court
Thomas R. Lee was appointed to the Utah Supreme Court by Governor Gary Herbert in July 2010. He currently serves as Associate Chief Justice and as a member of the Utah Judicial Council. He also chaired the Supreme Court's Advisory Committee on Professionalism and Civility during a time in which the court promulgated Standards of Professionalism and Civility for judges in Utah. Justice Lee is a graduate, with high honors, of the University of Chicago Law School. After law school, he served as a law clerk for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then for Justice Clarence Thomas of the United States Supreme Court. Justice Lee then joined the law firm now known as Parr, Brown, Gee & Loveless, where he became a shareholder. Prior to his appointment to the bench, Justice Lee was a full-time professor at the law school at Brigham Young University, where he continues to serve as Distinguished Lecturer. During his years as a full-time law professor, he maintained a part-time intellectual property litigation practice with Howard, Phillips, & Andersen. He also developed a part-time appellate practice, arguing numerous cases in federal courts throughout the country and in the United States Supreme Court. In 2004 - 05, Justice Lee served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Shareholder, Parr Brown Gee & Loveless
Stephen Mouritsen is a member of Parr Brown’s commercial litigation group. Prior to joining Parr Brown, Mr. Mouritsen was an associate with the law firms of Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP and Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP in New York. Mr. Mouritsen served as a law clerk to the Honorable Associate Chief Justice Thomas R. Lee of the Utah Supreme Court. Prior to law school, Mr. Mouritsen worked as a registered financial representative for Fidelity Investments.
Mr. Mouritsen has experience with a wide variety of securities-related matters, including securities fraud, mortgage fraud, trading violations, market manipulation schemes, as well as SEC and PCAOB investigations. Mr. Mouritsen also has significant experience with internal investigations, environmental litigation, and corporate restructuring litigation.
With a background in linguistics, Mr. Mouritsen has written and lectured extensively on the intersection between law and language. His writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Washington Law Review, the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, and at the Volokh Conspiracy legal blog. His work has been cited by judges in the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third, Sixth, and Tenth Circuits, as well as the Idaho, Michigan, Montana, and Utah Supreme Court. His work has also been cited in leading casebooks on legislation and contracts, and in the Congressional Research Service’s report on Statutory Interpretation.
Mr. Mouritsen currently serves as an adjunct professor at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, where he teaches courses on the theory and practice of legal interpretation and law and corpus linguistics. From 2016 through 2018, Mr. Mouritsen served as an associate (non-resident research fellow) at the University of Chicago Law School.
Mr. Mouritsen received his B.A. in English, from the Brigham Young University, in 2002. In 2007 he received his M.A. in linguistics from Brigham Young University. He attended Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, where he was the Lead Articles Editor of the BYU Law Review, a First Prize, John S. Welch Award for Outstanding Legal Writing, and graduated magna cum laude in 2010.
Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
B.A., Yale; J.D., University of Chicago. Lee Liberman Otis is the Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President at the Federalist Society. She also serves as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference (ACUS), and as the co-chair of the National Constitution Center's Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board. She previously was a special assistant and an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, General Counsel of the Department of Energy, an associate in the appellate section of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, an associate counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and a law clerk to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. She also served as an assistant professor of law at George Mason, where she taught legislation, federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, civil procedure, and appellate advocacy. Ms. Otis has been an important member of the Federalist Society team since the organization’s beginnings. Together with David McIntosh, she led the effort to start what became the Chicago chapter of the Society. She also helped organize the Society’s first conference at Yale, its second conference at Chicago, and its first Lawyers Division chapter in Washington DC, as well as the effort to incorporate the Society, recruit its permanent staff, and obtain its early funding. She was a Founding Director of the Federalist Society.
Don Forchelli Professor of Law and Director of Graduate Education, Brooklyn Law School
Lawrence Solan holds both a law degree and a Ph.D. in linguistics. His scholarly works are largely devoted to exploring interdisciplinary issues related to law, language and psychology, especially in the areas of statutory and contractual interpretation, the attribution of liability and blame, and linguistic evidence. He is director of the Law School's Center for the Study of Law, Language and Cognition, and his acclaimed book, The Language of Judges, is widely recognized as a seminal work on linguistic theory and legal argumentation. His most recent books are The Language of Statutes: Laws and their Interpretation, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010, and The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law, co-edited with Peter Tiersma and published in 2012. He has authored numerous articles and book chapters, and regularly lectures in the United States and abroad.
Professor Solan has been a visiting professor in the Council of Humanities and the Psychology Department at Princeton University. He has also been and a visiting professor at Yale Law School. He has served as president of the International Association of Forensic Linguistics, is on the board of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health, and the editorial board of the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law.
Prior to joining the faculty in 1996, Professor Solan was a partner in the firm of Orans, Elsen and Lupert, where he specialized in complex civil litigation, before which he was a law clerk to Justice Stewart Pollock of the Supreme Court of New Jersey.
Chief Executive Officer, Association of American Law Schools
Kellye Y. Testy is the executive director and chief executive officer of the Association of American Law Schools which serves as the institutional membership organization for its 175 member law schools and as the learned society for the legal academy.
Prior to joining AALS, Testy served as the president and chief executive officer of the Law School Admission Council, where she led the organization in its committed efforts to advance law and justice by encouraging diverse, talented individuals to study law and by supporting their enrollment and learning journeys from prelaw through practice.
Testy served as dean and professor of law at University of Washington School of Law from 2009 to 2017 and at Seattle University School of Law from 2005 to 2009. She began her career as a law professor at the University of Puget Sound in 1992, which then became Seattle University. As a professor, Testy was an award-winning teacher and an insightful scholar who brought an equity lens to her focus on business and corporate law. Her areas of expertise include leadership, business and corporate law, gender and the law, and legal education. Testy earned her undergraduate degree in journalism from Indiana University in Bloomington, and her law degree from Indiana University Maurer School of Law—Bloomington.
In addition to her role at AALS, she serves on the boards of the Washington Law Institute and LSSSE and teaches law and leadership at a number of law schools across the country.
Clayton J. and Henry R. Barber Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and Co-Chairman, Board of Directors, The Federalist Society
STEVEN GOW CALABRESI is the Clayton J. & Henry R. Barber Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. He has also co-taught in the Fall semester at Yale Law School from 2013 to the present. Calabresi clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and Judges Robert H. Bork and Ralph K. Winter. He was a Special Assistant to Attorney General Meese from 1985 to 1987 and worked with Ken Cribb as his deputy in 1987 on the second floor of the West Wing of the Reagan White House. Calabresi has written books on presidential power and comparative constitutional law and the origins of judicial review. He and Gary Lawson are the co-editors of a casebook on U.S. Constitutional Law, and Calabresi is also the co-editor of a casebook on comparative constitutional law. He has written over seventy law review articles since 1990.
Professor of Law, Fordham University School of Law
Professor Andrew Kent teaches and writes about constitutional law, foreign relations law, federal courts and procedure, national security law, public international law, professional responsibility and legal ethics. He received the Dean’s Distinguished Research Award (2016-17) for his scholarship.
After graduating from Yale Law School, Professor Kent clerked for the Hon. Robert A. Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Hon. Carol B. Amon of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Before joining Fordham’s faculty, he was a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School and an attorney at both Sullivan & Cromwell and WilmerHale.
From 2014-2015, Professor Kent served as Senior Counsel to the Solicitor General, State of New York, Office of the Attorney General.
Professor Kent is a member of the New York City Bar’s Professional Responsibility Committee. He provides appellate representation to the indigent as a member of the Pro Bono Panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
Joshua Kleinfeld teaches and writes about political, legal, and moral philosophy, criminal law, and criminal procedure. He also practices law in Northwestern's Juvenile Criminal Defense Clinic. He is a full professor with tenure at the Northwestern Pritzker School of the Law and (by courtesy) in Northwestern’s philosophy department. In 2017-18, he was a visiting professor at Harvard and Stanford Law Schools. He is the recipient of the Bator Award, given annually to one American law professor under the age of 40 who has demonstrated "excellence in legal scholarship, a commitment to teaching, a concern for students, and who has made a significant public impact."
In philosophy, Kleinfeld's research focuses on the idea of "embodied ethical life," as developed in the socio-theoretic tradition of Hegel, Weber, and Durkheim. This tradition aims to understand and critique social life by bringing to light the normative ideas implicit in social practices and institutions. In law, this means that the most interesting philosophical concepts are often those reflected or actualized in legal practice – in the law as judges and lawyers think of it and wield it.
In criminal law and procedure, Kleinfeld has developed a theory known as "reconstructivism," which holds that the chief office of criminal law is not to dole out retributive justice, nor to optimize crime and cost control, but to reconstruct a violated normative order in the wake of a crime. This work, which draws on the thought of Hegel, Durkheim, Jean Hampton, and Antony Duff, develops an alternative to retributive and utilitarian theories of criminal law by focusing on the distinctive social function and sense of justice at work in the criminal system.
Kleinfeld is also involved in practical criminal justice reform. In this vein, he defends children accused of homicide in the Northwestern Juvenile Criminal Defense clinic and assists in litigation efforts meant to reform American criminal law through the courts. He has also developed a view of criminal justice reform known as "democratization," which holds that the root of the American criminal justice crisis is a set of bureaucratic attitudes, structures, and incentives divorced from the American public’s concerns and sense of justice, and that the primary solution is to make criminal justice more community-focused and responsive to lay influences. Working with others, he has developed a number of policy proposals meant to reform American criminal justice in a democratic direction.
Kleinfeld holds a JD from Yale Law School, a PhD in philosophy from the Goethe University of Frankfurt (supervised by Axel Honneth, Klaus Günther, and Rainer Forst), and a BA in philosophy from Yale College. He clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit; Judge Janice Rogers Brown on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; and President (chief justice) Aharon Barak of the Supreme Court of Israel. He worked as an Associate at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in Frankfurt, Germany, in the area of corporate criminal law. Before law school, he worked as a Senior Research Analyst at the White House’s Council on Bioethics.
Assistant Professor of Law, George Mason University, Antonin Scalia Law School
Robert Leider is an Assistant Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. His scholarly interests are in criminal law, criminal procedure, and constitutional law, especially concerning questions about the use of force and the rule of law. He has written on the law of self-defense, the constitutional allocation of military power, and gun control. Among other places, he has published in the Florida Law Review (forthcoming), the Indiana Law Journal, and the Wall Street Journal.
Before joining Antonin Scalia Law School, Professor Leider was at Arnold & Porter in Washington, DC. He was previously with Mayer Brown LLP and was an Olin-Searle-Smith Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has clerked for Judge Diane S. Sykes, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and Justice Clarence Thomas. Professor Leider earned a BA, summa cum laude, from The George Washington University, a JD from Yale Law School, and a PhD in Philosophy (dissertation defended with distinction) from Georgetown University. While at Yale, he served as an articles editor for the Yale Law Journal.
Professor Leider teaches criminal law and torts.
Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
THOMAS W. MERRILL is the Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He previously taught at Northwestern University School of Law and Yale Law School. He has undergraduate degrees from Grinnell College and Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and a law degree from the University of Chicago. He clerked on the D.C. Circuit (for Chief Judge David Bazelon) and the U.S. Supreme Court (for Justice Harry Blackmun). From 1987-1990 he served as Deputy Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Merrill’s writings related to property include Property: Principles and Policies (Foundation Press Second Edition, 2012) (with Henry E. Smith); Property: The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law (Oxford U. Press, 2010); Property: Takings (Foundation Press, 2002)(with David Dana); and numerous articles, including “The Economics of Public Use” (Cornell Law Review 1986); “The Landscape of Constitutional Property” (Virginia Law Review 2000); and “The Character of the Governmental Action” (Vermont Law Review 2012). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Charles I. Francis Professorship in Law, University of Texas at Austin School of Law
Professor Aaron Nielson lectures and writes in the areas of administrative law, civil procedure, and federal courts. Before joining the faculty, he served as Solicitor General of Texas and represented Texas before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Texas Supreme Court, as well as overseeing all appellate litigation for the State. Earlier in his career, he was a professor at Brigham Young University and an appellate and antitrust partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP. He also clerked for Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
As Solicitor General, Professor Nielson successfully defended against a First Amendment challenge Texas’s law requiring online pornographers to institute age verification. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court appointed him to defend the constitutionality of a federal agency. He currently serves as a Senior Fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States after completing a six-year term as an appointed public member and chair of the Conference’s Administration & Management Committee.
Nielson’s research focuses on administrative law, federal litigation, and the separation of powers. He has published (or soon will publish) in the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, and Northwestern University Law Review, among others. Nielson has been recognized for teaching for teaching and scholarship and in 2021 received the Federalist Society’s Joseph Story Award, which recognizes a young academic for excellence in legal scholarship, a commitment to teaching, and a concern for students, and who has made a significant public impact in a manner that advances the rule of law in a free society. He is also an elected member of the American Law Institute.
Professor Nielson received his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and an LL.M from the University of Cambridge, where he focused his studies on the institutions that regulate global competition and commerce. He received his undergraduate degree summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in economics and political science.
Associate Professor of Law, Lewis & Clark Law School
Ozan Varol is a rocket scientist turned award-winning law professor and author. He teaches in the areas of constitutional law, criminal law and procedure, comparative constitutional law, and Islamic law. His recent scholarship has focused on constitutional transitions and constitutional design. He also lectures and writes about civil-military relations and law and politics in the Middle East.
Professor Varol is the author of two forthcoming books with Oxford University: The Democratic Coup d’État (monograph) and Comparative Constitutional Law: A Global and Interdisciplinary Approach (co-authored textbook).
He has also authored more than a dozen book chapters or law review articles published or forthcoming in the California Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, UC Davis Law Review, Iowa Law Review (twice), Harvard International Law Journal, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Virginia Journal of International Law, American Journal of Comparative Law (peer-reviewed), and the International Journal of Constitutional Law (peer-reviewed), among many other academic journals. His scholarship has been featured in various domestic and foreign media outlets, including BBC, CNN, Washington Post, Slate, and Foreign Policy.
Professor Varol’s articles have received numerous scholarly recognitions. He is the only scholar to twice win the American Society of Comparative Law’s paper competition for younger scholars. His 2014 article, Temporary Constitutions, was selected as one of the best three papers in the AALS Scholarly Papers Competition, which is widely considered the most prestigious in legal education, and awarded Honorable Mention. In 2014 and in 2016, his articles won the Federalist Society’s Young Legal Scholars Paper Competition. In addition, his article, The Democratic Coup d’État, was identified in a review by Professor Mark Tushnet (Harvard Law School) as “one of the best works of recent scholarship relating to constitutional law.”
To access Professor Varol’s personal website and download a free chapter from his forthcoming book, click here.
Clayton J. and Henry R. Barber Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and Co-Chairman, Board of Directors, The Federalist Society
STEVEN GOW CALABRESI is the Clayton J. & Henry R. Barber Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. He has also co-taught in the Fall semester at Yale Law School from 2013 to the present. Calabresi clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and Judges Robert H. Bork and Ralph K. Winter. He was a Special Assistant to Attorney General Meese from 1985 to 1987 and worked with Ken Cribb as his deputy in 1987 on the second floor of the West Wing of the Reagan White House. Calabresi has written books on presidential power and comparative constitutional law and the origins of judicial review. He and Gary Lawson are the co-editors of a casebook on U.S. Constitutional Law, and Calabresi is also the co-editor of a casebook on comparative constitutional law. He has written over seventy law review articles since 1990.
Professor of Law, Fordham University School of Law
Professor Andrew Kent teaches and writes about constitutional law, foreign relations law, federal courts and procedure, national security law, public international law, professional responsibility and legal ethics. He received the Dean’s Distinguished Research Award (2016-17) for his scholarship.
After graduating from Yale Law School, Professor Kent clerked for the Hon. Robert A. Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Hon. Carol B. Amon of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Before joining Fordham’s faculty, he was a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School and an attorney at both Sullivan & Cromwell and WilmerHale.
From 2014-2015, Professor Kent served as Senior Counsel to the Solicitor General, State of New York, Office of the Attorney General.
Professor Kent is a member of the New York City Bar’s Professional Responsibility Committee. He provides appellate representation to the indigent as a member of the Pro Bono Panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
Joshua Kleinfeld teaches and writes about political, legal, and moral philosophy, criminal law, and criminal procedure. He also practices law in Northwestern's Juvenile Criminal Defense Clinic. He is a full professor with tenure at the Northwestern Pritzker School of the Law and (by courtesy) in Northwestern’s philosophy department. In 2017-18, he was a visiting professor at Harvard and Stanford Law Schools. He is the recipient of the Bator Award, given annually to one American law professor under the age of 40 who has demonstrated "excellence in legal scholarship, a commitment to teaching, a concern for students, and who has made a significant public impact."
In philosophy, Kleinfeld's research focuses on the idea of "embodied ethical life," as developed in the socio-theoretic tradition of Hegel, Weber, and Durkheim. This tradition aims to understand and critique social life by bringing to light the normative ideas implicit in social practices and institutions. In law, this means that the most interesting philosophical concepts are often those reflected or actualized in legal practice – in the law as judges and lawyers think of it and wield it.
In criminal law and procedure, Kleinfeld has developed a theory known as "reconstructivism," which holds that the chief office of criminal law is not to dole out retributive justice, nor to optimize crime and cost control, but to reconstruct a violated normative order in the wake of a crime. This work, which draws on the thought of Hegel, Durkheim, Jean Hampton, and Antony Duff, develops an alternative to retributive and utilitarian theories of criminal law by focusing on the distinctive social function and sense of justice at work in the criminal system.
Kleinfeld is also involved in practical criminal justice reform. In this vein, he defends children accused of homicide in the Northwestern Juvenile Criminal Defense clinic and assists in litigation efforts meant to reform American criminal law through the courts. He has also developed a view of criminal justice reform known as "democratization," which holds that the root of the American criminal justice crisis is a set of bureaucratic attitudes, structures, and incentives divorced from the American public’s concerns and sense of justice, and that the primary solution is to make criminal justice more community-focused and responsive to lay influences. Working with others, he has developed a number of policy proposals meant to reform American criminal justice in a democratic direction.
Kleinfeld holds a JD from Yale Law School, a PhD in philosophy from the Goethe University of Frankfurt (supervised by Axel Honneth, Klaus Günther, and Rainer Forst), and a BA in philosophy from Yale College. He clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit; Judge Janice Rogers Brown on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; and President (chief justice) Aharon Barak of the Supreme Court of Israel. He worked as an Associate at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in Frankfurt, Germany, in the area of corporate criminal law. Before law school, he worked as a Senior Research Analyst at the White House’s Council on Bioethics.
Assistant Professor of Law, George Mason University, Antonin Scalia Law School
Robert Leider is an Assistant Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. His scholarly interests are in criminal law, criminal procedure, and constitutional law, especially concerning questions about the use of force and the rule of law. He has written on the law of self-defense, the constitutional allocation of military power, and gun control. Among other places, he has published in the Florida Law Review (forthcoming), the Indiana Law Journal, and the Wall Street Journal.
Before joining Antonin Scalia Law School, Professor Leider was at Arnold & Porter in Washington, DC. He was previously with Mayer Brown LLP and was an Olin-Searle-Smith Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has clerked for Judge Diane S. Sykes, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and Justice Clarence Thomas. Professor Leider earned a BA, summa cum laude, from The George Washington University, a JD from Yale Law School, and a PhD in Philosophy (dissertation defended with distinction) from Georgetown University. While at Yale, he served as an articles editor for the Yale Law Journal.
Professor Leider teaches criminal law and torts.
Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
THOMAS W. MERRILL is the Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He previously taught at Northwestern University School of Law and Yale Law School. He has undergraduate degrees from Grinnell College and Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and a law degree from the University of Chicago. He clerked on the D.C. Circuit (for Chief Judge David Bazelon) and the U.S. Supreme Court (for Justice Harry Blackmun). From 1987-1990 he served as Deputy Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Merrill’s writings related to property include Property: Principles and Policies (Foundation Press Second Edition, 2012) (with Henry E. Smith); Property: The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law (Oxford U. Press, 2010); Property: Takings (Foundation Press, 2002)(with David Dana); and numerous articles, including “The Economics of Public Use” (Cornell Law Review 1986); “The Landscape of Constitutional Property” (Virginia Law Review 2000); and “The Character of the Governmental Action” (Vermont Law Review 2012). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Charles I. Francis Professorship in Law, University of Texas at Austin School of Law
Professor Aaron Nielson lectures and writes in the areas of administrative law, civil procedure, and federal courts. Before joining the faculty, he served as Solicitor General of Texas and represented Texas before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Texas Supreme Court, as well as overseeing all appellate litigation for the State. Earlier in his career, he was a professor at Brigham Young University and an appellate and antitrust partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP. He also clerked for Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
As Solicitor General, Professor Nielson successfully defended against a First Amendment challenge Texas’s law requiring online pornographers to institute age verification. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court appointed him to defend the constitutionality of a federal agency. He currently serves as a Senior Fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States after completing a six-year term as an appointed public member and chair of the Conference’s Administration & Management Committee.
Nielson’s research focuses on administrative law, federal litigation, and the separation of powers. He has published (or soon will publish) in the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, and Northwestern University Law Review, among others. Nielson has been recognized for teaching for teaching and scholarship and in 2021 received the Federalist Society’s Joseph Story Award, which recognizes a young academic for excellence in legal scholarship, a commitment to teaching, and a concern for students, and who has made a significant public impact in a manner that advances the rule of law in a free society. He is also an elected member of the American Law Institute.
Professor Nielson received his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and an LL.M from the University of Cambridge, where he focused his studies on the institutions that regulate global competition and commerce. He received his undergraduate degree summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in economics and political science.
Associate Professor of Law, Lewis & Clark Law School
Ozan Varol is a rocket scientist turned award-winning law professor and author. He teaches in the areas of constitutional law, criminal law and procedure, comparative constitutional law, and Islamic law. His recent scholarship has focused on constitutional transitions and constitutional design. He also lectures and writes about civil-military relations and law and politics in the Middle East.
Professor Varol is the author of two forthcoming books with Oxford University: The Democratic Coup d’État (monograph) and Comparative Constitutional Law: A Global and Interdisciplinary Approach (co-authored textbook).
He has also authored more than a dozen book chapters or law review articles published or forthcoming in the California Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, UC Davis Law Review, Iowa Law Review (twice), Harvard International Law Journal, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Virginia Journal of International Law, American Journal of Comparative Law (peer-reviewed), and the International Journal of Constitutional Law (peer-reviewed), among many other academic journals. His scholarship has been featured in various domestic and foreign media outlets, including BBC, CNN, Washington Post, Slate, and Foreign Policy.
Professor Varol’s articles have received numerous scholarly recognitions. He is the only scholar to twice win the American Society of Comparative Law’s paper competition for younger scholars. His 2014 article, Temporary Constitutions, was selected as one of the best three papers in the AALS Scholarly Papers Competition, which is widely considered the most prestigious in legal education, and awarded Honorable Mention. In 2014 and in 2016, his articles won the Federalist Society’s Young Legal Scholars Paper Competition. In addition, his article, The Democratic Coup d’État, was identified in a review by Professor Mark Tushnet (Harvard Law School) as “one of the best works of recent scholarship relating to constitutional law.”
To access Professor Varol’s personal website and download a free chapter from his forthcoming book, click here.
Distinguished University Professor, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
University Professor Nelson Lund is the author of Rousseau’s Rejuvenation of Political Philosophy: A New Introduction. He has also written widely in the field of constitutional law, including articles on constitutional interpretation, federalism, separation of powers, the Second Amendment, the Commerce Clause, the Speech or Debate Clause, the Equal Protection Clause, and the Uniformity Clause. In addition, he has published articles in the fields of employment discrimination and civil rights, the legal regulation of medical ethics, and the application of economic analysis to legal institutions and legal ethics.
Professor Lund graduated from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, after which he received an MA in philosophy from the Catholic University of America and a PhD in political science from Harvard University. He left the faculty of the University of Chicago to attend its law school, where he served as executive editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and chapter chairman of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. After law school, he held positions at the United States Department of Justice in the Office of the Solicitor General and the Office of Legal Counsel. He also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Patrick E. Higginbotham of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and to the Honorable Sandra Day O'Connor of the United States Supreme Court. Following his clerkship with Justice O'Connor, Professor Lund served in the White House as associate counsel to the president from 1989 to 1992.
Since joining the faculty at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, Professor Lund has taught Constitutional Law, Legislation, Federal Election Law, Employment Discrimination, State and Local Government, and seminars on the Second Amendment and on a variety of topics in Jurisprudence.
Clayton J. and Henry R. Barber Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and Co-Chairman, Board of Directors, The Federalist Society
STEVEN GOW CALABRESI is the Clayton J. & Henry R. Barber Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. He has also co-taught in the Fall semester at Yale Law School from 2013 to the present. Calabresi clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and Judges Robert H. Bork and Ralph K. Winter. He was a Special Assistant to Attorney General Meese from 1985 to 1987 and worked with Ken Cribb as his deputy in 1987 on the second floor of the West Wing of the Reagan White House. Calabresi has written books on presidential power and comparative constitutional law and the origins of judicial review. He and Gary Lawson are the co-editors of a casebook on U.S. Constitutional Law, and Calabresi is also the co-editor of a casebook on comparative constitutional law. He has written over seventy law review articles since 1990.
E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Chair in Law, University of Richmond School of Law
Professor Kurt Lash teaches and writes about constitutional law. Founder and director of the Richmond Program on the American Constitution, Professor Lash has published widely on the subjects of constitutional law and constitutional history, including The Fourteenth Amendment and the Privileges or Immunities of American Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2014), The Lost History of the Ninth Amendment (Oxford University Press, 2009), and The American First Amendment in the Twenty-first Century: Cases and Materials(with William W. Van Alstyne) (5th ed., Foundation Press, 2014). An elected member of the American Law Institute, Professor Lash’s work has appeared in numerous legal journals including the Stanford Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, andNotre Dame Law Review. He has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University School of Law and is the former director of the University of Illinois College of Law Program in Constitutional Theory, History, and Law.
Associate Chief Justice, Utah Supreme Court
Thomas R. Lee was appointed to the Utah Supreme Court by Governor Gary Herbert in July 2010. He currently serves as Associate Chief Justice and as a member of the Utah Judicial Council. He also chaired the Supreme Court's Advisory Committee on Professionalism and Civility during a time in which the court promulgated Standards of Professionalism and Civility for judges in Utah. Justice Lee is a graduate, with high honors, of the University of Chicago Law School. After law school, he served as a law clerk for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then for Justice Clarence Thomas of the United States Supreme Court. Justice Lee then joined the law firm now known as Parr, Brown, Gee & Loveless, where he became a shareholder. Prior to his appointment to the bench, Justice Lee was a full-time professor at the law school at Brigham Young University, where he continues to serve as Distinguished Lecturer. During his years as a full-time law professor, he maintained a part-time intellectual property litigation practice with Howard, Phillips, & Andersen. He also developed a part-time appellate practice, arguing numerous cases in federal courts throughout the country and in the United States Supreme Court. In 2004 - 05, Justice Lee served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Shareholder, Parr Brown Gee & Loveless
Stephen Mouritsen is a member of Parr Brown’s commercial litigation group. Prior to joining Parr Brown, Mr. Mouritsen was an associate with the law firms of Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP and Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP in New York. Mr. Mouritsen served as a law clerk to the Honorable Associate Chief Justice Thomas R. Lee of the Utah Supreme Court. Prior to law school, Mr. Mouritsen worked as a registered financial representative for Fidelity Investments.
Mr. Mouritsen has experience with a wide variety of securities-related matters, including securities fraud, mortgage fraud, trading violations, market manipulation schemes, as well as SEC and PCAOB investigations. Mr. Mouritsen also has significant experience with internal investigations, environmental litigation, and corporate restructuring litigation.
With a background in linguistics, Mr. Mouritsen has written and lectured extensively on the intersection between law and language. His writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Washington Law Review, the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, and at the Volokh Conspiracy legal blog. His work has been cited by judges in the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third, Sixth, and Tenth Circuits, as well as the Idaho, Michigan, Montana, and Utah Supreme Court. His work has also been cited in leading casebooks on legislation and contracts, and in the Congressional Research Service’s report on Statutory Interpretation.
Mr. Mouritsen currently serves as an adjunct professor at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, where he teaches courses on the theory and practice of legal interpretation and law and corpus linguistics. From 2016 through 2018, Mr. Mouritsen served as an associate (non-resident research fellow) at the University of Chicago Law School.
Mr. Mouritsen received his B.A. in English, from the Brigham Young University, in 2002. In 2007 he received his M.A. in linguistics from Brigham Young University. He attended Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, where he was the Lead Articles Editor of the BYU Law Review, a First Prize, John S. Welch Award for Outstanding Legal Writing, and graduated magna cum laude in 2010.
Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
B.A., Yale; J.D., University of Chicago. Lee Liberman Otis is the Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President at the Federalist Society. She also serves as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference (ACUS), and as the co-chair of the National Constitution Center's Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board. She previously was a special assistant and an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, General Counsel of the Department of Energy, an associate in the appellate section of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, an associate counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and a law clerk to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. She also served as an assistant professor of law at George Mason, where she taught legislation, federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, civil procedure, and appellate advocacy. Ms. Otis has been an important member of the Federalist Society team since the organization’s beginnings. Together with David McIntosh, she led the effort to start what became the Chicago chapter of the Society. She also helped organize the Society’s first conference at Yale, its second conference at Chicago, and its first Lawyers Division chapter in Washington DC, as well as the effort to incorporate the Society, recruit its permanent staff, and obtain its early funding. She was a Founding Director of the Federalist Society.
Don Forchelli Professor of Law and Director of Graduate Education, Brooklyn Law School
Lawrence Solan holds both a law degree and a Ph.D. in linguistics. His scholarly works are largely devoted to exploring interdisciplinary issues related to law, language and psychology, especially in the areas of statutory and contractual interpretation, the attribution of liability and blame, and linguistic evidence. He is director of the Law School's Center for the Study of Law, Language and Cognition, and his acclaimed book, The Language of Judges, is widely recognized as a seminal work on linguistic theory and legal argumentation. His most recent books are The Language of Statutes: Laws and their Interpretation, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010, and The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law, co-edited with Peter Tiersma and published in 2012. He has authored numerous articles and book chapters, and regularly lectures in the United States and abroad.
Professor Solan has been a visiting professor in the Council of Humanities and the Psychology Department at Princeton University. He has also been and a visiting professor at Yale Law School. He has served as president of the International Association of Forensic Linguistics, is on the board of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health, and the editorial board of the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law.
Prior to joining the faculty in 1996, Professor Solan was a partner in the firm of Orans, Elsen and Lupert, where he specialized in complex civil litigation, before which he was a law clerk to Justice Stewart Pollock of the Supreme Court of New Jersey.
Chief Executive Officer, Association of American Law Schools
Kellye Y. Testy is the executive director and chief executive officer of the Association of American Law Schools which serves as the institutional membership organization for its 175 member law schools and as the learned society for the legal academy.
Prior to joining AALS, Testy served as the president and chief executive officer of the Law School Admission Council, where she led the organization in its committed efforts to advance law and justice by encouraging diverse, talented individuals to study law and by supporting their enrollment and learning journeys from prelaw through practice.
Testy served as dean and professor of law at University of Washington School of Law from 2009 to 2017 and at Seattle University School of Law from 2005 to 2009. She began her career as a law professor at the University of Puget Sound in 1992, which then became Seattle University. As a professor, Testy was an award-winning teacher and an insightful scholar who brought an equity lens to her focus on business and corporate law. Her areas of expertise include leadership, business and corporate law, gender and the law, and legal education. Testy earned her undergraduate degree in journalism from Indiana University in Bloomington, and her law degree from Indiana University Maurer School of Law—Bloomington.
In addition to her role at AALS, she serves on the boards of the Washington Law Institute and LSSSE and teaches law and leadership at a number of law schools across the country.
Clayton J. and Henry R. Barber Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and Co-Chairman, Board of Directors, The Federalist Society
STEVEN GOW CALABRESI is the Clayton J. & Henry R. Barber Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. He has also co-taught in the Fall semester at Yale Law School from 2013 to the present. Calabresi clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and Judges Robert H. Bork and Ralph K. Winter. He was a Special Assistant to Attorney General Meese from 1985 to 1987 and worked with Ken Cribb as his deputy in 1987 on the second floor of the West Wing of the Reagan White House. Calabresi has written books on presidential power and comparative constitutional law and the origins of judicial review. He and Gary Lawson are the co-editors of a casebook on U.S. Constitutional Law, and Calabresi is also the co-editor of a casebook on comparative constitutional law. He has written over seventy law review articles since 1990.
Clayton J. and Henry R. Barber Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and Co-Chairman, Board of Directors, The Federalist Society
STEVEN GOW CALABRESI is the Clayton J. & Henry R. Barber Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. He has also co-taught in the Fall semester at Yale Law School from 2013 to the present. Calabresi clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and Judges Robert H. Bork and Ralph K. Winter. He was a Special Assistant to Attorney General Meese from 1985 to 1987 and worked with Ken Cribb as his deputy in 1987 on the second floor of the West Wing of the Reagan White House. Calabresi has written books on presidential power and comparative constitutional law and the origins of judicial review. He and Gary Lawson are the co-editors of a casebook on U.S. Constitutional Law, and Calabresi is also the co-editor of a casebook on comparative constitutional law. He has written over seventy law review articles since 1990.
Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
B.A., Yale; J.D., University of Chicago. Lee Liberman Otis is the Executive Vice President and Senior Counselor to the President at the Federalist Society. She also serves as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference (ACUS), and as the co-chair of the National Constitution Center's Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board. She previously was a special assistant and an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, General Counsel of the Department of Energy, an associate in the appellate section of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, an associate counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and a law clerk to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. She also served as an assistant professor of law at George Mason, where she taught legislation, federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, civil procedure, and appellate advocacy. Ms. Otis has been an important member of the Federalist Society team since the organization’s beginnings. Together with David McIntosh, she led the effort to start what became the Chicago chapter of the Society. She also helped organize the Society’s first conference at Yale, its second conference at Chicago, and its first Lawyers Division chapter in Washington DC, as well as the effort to incorporate the Society, recruit its permanent staff, and obtain its early funding. She was a Founding Director of the Federalist Society.
Partner, Schaerr Jaffe LLP
Gene Schaerr specializes in handling—and usually winning—civil appeals, writ proceedings and similar matters, both in appellate courts and in the law-focused proceedings at the trial-court or agency level that often determine success or failure on appeal. He has argued and won dozens of cases in a variety of forums—including the U.S. Supreme Court (where he has argued six cases), every federal circuit, and numerous federal district courts and state appellate courts. His win rate in the dozens of federal appeals he has argued in the past six years is over 75 percent.
He was a coordinator of Sidley Austin's appellate practice from 1993 until 2005, and from 2005 until 2014 was the chair of the nationwide appellate practice at Winston & Strawn—a practice he led to numerous recognitions in such publications as the Appellate Hot List. His personal practice successes have won him repeated recognition in such publications as Best Lawyers in Washington, D.C., Legal 500, D.C. Superlawyers, and Best Lawyers in America. In January 2014, Mr. Schaerr formed his own boutique litigation firm so that he could serve his clients without the conflicts and inefficiencies inherent in big-firm law practice.
Substantively, Mr. Schaerr's experience includes not only virtually every area of federal law, defamation, higher education law, immigration, insurance coverage, labor and employment, patent and trademark, privacy, product liability and warranty, statutory interpretation and tax.He has represented clients in virtually every sector, including automotive, communications, energy, financial services, health care, higher education, insurance, maritime, pharmaceuticals, technology and state and local government. He also teaches courses in Supreme Court litigation, religious freedom litigation and advanced litigation skills as an adjunct professor of law at the Brigham Young University law school.
Mr. Schaerr began law practice in 1987 following clerkships on the U.S. Supreme Court (for Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justice Antonin Scalia) and on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (for then- Judge Kenneth Starr). He graduated in 1985 from the Yale Law School, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal on Regulation and Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal. From 1991 to 1993, he served in the White House as Associate Counsel to the President, where he had responsibility for a wide range of constitutional and administrative-law issues, including those involving economic regulation, higher education, separation of powers, federalism and religious freedom. He serves as Chairman of the Constitutional Sources Project, a digital resource providing free public access to historical materials relevant to the U.S. Constitution.
Clayton J. and Henry R. Barber Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and Co-Chairman, Board of Directors, The Federalist Society
STEVEN GOW CALABRESI is the Clayton J. & Henry R. Barber Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. He has also co-taught in the Fall semester at Yale Law School from 2013 to the present. Calabresi clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and Judges Robert H. Bork and Ralph K. Winter. He was a Special Assistant to Attorney General Meese from 1985 to 1987 and worked with Ken Cribb as his deputy in 1987 on the second floor of the West Wing of the Reagan White House. Calabresi has written books on presidential power and comparative constitutional law and the origins of judicial review. He and Gary Lawson are the co-editors of a casebook on U.S. Constitutional Law, and Calabresi is also the co-editor of a casebook on comparative constitutional law. He has written over seventy law review articles since 1990.
Professor of Law, Fordham University School of Law
Professor Andrew Kent teaches and writes about constitutional law, foreign relations law, federal courts and procedure, national security law, public international law, professional responsibility and legal ethics. He received the Dean’s Distinguished Research Award (2016-17) for his scholarship.
After graduating from Yale Law School, Professor Kent clerked for the Hon. Robert A. Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Hon. Carol B. Amon of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Before joining Fordham’s faculty, he was a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School and an attorney at both Sullivan & Cromwell and WilmerHale.
From 2014-2015, Professor Kent served as Senior Counsel to the Solicitor General, State of New York, Office of the Attorney General.
Professor Kent is a member of the New York City Bar’s Professional Responsibility Committee. He provides appellate representation to the indigent as a member of the Pro Bono Panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
Joshua Kleinfeld teaches and writes about political, legal, and moral philosophy, criminal law, and criminal procedure. He also practices law in Northwestern's Juvenile Criminal Defense Clinic. He is a full professor with tenure at the Northwestern Pritzker School of the Law and (by courtesy) in Northwestern’s philosophy department. In 2017-18, he was a visiting professor at Harvard and Stanford Law Schools. He is the recipient of the Bator Award, given annually to one American law professor under the age of 40 who has demonstrated "excellence in legal scholarship, a commitment to teaching, a concern for students, and who has made a significant public impact."
In philosophy, Kleinfeld's research focuses on the idea of "embodied ethical life," as developed in the socio-theoretic tradition of Hegel, Weber, and Durkheim. This tradition aims to understand and critique social life by bringing to light the normative ideas implicit in social practices and institutions. In law, this means that the most interesting philosophical concepts are often those reflected or actualized in legal practice – in the law as judges and lawyers think of it and wield it.
In criminal law and procedure, Kleinfeld has developed a theory known as "reconstructivism," which holds that the chief office of criminal law is not to dole out retributive justice, nor to optimize crime and cost control, but to reconstruct a violated normative order in the wake of a crime. This work, which draws on the thought of Hegel, Durkheim, Jean Hampton, and Antony Duff, develops an alternative to retributive and utilitarian theories of criminal law by focusing on the distinctive social function and sense of justice at work in the criminal system.
Kleinfeld is also involved in practical criminal justice reform. In this vein, he defends children accused of homicide in the Northwestern Juvenile Criminal Defense clinic and assists in litigation efforts meant to reform American criminal law through the courts. He has also developed a view of criminal justice reform known as "democratization," which holds that the root of the American criminal justice crisis is a set of bureaucratic attitudes, structures, and incentives divorced from the American public’s concerns and sense of justice, and that the primary solution is to make criminal justice more community-focused and responsive to lay influences. Working with others, he has developed a number of policy proposals meant to reform American criminal justice in a democratic direction.
Kleinfeld holds a JD from Yale Law School, a PhD in philosophy from the Goethe University of Frankfurt (supervised by Axel Honneth, Klaus Günther, and Rainer Forst), and a BA in philosophy from Yale College. He clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit; Judge Janice Rogers Brown on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; and President (chief justice) Aharon Barak of the Supreme Court of Israel. He worked as an Associate at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in Frankfurt, Germany, in the area of corporate criminal law. Before law school, he worked as a Senior Research Analyst at the White House’s Council on Bioethics.
Assistant Professor of Law, George Mason University, Antonin Scalia Law School
Robert Leider is an Assistant Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. His scholarly interests are in criminal law, criminal procedure, and constitutional law, especially concerning questions about the use of force and the rule of law. He has written on the law of self-defense, the constitutional allocation of military power, and gun control. Among other places, he has published in the Florida Law Review (forthcoming), the Indiana Law Journal, and the Wall Street Journal.
Before joining Antonin Scalia Law School, Professor Leider was at Arnold & Porter in Washington, DC. He was previously with Mayer Brown LLP and was an Olin-Searle-Smith Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has clerked for Judge Diane S. Sykes, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and Justice Clarence Thomas. Professor Leider earned a BA, summa cum laude, from The George Washington University, a JD from Yale Law School, and a PhD in Philosophy (dissertation defended with distinction) from Georgetown University. While at Yale, he served as an articles editor for the Yale Law Journal.
Professor Leider teaches criminal law and torts.
Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
THOMAS W. MERRILL is the Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He previously taught at Northwestern University School of Law and Yale Law School. He has undergraduate degrees from Grinnell College and Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and a law degree from the University of Chicago. He clerked on the D.C. Circuit (for Chief Judge David Bazelon) and the U.S. Supreme Court (for Justice Harry Blackmun). From 1987-1990 he served as Deputy Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Merrill’s writings related to property include Property: Principles and Policies (Foundation Press Second Edition, 2012) (with Henry E. Smith); Property: The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law (Oxford U. Press, 2010); Property: Takings (Foundation Press, 2002)(with David Dana); and numerous articles, including “The Economics of Public Use” (Cornell Law Review 1986); “The Landscape of Constitutional Property” (Virginia Law Review 2000); and “The Character of the Governmental Action” (Vermont Law Review 2012). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Charles I. Francis Professorship in Law, University of Texas at Austin School of Law
Professor Aaron Nielson lectures and writes in the areas of administrative law, civil procedure, and federal courts. Before joining the faculty, he served as Solicitor General of Texas and represented Texas before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Texas Supreme Court, as well as overseeing all appellate litigation for the State. Earlier in his career, he was a professor at Brigham Young University and an appellate and antitrust partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP. He also clerked for Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
As Solicitor General, Professor Nielson successfully defended against a First Amendment challenge Texas’s law requiring online pornographers to institute age verification. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court appointed him to defend the constitutionality of a federal agency. He currently serves as a Senior Fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States after completing a six-year term as an appointed public member and chair of the Conference’s Administration & Management Committee.
Nielson’s research focuses on administrative law, federal litigation, and the separation of powers. He has published (or soon will publish) in the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, and Northwestern University Law Review, among others. Nielson has been recognized for teaching for teaching and scholarship and in 2021 received the Federalist Society’s Joseph Story Award, which recognizes a young academic for excellence in legal scholarship, a commitment to teaching, and a concern for students, and who has made a significant public impact in a manner that advances the rule of law in a free society. He is also an elected member of the American Law Institute.
Professor Nielson received his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and an LL.M from the University of Cambridge, where he focused his studies on the institutions that regulate global competition and commerce. He received his undergraduate degree summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in economics and political science.
Associate Professor of Law, Lewis & Clark Law School
Ozan Varol is a rocket scientist turned award-winning law professor and author. He teaches in the areas of constitutional law, criminal law and procedure, comparative constitutional law, and Islamic law. His recent scholarship has focused on constitutional transitions and constitutional design. He also lectures and writes about civil-military relations and law and politics in the Middle East.
Professor Varol is the author of two forthcoming books with Oxford University: The Democratic Coup d’État (monograph) and Comparative Constitutional Law: A Global and Interdisciplinary Approach (co-authored textbook).
He has also authored more than a dozen book chapters or law review articles published or forthcoming in the California Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, UC Davis Law Review, Iowa Law Review (twice), Harvard International Law Journal, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Virginia Journal of International Law, American Journal of Comparative Law (peer-reviewed), and the International Journal of Constitutional Law (peer-reviewed), among many other academic journals. His scholarship has been featured in various domestic and foreign media outlets, including BBC, CNN, Washington Post, Slate, and Foreign Policy.
Professor Varol’s articles have received numerous scholarly recognitions. He is the only scholar to twice win the American Society of Comparative Law’s paper competition for younger scholars. His 2014 article, Temporary Constitutions, was selected as one of the best three papers in the AALS Scholarly Papers Competition, which is widely considered the most prestigious in legal education, and awarded Honorable Mention. In 2014 and in 2016, his articles won the Federalist Society’s Young Legal Scholars Paper Competition. In addition, his article, The Democratic Coup d’État, was identified in a review by Professor Mark Tushnet (Harvard Law School) as “one of the best works of recent scholarship relating to constitutional law.”
To access Professor Varol’s personal website and download a free chapter from his forthcoming book, click here.
Corpus Linguistics and Legal Interpretation
Steven G. Calabresi, Kurt T. Lash, Thomas Rex Lee, Stephen Mouritsen, Lee Liberman Otis, Lawrence Solan, Kellye Y. Testy
This panel is about “corpus linguistics,” a technique that involves the use of computer searches...
Corpus Linguistics and Legal Interpretation
19th Annual Faculty Conference
San Francisco, CAA Tribute to Justice Scalia
Remembering Justice Scalia - His Life and Legacy
TeleforumConservative & Libertarian Legal Scholarship: International Law & Transactions
[Return to Table of Contents] XVI. International Law & Transactions Introductory Materials Emer de Vattel,...
Conservative & Libertarian Legal Scholarship: Family Law
[Return to Table of Contents] XIII. Family Law Philosophical Underpinnings Individual Responsibility and the Law,...
Young Legal Scholars Paper Presentations
Steven G. Calabresi, Andrew Kent, Joshua Kleinfeld, Robert Leider, Thomas W. Merrill, Aaron Nielson, Ozan Varol
The Federalist Society's Faculty Division hosted this panel featuring young legal scholar paper presentations on Saturday, January...
Young Legal Scholars Paper Presentations
Steven G. Calabresi, Andrew Kent, Joshua Kleinfeld, Robert Leider, Thomas W. Merrill, Aaron Nielson, Ozan Varol
The Federalist Society's Faculty Division hosted this panel featuring young legal scholar paper presentations on Saturday, January...
Young Legal Scholars Paper Presentations
16th Annual Faculty Conference
New York, NYBook Review: Cosmic Constitutional Theory: Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance
Nelson Lund
Other Reviews of Cosmic Constitutional Theory: •Marc O. Degirolami, The New Republic, Sept. 2012: http://www.newrepublic.com/book/review/cosmic-constitutional-theory-judicial-restraint...