President, Society for the Rule of Law
George T. Conway III has been a partner in the Litigation Department of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz since January 1994. He joined the firm in September 1988. His litigation experience has included a variety of high-profile matters spanning many areas of law in federal and state courts throughout the country. He has extensive experience in securities litigation, mergers and acquisitions litigation, contract litigation, antitrust litigation, and other litigation, both at the trial and appellate levels.
In the area of securities litigation, he recently briefed and argued the case for respondents in Morrison v. National Australia Bank, in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 does not apply extraterritorially to claims of so-called "foreign-cubed" plaintiffs -- foreign investors who purchased securities of foreign issuers on foreign exchanges. He also recently argued and won a precedent-setting motion to dismiss so-called "foreign-squared" claims against European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co. brought by American plaintiffs who purchased that foreign company's shares on foreign exchanges.
Mr. Conway also recently argued and won an important appeal under the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 on behalf of the Swiss installation artist Christoph Büchel in the artist’s highly publicized dispute with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. He also successfully represented the Chief Judge of the State of New York and the New York Unified Court System in historic constitutional litigation over the State of New York’s extended failure to adjust judicial salaries. Mr. Conway also played a substantial role in the successful defense of Kenneth Langone’s Invemed Associates in a disciplinary proceeding before the NASD (now FINRA) that resulted in what the New York Times called a "withering," "high-profile defeat" for the regulators.
Mr. Conway’s work in mergers and acquisitions litigation includes the representation of Rohm and Haas Co. and ADVO, Inc., in, respectively, Rohm and Haas v. Dow Chemical Co., and Valassis Communications v. ADVO, two Delaware Chancery Court cases involving claims to enforce merger agreements, as well as two historic cases in the development of Delaware corporate law governing mergers and acquisitions, QVC v. Paramount Communications and Paramount Communications v. Time Inc. and Warner Communications, in addition to many other cases involving contests for corporate control in the Delaware courts and elsewhere over the past two decades.
In addition, Mr. Conway played a substantial role in prosecuting one of the most prominent defamation cases in recent memory (Philip Morris v. American Broadcasting Cos.). He has extensive experience in merger-related private antitrust litigation and government antitrust investigations, including the defense of Cardinal Health in the preliminary injunction proceedings before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in FTC v. Cardinal Health. He also represented the National Football League in trademark and antitrust litigation against the Dallas Cowboys in NFL Properties v. Dallas Cowboys Football Club. His pro bono work includes his successful representation in the Second Circuit of crime victims and public-interest groups as amici curiae in opposing claims that federal law requires the State of New York to allow felons to vote while still incarcerated.
Mr. Conway is a graduate of Harvard College, where in 1984 he received an A.B. magna cum laude in biochemical sciences. He received his J.D. in 1987 from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. In 1987 and 1988, he served as a law clerk to Circuit Judge Ralph K. Winter, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
President, Harned Strategies LLC
Karen Harned is President at Harned Strategies LLC. Previously, she served as Executive Director of the National Federation of Independent Business Small Business Legal Center, a post she held from 2002-2022. Prior to joining the Legal Center, Ms. Harned was an attorney at a Washington, D.C. law firm specializing in food and drug law, where she represented several small and large businesses and their respective trade associations before Congress and federal agencies. She also served as Assistant Press Secretary to U.S. Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma from August of 1989 to March of 1993. Ms. Harned received her B.A. from the University of Oklahoma in 1989 and her J.D. from The George Washington University National Law Center in 1995. She is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia.
As Executive Director of the NFIB Small Business Legal Center, Ms. Harned commented regularly on small business cases before federal and state courts, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court. She has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business, NBC Nightly News, CNN, CNBC and MSNBC, as well as National Public Radio, CBS Radio, and radio outlets across the country. Her opinion editorials and articles regarding healthcare, lawsuit abuse, regulation, and other issues important to small business have been published in newspapers and other publications nationwide.
Ms. Harned has testified before Congress on the small business impact of regulation and the civil justice system. Additionally, she has conducted numerous webinars and legal compliance seminars for small business owners across the country on issues relating to employment law, including unionization and immigration.
Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies, Manhattan Institute
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Previously he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute.
Shapiro is the author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (2025) and Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020), coauthor of Religious Liberties for Corporations? (2014), and editor of 11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review (2008-18). He has contributed to a variety of academic, popular, and professional publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, and Newsweek. He also regularly provides commentary for various media outlets, writes the Shapiro’s Gavel newsletter on Substack, and once appeared on the Colbert Report.
Shapiro has testified many times before Congress and state legislatures and has filed more than 500 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court. He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, is a member of the board of fellows of the Jewish Policy Center, was an inaugural Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute, and has been an adjunct law professor at the George Washington University and University of Mississippi. He is also the chairman of the board of advisers of the Mississippi Justice Institute, a barrister in the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court, and a former member of the Virginia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Earlier in his career, Shapiro was a special assistant/adviser to the Multi-National Force in Iraq on rule-of-law issues and practiced at Patton Boggs and Cleary Gottlieb. Before entering private practice, he clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He holds an AB from Princeton University, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School.
Dr. John Eastman is the former Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service and former Dean at Chapman University's Dale E. Fowler School of Law, where he had been a member of the faculty since 1999, specializing in Constitutional Law, Legal History, and Property. He is a founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute that he founded in 1999. He has a Ph.D. in Government from the Claremont Graduate School and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, and a B.A. in Politics and Economics from the University of Dallas. He serves as the Chairman of the Board of the National Organization for Marriage.
Prior to joining the Chapman law faculty, Dr. Eastman served as a law clerk to the Honorable Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States, and to the Honorable J. Michael Luttig, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and practiced law with the national law firm of Kirkland & Ellis. Dr. Eastman has also represented numerous clients in important constitutional law matters and has argued before the Supreme Court. On behalf of the Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, he has participated as amicus curiae before the Supreme Court of the United States, U.S. Courts of Appeals, and State Supreme Courts in more than one hundred cases of constitutional significance, including Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (the school vouchers case), Kelo v. New London, Ct. (eminent domain), and Van Orden v. Perry (the 10 Commandments case). He has also appeared as an expert legal commentator on numerous television and radio programs, including C-SPAN, Fox News, PBS, NewsHour, and The O'Reilly Factor.
Senior Staff Attorney, Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, ACLU
Brian Hauss is a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, where he focuses on free expression issues. Since joining the ACLU in 2012, he has litigated cases defending the First Amendment rights of writers, journalists, media organizations, activists, advocacy groups, labor unions and private citizens. He has authored or co-authored numerous Supreme Court amicus curiae briefs on behalf of the ACLU and other groups. He also regularly discusses First Amendment issues in the media and at law schools throughout the country. Brian was a 2021-22 Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School. He is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School and served as a law clerk to the Hon. Marsha S. Berzon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Professor of Law, Catholic University of America
Robert Destro served as Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL). He has a long history as a human rights advocate and civil rights attorney with expertise in elections, employment, and constitutional law. Destro has served on the faculty at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law since 1982 and served as its interim dean from 1999 to 2001. He was founding director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Law and Religion and served as the Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies from June 2017 to September 2019. He served as a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1983-1989. His legal work includes collaboration with the Peace Research Institute Oslo in a fifteen-year dialogue among Muslim, Christian, and Jewish leaders in the legal, business, and religious fields in the United States and the Middle East as well as efforts promoting the release of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience in the Middle East. He has served as voting rights counsel for the Ohio Secretary of State and has advocated for the first amendment rights of individuals and organizations.
He earned a B.A. from Miami University, Ohio, and a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is an active member of the Bar in Ohio and California.
The rest of his bio including his publications are available on the Catholic University Faculty page linked here.
Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law & Religion and, Washington University School of Law
Professor John Inazu's scholarship focuses on the First Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion, and related questions of legal and political theory. His first book, Liberty's Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (Yale University Press, 2012), seeks to recover the role of assembly in American political and constitutional thought. His second book isConfident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Professor Inazu is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He is the special editor of a volume on law and theology published in Law and Contemporary Problems, and his articles have appeared in a number of law reviews and specialty journals. He has written broadly for mainstream audiences in publications including USA Today, CNN, the Hedgehog Review, and the Washington Post.
Professor Inazu was the law school's 2014 David M. Becker Professor of the Year. Prior to joining the law faculty, he was a visiting assistant professor at Duke University School of Law and a Royster Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He clerked for Judge Roger L. Wollman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and served for four years as an associate general counsel with the Department of the Air Force at the Pentagon.
F. Elwood and Eleanor Davis Professor Emeritus of Law, The George Washington University Law School
Professor Lupu joined the law school in 1990. After graduating from law school, where he was case editor of the Harvard Law Review, he practiced law with the Boston firm of Hill & Barlow and then joined the law faculty at Boston University, where he taught from 1973 to 1989. During that time, he also served as a visiting professor at Northeastern University and at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1989–90, he was the professor-in-residence on the Appellate Staff of the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Professor Lupu is a nationally recognized scholar in constitutional law, with an emphasis in his writings on the religion clauses of the First Amendment. Together with his colleague Professor Robert Tuttle, Professor Lupu is the co-author of Secular Government, Religious People (Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2014) and many law journal articles.
Warren Distinguished Professor of Law; Co-Executive Director, Institute for Law & Religion; Co-Executive Director, Institute for Law & Philosophy, University of San Diego School of Law
Steven D. Smith, J.D. Yale 1979, B.A. BYU 1976, is a Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego, and Co-Director of that university's Institute for Law and Religion. Before moving to San Diego, he was the Robert and Marion Short Professor at Notre Dame Law School and the Byron R. White Professor of Law at the University of Colorado.
Professor Smith's first book, Foreordained Failure: The Quest for a Constitutional Principle of Religious Freedom (Oxford 1995), critically examines both the standard historical and normative accounts of religious freedom. This examination is continued in his most recent book, The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom (Harvard 2014), which offers a "revised account" in contrast to the standard story of religious freedom in this country. Recently described as a kind of "conservative Crit," Professor Smith has offered critical analyses of more general philosophical and jurisprudential themes in Law's Quandary (Harvard 2004) and The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (Harvard 2010).
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
Judge Duncan received his B.A. from Louisiana State University in 1994, his J.D. from the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University in 1997, and his LL.M. from Columbia Law School in 2004.
After graduating from law school, he clerked for Louisiana-based Circuit Judge John Malcolm Duhé Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
From 2008–2012, Duncan served as Appellate Chief for Louisiana's Attorney General's office. From 2012–2014, he served as general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. From 2004-2008, he was an assistant professor of law at the University of Mississippi School of Law.
Before becoming a judge, Duncan practiced at the Washington, D.C. firm of Schaerr Duncan LLP, where he was a founding partner. He was appointed by President Trump to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on May 1, 2018.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit
Judge Katsas was appointed to the D.C. Circuit in December 2017. He graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, where he was an executive editor on the Harvard Law Review. Between 1989 and 1992, he served as a law clerk to Judge Edward Becker on the Third Circuit, to then-Judge Clarence Thomas on the D.C. Circuit, and to Justice Thomas on the Supreme Court. Between 1992 and 2001, he was an associate and then partner in the Washington office of Jones Day, where he specialized in appellate and complex civil litigation. Between 2001 and 2009, he served in many senior positions in the Department of Justice, including as Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division and as Acting Associate Attorney General. In 2009, he returned to Jones Day. From January to December 2017, he served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President.
Before joining the bench, Judge Katsas argued more than 75 appeals, including three cases in the Supreme Court, 13 cases in the D.C. Circuit, and cases in every other federal court of appeals. By appointment of the Chief Justice, he served on the Advisory Committee on Appellate Rules from 2013 to 2017. In 2016, he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers.
Senior Vice President for Legal Studies, Cato Institute
Clark Neily is senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute. His areas of interest include constitutional law, overcriminalization, civil forfeiture, police accountability, and gun rights. Neily is the author of Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and National Review Online, as well as various law reviews, including the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, George Mason Law Review, Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, NYU Journal of Law and Liberty, and Texas Review of Law and Politics. Neily is a frequent guest speaker and lecturer for the Federalist Society, Institute for Humane Studies, and American Constitution Society.
Before joining Cato in 2017, Neily was a senior attorney and constitutional litigator at the Institute for Justice and director of the Institute’s Center for Judicial Engagement. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law, where he teaches constitutional litigation and public-interest law.
Neily served as co-counsel in District of Columbia v. Heller, the historic case in which the Supreme Court held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun for self-defense.
Neily began his legal career as a law clerk to Judge Royce Lamberth on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. After that he spent four years in the trial department of the Dallas-based firm Thompson & Knight. Neily received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Texas, where he was Chief Articles Editor of the Texas Law Review.
President, The Ethics and Public Policy Center
Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., is the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. In May 2025, Anderson was appointed by President Trump to the Religious Liberty Commission.
He is the author or co-author of five books, including the just-released Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing. Previous books include When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, and Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination. He is the co-editor of A Liberalism Safe for Catholicism? Perspectives from “The Review of Politics.”
Anderson’s research has been cited by two U.S. Supreme Court justices, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, in two Supreme Court cases.
He received his bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, and he received his doctoral degree in political philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. His dissertation was titled: “Neither Liberal Nor Libertarian: A Natural Law Approach to Social Justice and Economic Rights.”
Anderson has made appearances on ABC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, and Fox News. His work has been published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the Harvard Health Policy Review, the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, First Things, the Claremont Review of Books, and National Review.
He is the John Paul II Teaching Fellow in Social Thought at the University of Dallas, a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University, and a Fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, as well as the Founding Editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey.
For 9 years he was the William E. Simon senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and has served as an adjunct professor of philosophy and political science at Christendom College, and a Visiting Fellow at the Veritas Center at Franciscan University. He has also served as an assistant editor of First Things.
Omnicare v. Laborers District Council Construction Industry Pension Fund - Post-Argument SCOTUScast
George T. Conway, George ConwayI
On November 3, 2014, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Omnicare v. Laborers District...
Supreme Court Preview
New York City, New YorkBurwell v. Hobby Lobby: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
RochesterThe Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom
Book Event Sponsored by the Faculty Division and the George Washington University Law School Student Chapter
Washington, DCHobby Lobby and Religious Freedom
Cincinnati, OhioAttorney Eric Miller on Upcoming Supreme Court Term
Seattle, WashingtonUnited States Supreme Court Preview
Charleston, West VirginiaOvercriminalization and Overregulation
Tulsa, OklahomaReligious Liberty: The Founders' Intentions and Current Threats
Nashville, TennesseeIntegrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk - Post-Argument SCOTUScast
Karen Harned
On October 8, 2014, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Integrity Staffing Solutions v....