Associate, Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy, LLP
Ms. Jones is an associate with the government affairs group, responsible for providing expertise on legislation and regulations that address various immigration matters. Prior to joining Fragomen, Ms. Jones served as Chief Counsel for Constitutional Law, Courts, and Immigration for Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), Chairman and Ranking Member of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary. She was responsible for a broad range of issues, including immigration and border security, oversight of the judiciary, and constitutional law. Prior to her tenure in the United States Senate, Ms. Jones clerked for circuit court judge Lawrence Glazer in Lansing, Michigan and interned with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City and at the Michigan Department of Attorney General.
During law school, Ms. Jones served as a teaching assistant for constitutional law and as an Executive member of the Moot Court Board and marketing editor for the Thomas Cooley Law Journal. Ms. Jones is admitted in the District of Columbia (2003).
Associate, Greehan, Taves, Pandak & Stoner, PLLC
Retired
Tom Gede retired in 2023 as a principal in Morgan Lewis Consulting LLC and of counsel to the firm. He currently consults on a variety of legal and policy matters for both public and private clients. Tom has a national reputation and distinguished background in federal Indian law. Prior to retirement, he represented clients in complex governmental matters in litigation, administrative and regulatory proceedings, including high-profile matters involving state governments. A former senior deputy in the California Attorney General’s office, Tom was amicus coordinator and Supreme Court counsel, and argued cases in the US Supreme Court, the California Supreme Court, and numerous state and federal appellate courts.
Tom also served as executive director of the Conference of Western Attorneys General (CWAG), coordinating activities on key legal and policy issues, such as federal Indian law, energy, environmental, public lands, financial services, and telecommunications, for the attorneys general of 18 western states and territories. In 2016, Tom was elected as a Member of the American Law Institute (ALI), and served as an Adviser on the Restatement of the Law Third - The Law of American Indians. Tom also taught federal Indian law as an adjunct law professor at the University of the Pacific - McGeorge School of Law. He served as an assistant editor for and the author of the Indian gaming chapter in CWAG’s American Indian Law Deskbook (2d & 3d eds.). He has been engaged in Indian gaming and Indian law matters for more than three decades, having focused on the gaming compacts with Indian tribes, as well as complex civil and criminal jurisdiction, land, natural resources, water and law enforcement issues in Indian country. He has testified before Congress on American Indian and Native Alaskan issues. In 2012 he was appointed by Speaker John Boehner to serve on the United States Indian Law and Order Commission, where he examined criminal justice issues in Indian country and Alaska, resulting in the issuance of an important report to the President and Congress.
Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
ILYA SOMIN is Professor of Law at George Mason University and the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, democratic theory, federalism, and migration rights. He is the author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom (Oxford University Press, revised and expanded edition, 2022), Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (Stanford University Press, revised and expanded second edition, 2016), and The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain (University of Chicago Press, 2015, rev. paperback ed., 2016), coauthor of A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and co-editor of Eminent Domain: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Democracy and Political Ignorance has been translated into Italian and Japanese.
Somin’s work has appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Critical Review, and others. Somin has also published articles in a variety of popular press outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, CNN, NBC, The Atlantic, USA Today, Boston Globe, US News and World Report, South China Morning Post, National Law Journal and Reason. He has been quoted or interviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, The Economist, the Christian Science Monitor, the Financial Times, The Guardian, the Associated Press, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, BBC, Reuters, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Al Jazeera, and the Voice of America, among other media.
Somin’s writings have been cited in decisions by the United States Supreme Court, multiple state supreme courts and lower federal courts, and the Supreme Court of Israel. He is co-counsel for the plaintiffs in VOS Selections, Inc. v. Trump, a case challenging the constitutionality of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. Somin has testified on the use of drones for targeted killing in the War on Terror before the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights. In 2009, he testified on property rights issues at the United States Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Somin writes regularly for the popular Volokh Conspiracy law and politics blog, now affiliated with Reason magazine (previously affiliated with the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017). From 2006 to 2013, he served as Co-Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review, one of the country’s top-rated law and economics journals.
Somin has served as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has also been a visiting professor or scholar at the Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Hamburg, Germany, the University of Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Uriel Reichman University in Israel, and Zhengzhou University in China. He is a University Affiliate of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and an affiliated faculty member of the George Mason University Institute for Immigration Research. Before joining the faculty at George Mason, Somin was the John M. Olin Fellow in Law at Northwestern University Law School in 2002-2003. In 2001-2002, he clerked for the Hon. Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Professor Somin earned his B.A., Summa Cum Laude, at Amherst College, M.A. in Political Science from Harvard University, and J.D. from Yale Law School.
Partner, Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, LLP
Larry builds on a wide range of experiences – including as an accomplished attorney, a former President of the Ohio Senate, and a legal academic – to help solve his clients’ most challenging legal problems. Larry focuses on complex litigation, including high-stakes appeals.
Larry is a Partner in the firm’s Litigation practice. He focuses his practice on litigation at both the trial and appellate levels and has experience in a variety of matters involving antitrust, fiduciary duties, torts, contracts, securities, and employment law. These range from standard contract disputes to constitutional challenges against federal statutes to defending against complex class actions.
In addition to his litigation practice, Larry served as a member of the Ohio Senate for nearly a decade. His colleagues unanimously elected him to serve as Senate President, the presiding officer of the 33-member chamber, from 2017-2020. During his time in the Senate, Larry successfully sponsored legislation on a wide range of topics, including education, tax law, elections administration, criminal law, and corporate law. These included a comprehensive update to Ohio’s corporate code and limited liability company law, including the sections setting out fiduciary duties for officers and shareholders. Larry also sponsored significant updates to Ohio’s Control Share Acquisition Act (which governs corporate takeovers). In 2018, he received the Ohio State Bar Association’s Lawyer-Legislator Distinguished Service Award.
Larry has also taught courses on Civil Procedure and Legislation as an adjunct law professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. He has published legal scholarship on a range of issues including constitutional law, education, law and economics, and securities. He has been cited in roughly 75 law journals throughout the country and by a member of the United States Supreme Court.
Larry began his legal career as a law clerk to Judge Alice M. Batchelder of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He has worked at some of the nation’s largest law firms and began his private practice by spending more than five years with Chicago-based Kirkland & Ellis LLP.
From 2018-2020, Larry was a Rodel Fellow at the Aspen Institute, a program designed to bring greater civility to public discourse. He is active in the Federalist Society and is a former board member of the Ohio Legal Assistance Foundation (now known as the Ohio Access to Justice Foundation), the statewide umbrella organization for legal aid.
Director of Litigation and Senior Attorney, Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute
Theodore H. Frank is director at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute and the Center for Class Action Fairness. Frank founded and ran CCAF as a non-profit, public interest law firm in 2009.
Frank has won several landmark appeals and tens of millions of dollars for consumers and other plaintiffs through his class action work. Adam Liptak of The New York Times calls Frank “the leading critic of abusive class action settlements” and the American Lawyer Litigation Daily referred to him as “the indefatigable scourge of underwhelming class action settlements.”
Previously, Frank clerked for the Honorable Frank H. Easterbrook on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and was a litigator at firms in Washington and Los Angeles and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Frank is a frequent public speaker and has testified before Congress multiple times on legal issues. He has been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, GQ, and the ABA Journal, among other publications.
In 2008, Frank was elected to membership in the American Law Institute. He also serves on the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society Litigation Practice Group. Frank graduated from The University of Chicago Law School in 1994 with high honors and as a member of the Order of the Coif and the Law Review. He is a member of the District of Columbia Bar and the state bars of California and Illinois.
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