Senior Counsel, Chair, Religious Institutions and Education Practice Groups, First Liberty Institute
Jeremy Dys, Esq., is Senior Counsel for First Liberty.
Dys earned his law degree from West Virginia University College of Law in 2005. After law school, Dys clerked for the Hon. Russell M. Clawges, Jr., chief judge of the Circuit Court of Monongalia County in Morgantown, West Virginia. For six years prior to joining First Liberty Institute, Dys led a public policy organization where he led research and advocacy efforts on matters of life, marriage, and religious freedom.
Dys graduated from Taylor University in 2001 with a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, degree in Communication Studies, with minors in U.S. History and Philosophy. During his undergraduate career, Dys studied at the American Studies Program in Washington, D.C., where he interned with the late David Orgon Coolidge as part of the Marriage Law Project of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
In support of his clients, Dys has made numerous appearances in local, state, and national television, print, and radio outlets. His written commentaries have been featured at the Wall Street Journal, FoxNews.com, New York Daily News, TheHill.com, Des Moines Register, Dallas Morning News, DailySignal.com, Washington Examiner, Indianapolis Star, Charleston Gazette-Mail, Outcomes Magazine, TheFederalist.com, and others.
Senior Counsel, First Liberty Institute
Stephanie N. Taub serves as Senior Counsel with First Liberty Institute, focusing on litigation, appellate advocacy, and legal education.
While at First Liberty, her article on the rights of faith-based organizations under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been published in the Texas Review of Law and Politics. She has also authored pieces published in National Review, the Daily Signal, the Washington Times, the Des Moines Register, and the New York Daily News. In 2017, Taub was named one of 15 recipients of the James Wilson Fellowship in natural law.
Before joining First Liberty, Taub worked as a law clerk to the Honorable Reed O’Connor in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Texas.
Taub is a Harvard Law School graduate in the class of 2014 and a Blackstone Fellow in the class of 2012. During law school, she served as Co-President of the HLS Christian Fellowship and Managing Technical Editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal. Taub spent her law school summers defending religious liberty in public interest law firms and clerking in the Texas Office of Solicitor General.
For her undergraduate studies at the University of Southern California, Taub graduated summa cum laude, majoring in Business Administration with a minor in Philosophy.
Counsel, First Liberty Institute
Kayla Toney is Associate Counsel with First Liberty Institute, concentrating on religious liberty matters and First Amendment rights for clients of all faiths.
Prior to joining First Liberty, Kayla litigated religious freedom cases as a Constitutional Law Fellow at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. She clerked for Judge Gregory E. Maggs on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, where she gained valuable experience in the military justice system. Kayla also worked as a litigation associate in the D.C. office of Winston & Strawn LLP, where she enjoyed working on pro bono religious liberty matters.
Kayla earned her law degree from George Washington University, where she served as president of the Federalist Society chapter, a member of the GW International Law Review, and a writing fellow. She graduated summa cum laude from Grove City College with a degree in history and economics.
A native of Michigan, Kayla is based in First Liberty’s Washington, D.C. office and is licensed to practice law in Virginia and D.C.
Garwood Visiting Professor and Visiting Fellow, James Madison Pr, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law
David F. Forte is Professor of Law at Cleveland State University, where he was the inaugural holder of the Charles R. Emrick, Jr.- Calfee Halter & Griswold Endowed Chair. This fall, Professor Forte will be the Garwood Visiting Professor at Princeton University in the Department of Politics, and Visiting Fellow at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He holds degrees from Harvard College, Manchester University, England, the University of Toronto and Columbia University.
During the Reagan administration, Professor Forte served as chief counsel to the United States delegation to the United Nations and alternate delegate to the Security Council. He has authored a number of briefs before the United States Supreme Court, and has frequently testified before the United States Congress and consulted with the Department of State on human rights and international affairs issues. His advice was specifically sought on the approval of the Genocide Convention, on world-wide religious persecution, and Islamic extremism. He has appeared and spoken frequently on radio and television, both nationally and internationally. In 2002, the Department of State sponsored a speaking tour for Professor Forte in Amman, Jordan, and he was also a featured speaker to the Meeting of Peoples in Rimini, Italy, a meeting which gathers over 500,000 people from all over Europe. He has also been called to testify before the state legislatures of Ohio, Kansas, and Idaho as well as the New York City Council. He has assisted in drafting a number of pieces of legislation for the Ohio General Assembly dealing with abortion, international trade, and federalism. He has sat as acting judge on the municipal court of Lakewood Ohio and was chairman of Professional Ethics Committee of the Cleveland Bar Association. He has received a number of awards for his public service, including the Cleveland Bar Association’s President’s Award, the Cleveland State University Award for Distinguished Service, the Cleveland State University Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Alumni Award for Faculty Excellence. He served as Consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Family under Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. In 2003, Dr. Forte was a Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the University of Trento and returned there in 2004 as a Visiting Professor. For the academic year, 2008-2009, Professor Forte was Senior Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion and the Constitution in at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. He was the Robert E. Henderson Constitution Day Lecturer at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, and he has given over 300 invited addresses and papers at more than 100 academic institutions. His work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Professor Forte was a Bradley Scholar at the Heritage Foundation, and Visiting Scholar at the Liberty Fund. He has been President of the Ohio Association of Scholars, was on the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia Society, and is also adjunct Scholar at the Ashbrook Center. He has been appointed to the Ohio State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He has also been a Civil War re-enactor and a Merit Badge Counselor for the Boy Scouts.
He writes and speaks nationally on topics such as constitutional law, religious liberty, Islamic law, the rights of families, and international affairs. He served as book review editor for the American Journal of Jurisprudence and has edited a volume entitled, Natural Law and Contemporary Public Policy, published by Georgetown University Press. His book, Islamic Law Studies: Classical and Contemporary Applications, has been published by Austin & Winfield. He is Senior Editor of The Heritage Guide to the Constitution (2006), 2d edition (2014), published by Regnery & Co, a clause by clause analysis of the Constitution of the United States.
His teaching competencies include Constitutional Law, the First Amendment, Islamic Law, Jurisprudence, Natural Law, International Law, International Human Rights, the Presidency, and Constitutional History.
R. B. Price and Isabelle Wade & Paul C. Lyda Professor Emeritus of Law, University of Missouri School of Law
Carl H. Esbeck is R.B. Price Professor and Isabelle Wade & Paul C. Lyda Professor of Law emeritus at the University of Missouri. After attending Cornell University School of Law where he served as an editor on the Cornell Law Review, he held a judicial clerkship with the Honorable Howard C. Bratton, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in New Mexico.
Professor Esbeck publishes widely in the area of religious liberty and church-state relations. He is recognized as the progenitor of "Charitable Choice," an integral part of the 1996 Federal Welfare Reform Act, later made a part of the faith-based initiative and equal-treatment regulations under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In addition, he has taken the lead in recognizing that the modern Supreme Court has applied the Establishment Clause not as a personal right, but as a structural limit on the government's authority in disputes involving church governance. While on leave from 1999 to 2002, Professor Esbeck directed the Center for Law & Religious Freedom (CLRF) and later served as Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice. While directing the CLRF, Professor Esbeck was a central part of the congressional advocacy behind the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA). While at the Department of Justice one of his duties was to direct a task force to remove barriers to the equal-treatment of faith-based organizations applying for social service grants. He is the author of Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776 - 1833 (U. of MO Press, 2019).
Senior Counsel, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
Senior Counsel Hannah Smith joined Becket in 2007 following two clerkships at the U.S. Supreme Court for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito, Jr.
Ms. Smith was a member of the Becket legal team that secured victories in key U.S. Supreme Court religious liberty cases, including Holt v. Hobbs, 574 U.S. ___ (Jan. 20, 2015), where a unanimous Court held in an opinion authored by Justice Alito that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act requires prison officials to accommodate peaceful expressions of religious devotion; Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 134 S. Ct. 2751 (June 30, 2014), where the Court held in a 5-4 opinion authored by Justice Alito that family-owned businesses enjoy religious liberty rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and that the HHS mandate violated the Act; and Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, 132 S. Ct. 694 (2012), where a unanimous Court held in an opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts that the “ministerial exception” under the First Amendment protects a church’s right to choose its own ministers.
Ms. Smith contributed to Becket's Supreme Court filings in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Burwell (2015); Houston Baptist University v. Burwell (2015); Stormans v. Wiesman (2015); Michigan Catholic Conference v. Burwell (2015); Obergefell v. Hodges (2015); University of Notre Dame v. Burwell (2014); Wheaton College v. Burwell, 134 S. Ct. 2806 (2014); Little Sisters of the Poor v. Sebelius, 134 S. Ct. 1022 (2014); Bronx Household of Faith v. New York City Board of Education (2014), Elmbrook School District v. Doe (2014), Big Sky Colony v. Montana Department of Labor and Industry (2013), Sossamon v. Texas (2011), Arizona Christian School Tuition Association v. Winn (2011), Bronx Household of Faith v. New York City Board of Education (2011), Utah Highway Patrol Association v. American Atheists (2011), Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), and Salazar v. Buono (2010).
Ms. Smith has been featured on CNN, Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, The Sean Hannity Show, C-Span, EWTN, Al Jazeera America, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, U.S. News and World Report, the Associated Press, National Review Online, Bloomberg News, NPR, BBC, the Laura Ingraham Show, the Rush Limbaugh Show, the Hugh Hewitt Show, BYU Radio, and many other publications and radio shows. She has been invited to speak on religious liberty at Harvard Law School, Princeton University, Stanford Law School, University of Pennsylvania Law School, Southern Methodist University Law School, Brigham Young University Law School, American University Washington College of the Law, and Central European University. And she has given briefings on religious liberty issues at the U.S. Capitol, the State Department, the Heritage Foundation, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, the American Bar Association, and the National Constitution Center.
Ms. Smith received her B.A. from Princeton University, concentrating in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She graduated with honors from Brigham Young University Law School and was elected to the Order of the Coif. She served as Executive Editor of the BYU Law Review, as a research assistant for the BYU International Center for Law and Religion Studies, and as president of the BYU Federalist Society. BYU awarded her its Alumni Achievement Award for her work in the defense of religious freedom. Ms. Smith also received the J. Reuben Clark Law Society's Women-in-Law Leadership Award for her national leadership in defending religious liberty and advancing the contributions of Mormon women to the law.
Following law school and in between clerkships, she was an associate in private practice at Williams & Connolly and Sidley Austin in Washington D.C., representing clients before state and federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court in civil, criminal, and constitutional cases. Her private practice religious liberty work included the U.S. Supreme Court petition for certiorari in Corporation of the Presiding Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints v. First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City (2003), as well as matters on behalf of Brigham Young University, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington D.C.
Ms. Smith served as a full-time volunteer missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in France and Switzerland. She currently serves as a member of the J. Reuben Clark Law Society International Board and as a member of the Deseret News Editorial Advisory Board. She writes on religious liberty issues in the Deseret News. Hannah and her husband John are happily married with 4 wonderful children.
Do Legislative Meetings Have a Prayer? Town of Greece and a Curious Circuit Split
Montgomery Lawyers Chapter
Montgomery, ALA Cord of Three Strands: How Kennedy v. Bremerton School District Changed Free Exercise, Establishment, and Free Speech Clause Doctrine
Stephanie Taub, Kayla Ann Toney
In 2015, Bremerton High School football coach Joseph Kennedy lost his job for kneeling at...
Topics
Kennedy v. Bremerton School District’s Effect on the Establishment Clause
On June 27, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. In...
We Are Free for a Reason
David F. Forte
A review of Free to Believe: The Battle Over Religious Liberty in America, by Luke...
After Espinoza, What’s Left of the Establishment Clause?
Carl H. Esbeck
Note from the Editor: The Federalist Society takes no positions on particular legal and public...
Can a New Establishment Clause Jurisprudence Succeed in Protecting Religious Minorities Where Lemon Has Failed?
Alexandra M. Lightfoot
Note from the Editor: The Federalist Society takes no positions on particular legal and public...
Topics
The Bladensburg WWI Memorial Cross
On February 27, 2019, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral argument in...
Topics
Interesting Establishment Clause Case in the Eleventh Circuit - Kondrat'Yev v. City of Pensacola
In May, the Eleventh Circuit will hear argument in Kondrat'Yev v. City of Pensacola (No....
Topics
Docket Watch: Bormuth v. County of Jackson
If you’re looking for evidence that Establishment Clause jurisprudence is a mess, look no further...
When a Pastor’s House Is a Church Home: Why the Parsonage Allowance Is Desirable Under the Establishment Clause
Daniel Benson, Hannah C. Smith
Note from the Editor: This article discusses the parsonage allowance, whereby the value of a...