Senior Vice President, Strategic Initiatives & Special Counsel to the President, Alliance Defending Freedom
Ryan Bangert serves as senior vice president for strategic initiatives and special counsel to the president at Alliance Defending Freedom. He oversees ADF’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship and Research & Innovation Team. He also advises executive leadership on strategic initiatives.
Before joining ADF, Bangert served as deputy first assistant attorney general and deputy for legal counsel in the office of the Texas attorney general, and as deputy for civil litigation for Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley. Prior to his government service, Bangert was a litigation partner at Baker Botts L.L.P., where he was a member of the firm’s commercial litigation and appellate practice sections.
Bangert has been published at First Things, Civitas Outlook, Law & Liberty, National Review, Daily Wire, The Hill, Washington Examiner, The Federalist, Fox News, and the American Reformer. He speaks nationally on constitutional, cultural, and religious liberty issues. He also serves as Visiting Faculty in Law at the University of Austin.
He earned his J.D. from Southern Methodist University, where he was a Hatton Sumners scholar and graduated first in his class. Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable Patrick E. Higginbotham on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Partner, Schaerr | Jaffe LLP
Erik Jaffe has been involved in appeals on a broad range of legal issues, including First Amendment challenges to campaign finance reform, Commerce Clause challenges to Health Care Reform and other federal legislation, Equal Protection Clause challenges to affirmative action in education, First Amendment challenges to school vouchers, Fifth Amendment challenges to takings of property, Second Amendment challenges to restrictions on gun ownership, and a wide variety of cases involving patents, copyrights, ERISA, securities fraud, federal preemption, environmental regulation, and other state and federal constitutional and statutory matters. He has represented businesses and non-profit groups, Judges, Senators, former government officials, Nobel Prize winners, and a broad cross-section of private individuals. Mr. Jaffe has been involved in over 120 Supreme Court matters, including filing over 30 cert. petitions, representing half-a-dozen parties on the merits, and filing over 70 amicus briefs at both the cert. and merits stages.
A 1990 graduate of the Columbia University School of Law, Mr. Jaffe was a law clerk to Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1990 to 1991. Following that clerkship he spent five years in litigation practice with the Washington, D.C. law firm of Williams & Connolly. In the summer of 1996 he left Williams & Connolly to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. At the end of that clerkship he started his own practice, and he was a sole practitioner from 1997 to 2018. He joined the firm of Schaerr | Jaffe LLP in 2018.
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.
General Counsel, Center for Individual Rights
Darpana Sheth joined CIR as General Counsel in May 2025. She is a nationally recognized constitutional litigator with over two decades of experience serving in in leadership roles at other nonprofit organizations.
Before joining CIR, Darpana served for four years as Vice President of Litigation for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Prior to that, Darpana was a Senior Attorney with the Institute for Justice, where she also served as Director of the Institute’s National Initiative to End Forfeiture Abuse.
Before finding her calling as a public-interest attorney, Darpana served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of New York and worked in private practice as a litigation associate at the Manhattan law firm of Chadbourne & Parke, LLP. She also served as law clerk to the Honorable Jerome A. Holmes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
A native of Philadelphia, Darpana graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and History. She earned her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center.
Senior Attorney, Institute for Free Speech
Owen Yeates is a Senior Attorney on the litigation team and plays an important role in their regulatory, legislative, and policy work. Owen joined the Institute in 2015 as a Staff Attorney and was promoted in 2021 to Senior Attorney and Deputy Vice President for Litigation, after serving as Acting Legal Director following the departure of Allen Dickerson to the Federal Election Commission. From May 2022 to May 2025, Owen served as a Deputy District Attorney for Multnomah County, Oregon. He re-joined the Institute for Free Speech as a Senior Attorney in May 2025.
He received his J.D. from Stanford Law School after completing a Ph.D. in Political Science at Duke University and a B.S., summa cum laude, in Physics from Brigham Young University. Owen clerked for the Honorable Scott Matheson, Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit (2012-2013), the Honorable J. Jerome Farris of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (2011-2012), and the Honorable James L. Robart of the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington (Summer 2012). After clerking, he was a litigation associate in intellectual property law at Klarquist Sparkman, LLP, in Portland, Oregon, where he was involved with the Legal Aid Society of Oregon’s domestic violence program. Before law school, he taught Ancient Political Theory, American Politics, Theories of Human Freedom, and Religion and American Politics at Brigham Young University and Wake Forest University. During law school, Owen interned with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Department of Defense, and he worked with the school’s Three Strikes Clinic and Domestic Violence pro bono program.
Owen is licensed to practice law in the District of Columbia, Oregon, Utah (inactive), and Washington state (inactive). He is admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court; the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and D.C. Circuits; and the United States District Courts for the Districts of Colorado, Columbia, Oregon, and Utah, as well as the Eastern District of Texas and the Western District of Tennessee.
Research Scholar in Law and Executive Director, Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech, Yale Law School
Joe Cohn is a research scholar in law at Yale Law school and the executive director of the Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech (CAFFS).
Cohn has served as a staff attorney at the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania, a staff attorney for the Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, an adjunct professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he supervised law students representing clients in litigation in state and federal courts, and as the interim legal director for ACLU affiliates in Nevada and Utah.
A majority of Cohn’s career has been dedicated to defending civil liberties on college campuses and free expression in society at large. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE’s) founding legislative and policy director, from 2012 to 2023, he testified on numerous occasions in legislatures across America and in Congress, drafted legislation on campus free speech, campus due process, and academic freedom that has been enacted in states across the country. Immediately before joining CAFFS, Cohn advocated for open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in higher education as Heterodox Academy’s director of policy.
Cohn writes extensively on civil liberties, with articles published in a wide array of media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Newsweek, the Hill, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the Las Vegas Review Journal, the Minnesota Star Tribune, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and the Volokh Conspiracy.
He earned his bachelor of arts from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas in 2000. He is a 2004 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law and the Fels Institute of Government Administration, where he earned his J.D. and M.A. in Government Administration.
Senior Counsel, Director of Center for Academic Freedom, Alliance Defending Freedom
Tyson Langhofer serves as senior counsel and director of the Center for Academic Freedom with Alliance Defending Freedom.
Langhofer represents students and faculty at public high schools and colleges in defending their First Amendment rights. For example, in Denton v. Hecht, he successfully defended a Florida State University student after he was removed as Student Senate President simply for sharing his Catholic views in a private group chat. In Cross v. Loudoun County Public Schools, he successfully defended an elementary school gym teacher after the school suspended him for peacefully sharing his views on a proposed policy at a public school board meeting.
Langhofer has extensive experience in civil litigation and constitutional law. Before joining ADF, Langhofer was a partner with Stinson LLP, where he worked as a commercial litigation attorney from 2000 until he joined ADF in 2015.
Langhofer is Peer Review Rated AV® Preeminent in Martindale-Hubbell. He is a sought-after speaker on legal and cultural issues. He regularly comments on free speech issues in television, radio, and print media. He has appeared as a guest and written pieces for numerous major media outlets, including The Washington Post, The Washington Times, USA Today, Townhall, The Federalist, and The Daily Wire.
Langhofer earned his Juris Doctor from Regent University School of Law in 1999, graduating cum laude. Langhofer is admitted to practice in multiple states, the Supreme Court, and numerous federal district and appellate courts.
Director, Independent Women's Law Center; Owner, MPL Strategies
Vice President for Legal Strategy, Stand Together
Casey Mattox is Vice President for Legal Strategy at Stand Together and Senior Advisor at
Americans for Prosperity. In these roles he advocates for and creates strategies and
partnerships to ensure a constitutionally limited government that protects the civil liberties of all
Americans. Prior to joining Stand Together and AFP Casey’s legal career focused on defending
the First Amendment rights of students, faculty, healthcare workers and religious organizations.
Casey has a J.D. from Boston College School of Law and an undergraduate degree from the
University of Virginia. You can find him on Twitter at @CaseyMattox_ and on LinkedIn at
@Casey-Mattox-ST.
Senior Counsel, Director of Center for Academic Freedom, Alliance Defending Freedom
Tyson Langhofer serves as senior counsel and director of the Center for Academic Freedom with Alliance Defending Freedom.
Langhofer represents students and faculty at public high schools and colleges in defending their First Amendment rights. For example, in Denton v. Hecht, he successfully defended a Florida State University student after he was removed as Student Senate President simply for sharing his Catholic views in a private group chat. In Cross v. Loudoun County Public Schools, he successfully defended an elementary school gym teacher after the school suspended him for peacefully sharing his views on a proposed policy at a public school board meeting.
Langhofer has extensive experience in civil litigation and constitutional law. Before joining ADF, Langhofer was a partner with Stinson LLP, where he worked as a commercial litigation attorney from 2000 until he joined ADF in 2015.
Langhofer is Peer Review Rated AV® Preeminent in Martindale-Hubbell. He is a sought-after speaker on legal and cultural issues. He regularly comments on free speech issues in television, radio, and print media. He has appeared as a guest and written pieces for numerous major media outlets, including The Washington Post, The Washington Times, USA Today, Townhall, The Federalist, and The Daily Wire.
Langhofer earned his Juris Doctor from Regent University School of Law in 1999, graduating cum laude. Langhofer is admitted to practice in multiple states, the Supreme Court, and numerous federal district and appellate courts.
Vice President of Domestic and Economic Policy, The Heritage Foundation
Roger Severino is Vice President of Economic and Domestic Policy, and the Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
Severino is a national authority on civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, the administrative state, and information privacy, particularly as applied to health care law and policy. Find his tweets at @RogerSeverino_.
Severino spearheaded the HHS Accountability Project while a Senior Fellow at EPPC from 2021 to 2023. Previously, Severino was Director of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights, where he led a team of over 250 staff enforcing our nation’s civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, and health information privacy laws. He served from 2017 to 2021 and was the longest-serving OCR director of the past three decades.
Prior to joining HHS, Severino served for two years as Director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at Heritage, advocating for life, family, and religious-freedom policies. Before that, he was a trial attorney for seven years at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division where he enforced the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Severino started his legal career at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where he was Legal Counsel and Chief Operations Officer and defended the rights of people of all faiths under federal and international law.
Severino has been profiled in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The Hill and has appeared on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS, among others. In 2020, The New York Times dubbed him and his wife Carrie, “a conservative power couple” to be reckoned with.
Severino holds a JD from Harvard Law School, a master’s degree in public policy, with highest distinction, from Carnegie Mellon University, and a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Southern California. He was appointed by President Trump to the Administrative Conference of the United States and is a member of the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Virginia bars.
As OCR director, Severino founded the federal government’s first division dedicated exclusively to conscience and religious freedom compliance and enforcement. He enforced the Weldon Amendment for the first time against a state (California) after it coerced families and religious organizations into paying for abortion insurance coverage, leading to a $200 million federal funding disallowance. He also enforced laws protecting pro-life pregnancy resource centers from discrimination by states hostile to their message and enforced laws prohibiting forced participation in abortions by medical professionals.
With respect to civil rights, Severino protected older persons and people with disabilities from being denied life-saving care due to discriminatory “quality of life” judgments, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also achieved a landmark sexual harassment resolution with Michigan State University in the wake of the Larry Nassar sexual assault scandal and protected the rights of non-English speakers to have equal access to health and human services.
In the area of health privacy, he secured the largest HIPAA monetary settlement in history and achieved the largest number of enforcement resolutions both in a single year and across four years. He also facilitated the transformational use of Skype, Zoom, and Facetime for delivery of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
His regulatory reform activities resulted in a comprehensive conscience protection regulation and proposed a life-affirming disability rights regulation. He achieved regulatory savings of $3.6 billion in health care industry costs over five years and identified and proposed an additional $3.2 billion in cost savings from the repeal of ineffective and unnecessary regulatory burdens.
Severino is a Spanish speaker who teaches salsa and west coast swing in his spare time.
Associate Professor of Law, Notre Dame Law School
Haley Proctor joined Notre Dame Law School in 2024 as an Associate Professor of Law. She teaches and writes on procedure, evidence, constitutional law, and federal courts. Her scholarship explores the connections between judicial and administrative procedures and the powers legislators, administrators, and courts exercise. Before coming to ND Law, she was a faculty fellow at the University of Missouri School of Law and the Kinder Institute for Constitutional Democracy and practiced law at the law firm of Cooper & Kirk PLLC. She also served as a clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Thomas Griffith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Proctor earned her B.A., magna cum laude, in political science and international studies from Yale College, and her J.D. from Yale Law School.
Senior Legal Fellow, Advancing American Freedom
Amy Swearer is a leading national expert on a wide range of public policy, legal, and constitutional issues, including the Second Amendment, criminal justice, and mental health policy. She has long been a respected conservative voice on gun policy and is routinely asked to testify before state and federal legislative bodies. Her work on birthright citizenship, meanwhile, has been featured extensively in litigation over the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.
Swearer was formerly a Senior Legal Fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal & Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation. At Heritage, she ran the Defensive Gun Use Database and was the primary author of the e-book “The Essential Second Amendment.” She was also a driving force behind the organization’s School Safety Initiative.
She was the 2022 recipient of the Heritage Foundation’s Joseph Shattan Award for “writing that presents conservative ideas in a powerful and compelling fashion to policymakers and the American people.” She was also named the Second Amendment Institute’s 2022 Gun Rights Champion.
Swearer received her law degree from the University of Nebraska College of Law and was a member of the Nebraska Law Review. She holds a B.S. in Criminology & Criminal Justice from the University of Nebraska, where she was a Chancellor’s Scholar and a goalkeeper on the women’s soccer team
General Counsel, American Suppressor Association
Michael first joined ASA in 2014, and served as ASA’s General Counsel from 2015 to 2016, before leaving to join the Administration in 2017.
Michael began his federal service at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where he served two years as an attorney in the Office of General Counsel and focused on federal budget and regulatory matters. He then transitioned to the West Wing in March of 2019, where he served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Counselor to White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. During his time in the West Wing, Michael advised the Chief of Staff and the President on numerous matters, and served as the top White House policy advisor on Second Amendment issues. Michael left the West Wing in July of 2020 to serve as Acting General Counsel at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), where he managed a budget of over $100 million and supervised a staff of nearly 300 attorneys and 250 other professionals.
Director, Project on Criminal Justice, Cato Institute
Matthew Cavedon is the Director of the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice. He focuses on reforming plea-driven mass adjudication, ensuring police accountability, and defending constitutional criminal originalism. Cavedon’s scholarship has been published (or is forthcoming in) publications including the Arizona State Law Journal, Cato Supreme Court Review, Seattle University Law Review, and Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy. Formerly a Georgia public defender and fellow at the Institute for Justice, Cavedon has taught law school courses on criminal law and procedure, as well as the First Amendment. Cavedon clerked for a U.S. district court and the Supreme Court of Georgia. He came to Cato following a fellowship at the Emory University Center for the Study of Law and Religion.
Chief Policy Counsel, Council on Criminal Justice and Senior Advisor, Right on Crime
Marc A. Levin is the Chief Policy Counsel for the Council on Criminal Justice (counciloncj.org) and Senior Advisor for Right on Crime.
An attorney and accomplished author on legal and public policy issues, Marc began the Foundation’s criminal justice program in 2005. This work contributed to nationally praised policy changes that have been followed by dramatic declines in crime and incarceration in Texas. Building on this success, in 2010, Levin developed the concept for the Right on Crime initiative, a TPPF project in partnership with Prison Fellowship and the American Conservative Union Foundation. Right on Crime has become the national clearinghouse for conservative criminal justice reforms and has contributed to the adoption of policies in dozens of states that fight crime, support victims, and protect taxpayers.
In 2014, Levin was named one of the “Politico 50” in the magazine’s annual “list of thinkers, doers, and dreamers who really matter in this age of gridlock and dysfunction.”
Marc has testified on criminal justice policy on four occasions before Congress and has testified before legislatures in states including Texas, Nevada, Kansas, Wisconsin, and California. He also has met personally with leaders such as U.S. Presidents, Speakers of the House, and the Justice Commtitee of the United Kingdom Parliament to share his ideas on criminal justice reform. In 2007, he was honored in a resolution unanimously passed by the Texas House of Representatives that stated, “Mr. Levin’s intellect is unparalleled and his research is impeccable.”
Since 2005, Marc has published dozens of policy papers on topics such as sentencing, probation, parole, reentry, and overcriminalization which are available on the TPPF website. Levin’s articles on law and public policy have been featured in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Texas Review of Law & Politics, National Law Journal, New York Daily News, Jerusalem Post, Toronto Star, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Times, Los Angeles Daily Journal, Charlotte Observer, Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, San Antonio Express-News and Reason Magazine.
In 1999, Marc graduated with honors from the University of Texas with a B.A. in Plan II Honors and Government. In 2002, Marc received his J.D. with honors from the University of Texas School of Law. Marc was a Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow in 1996. He served as a law clerk to Judge Will Garwood on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Staff Attorney at the Texas Supreme Court.
Legal Director & General Counsel, Criminal Justice Legal Foundation
Kent S. Scheidegger has been the Legal Director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation since December 1986. He also served as Chairman of the Criminal Law Practice Group of the Federalist Society 2003 to 2005. His articles on criminal and constitutional law have been published in law reviews, national legal publications, and congressional reports. Legal arguments authored by Mr. Scheidegger have been cited and incorporated in several precedent-setting United States Supreme Court decisions.
After receiving a degree in physics with honors from New Mexico State University in 1976, Mr. Scheidegger served for six years in the United States Air Force as a Nuclear Research Officer. He took his law degree with distinction from the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in 1982 and practiced civil law in Northern California. He was general counsel of California Cooler, Inc. from 1984 until 1986, when he joined the Foundation.
Commissioner, Federal Trade Commission
Andrew N. Ferguson was sworn in April 2, 2024 as a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. President Joe Biden named Ferguson to a term that expires on September 25, 2030.
Ferguson most recently served as solicitor general of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Prior to that position, he served as chief counsel to U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, and as a Republican counsel on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. He also practiced law at several Washington, D.C. law firms. He earned his undergraduate degree and law degree from the University of Virginia. After law school, Ferguson clerked for Judge Karen L. Henderson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Partner, Torridon Law PLLC
Mike Fragoso is an experienced legal and policy strategist who represents clients before all three branches of the federal government. Most recently he served as chief counsel to the Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY). He has negotiated consequential legislation, managed successful congressional oversight, and prepared individuals for the most contentious Senate hearings.
As chief counsel to Leader McConnell, Mike was the Leader’s primary legal advisor and managed the “last mile” of any legislation touching on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He ran the 2024 reauthorization of FISA Section 702 and was involved at the highest levels of the appropriations and budget-reconciliation processes. Mike also repeatedly represented Leader McConnell as counsel of record at the Supreme Court. Leader McConnell said of Mike that he’s “equally at home in the high-minded philosophical discourse of the legal community and the urgent pragmatism of congressional dealmaking,” and that he “maintains a firm grasp on the realm of the possible” but “knows which screws to twist.” He observed that Mike “is so exceptionally competent that he often produces from his desk the work that would normally require, literally, teams of outside counsel.”
President and CEO, The Federalist Society
Sheldon Gilbert is the President and CEO of The Federalist Society. Gilbert has been involved in the conservative and libertarian legal movement since law school, and has served in prominent roles at both nonprofit organizations as well as corporate America.
A longtime constitutional litigator, Gilbert has represented clients through amicus and party briefs in nearly a hundred cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, at both the certiorari and merits stages. Most recently, Gilbert served as Senior Lead Counsel for Strategic Initiatives at Walmart, the world’s largest company, where he led teams providing legal advice related to government enforcement, internal investigations, government relations, public relations, and special projects at the center of law and policy.
Before joining Walmart, Gilbert served as Vice President for Content and Development and Senior Fellow for Constitutional Studies at the National Constitution Center, a congressionally chartered non-partisan center for constitutional education and debate, where he led both fundraising and programming efforts. While at the NCC, Gilbert helped ensure that the Center’s programming and exhibits incorporated constitutional perspectives from experts on both the right and the left, including the launch of the Center’s landmark permanent exhibit on the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments.
Prior to the National Constitution Center, Gilbert served as the director of the Institute for Justice’s Center for Judicial Engagement (CJE), where he educated the public about the role of the courts and the Constitution, where he frequently hosted discussions and debates on constitutional issues, and often spoke at Federalist Society lawyer and student chapters across the country.
He was also a litigator with the U.S. Chamber Litigation Center, the litigation arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he represented the U.S. Chamber in over 400 cases in federal and state courts addressing a wide range of legal issues, from free speech to property rights.
Gilbert is a graduate of the George Washington University Law School where he helped found a first-of-its-kind National Religious Freedom Moot Court, which hosted law students from across the country to debate important, emerging religious liberty issues. After graduating from GWU, he also taught as a professorial lecturer at the school.
A graduate of the University of Utah, Gilbert is a child of the Mountain West, where he was born in a coal mining town in Utah and raised in Idaho near the Grand Tetons. Before going to law school, Gilbert’s diverse interests led him to work in a wide range of roles, from software development project management for a nonprofit, to working in his University’s radiobiology research lab, to volunteer service in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for his church.
Gilbert is married with four children.
Shareholder, D.C. Office Managing Shareholder
Lee is a former Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the Senate Judiciary Committee for then-Chairman Lindsey Graham, Deputy Counsel to Vice President J.D. Vance, and federal prosecutor who serves as Managing Shareholder of Maynard Nexsen’s Washington, D.C. office. He has deep experience in all three branches of the federal government, stand-up courtroom experience, and extensive knowledge of Washington, D.C.
While serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lee played a central role in some of the most consequential legislative, nominations, and oversight efforts in recent years. He led Supreme Court and Attorney General confirmation hearings, guided politically charged negotiations on the First Step Act, police reform, the CARES Act, and the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, and oversaw the Committee’s work on the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation. Lee also helped advance the CLOUD Act and major intellectual property legislation, including the Defend Trade Secrets Act, the Music Modernization Act, and the CASE Act. Over his seven-year Senate career, he handled the Committee’s authorization of subpoenas, participated in transcribed interviews, managed public communications campaigns, and prepared witnesses and nominees for high-profile hearings—culminating in his service as a key advisor to Republican Senators during both impeachments of President Donald Trump.
As a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, Lee managed a diverse criminal and civil litigation docket, including first chair of a felony trial, briefing appeals, and arguing in the Fourth Circuit. Lee defended the United States in civil suits under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), and also served as the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (CHIP) prosecutor for the South Carolina U.S. Attorney's Office. Before joining Maynard Nexsen, Lee served in the White House, where he provided strategic and legal advice to the Office of the Vice President.
Lee earned his law degree at the Vanderbilt University Law School and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and International Affairs from Florida State University. He clerked for the Honorable Joseph F. Anderson, Jr. on the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina and briefly on the Fourth Circuit when Judge Anderson sat on that court by designation.
Senior Director, Microsoft, Former Staff Director and Chief Counsel, U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit
Judge Julius “Jay” Richardson serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Jay grew up in Barnwell, South Carolina. After graduating from Vanderbilt University, Jay moved to Hawaii and worked at a pool-side bar-and-grill. Jay later earned his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School, where he served as Articles Editor for the Law Review and right fielder for the law school’s championship softball team. Following law school, Jay clerked for Judge Richard A. Posner and for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. He then practiced with Kellogg Hansen in Washington, DC before returning to South Carolina as an Assistant United States Attorney. Along with prosecuting violent crime, gangs, terrorism, public corruption, civil rights, and narcotics trafficking, he led the prosecution of Dylann Roof, who was convicted and sentenced to death for his racist massacre of nine Black worshippers during a Bible study at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. He and his wife Macon are blessed with four daughters.
Boochever and Bird Distinguished Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law
Ash Bhagwat joined the UC Davis School of Law faculty in 2011. Prior to joining UC Davis, he taught at UC Hastings College of the Law for seventeen years. Bhagwat is the author of The Myth of Rights, published by the Oxford University Press in 2010, as well as numerous books, articles, and book chapters on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from the structure of constitutional rights, to free speech law, to the California Electricity Crisis. Journals his articles have appeared in include the Yale Law Journal, the Supreme Court Review, the California Law Review, the Administrative Law Review, and the University of Illinois Law Review.
Bhagwat is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, where he received a B.A. with Honors in History. He is also a graduate of The University of Chicago Law School, where he served as Articles Editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. He then completed clerkships with Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court. Prior to joining the Hastings faculty, Bhagwat practiced appellate and regulatory law for two years in the Washington, D.C. offices of the Sidley & Austin law firm.
In May of 2011, Governor Jerry Brown appointed Bhagwat to serve on the Board of Governors of the California Independent System Operator, a public benefit corporation responsible for running the high-voltage electricity grid in California. In 2003, he was awarded the Rutter Award for Teaching Excellence at UC Hastings. Bhagwat is a member of the American Law Institute.
Managing Attorney of the Washington Office, Institute for Justice
William R. Maurer is the Managing Attorney of the Washington state office of the Institute for Justice, which engages in litigation in the areas of economic liberty, private property rights, educational choice, & freedom of speech.
Maurer is an advocate against the criminalization of poverty and the governmental use of the criminal and civil enforcement systems to raise revenue. He was lead counsel in a class action challenging the use of tickets to raise revenue in the city of Pagedale, Missouri. The suit resulted in a federal consent decree that reformed the city’s ticketing and municipal court system. He regularly speaks, teaches, and writes about the abuse of fines and fees in the criminal justice system. He was a participant in summits on taxation by citation put on by the White House and Department of Justice during the Obama Administration. His work on the issue includes serving as an advisory board member of the Fines and Fees Justice Center.
In addition to his work on criminal and civil justice reform, Maurer is a First Amendment litigator. In 2011, he successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that Arizona’s punitive campaign financing regime was unconstitutional. Before the Washington Supreme Court, he successfully argued against efforts to classify radio commentary as a contribution under the state’s campaign finance law.
His cases and advocacy have been covered in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and other major media outlets.
Maurer was named a “Washington Superlawyer” by Washington Law & Politics Magazine for several years. He is a chapter author in numerous legal reference works and has written several articles for law reviews and legal publications across the country.
Prior to joining IJ-WA, Maurer clerked for Washington Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders and then practiced law at Perkins Coie LLP. Maurer received his law degree in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he was an editor of the Wisconsin Law Review. He received his BA from Bard College in 1989.
Senior Legal Fellow, Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law, Advancing American Freedom
Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Constitutional Law Center, Stanford Law School
Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and Faculty Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, he served as a Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was nominated by President George W. Bush, a Republican, and confirmed by a Democratic Senate by unanimous consent. McConnell has previously held chaired professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah, and visiting professorships at Harvard and NYU. He teaches courses on constitutional law, constitutional history, First Amendment, and interpretive theory. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law and theory, especially church and state, equal protection, and separation of powers. His book, “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution,” was published by Princeton University Press in 2020, based on the Tanner Lectures in Human Values, which he delivered at Princeton in 2019. His latest book, co-authored with Nathan Chapman, “Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience,” was published by Oxford University Press in mid-2023. McConnell has argued sixteen cases in the United States Supreme Court, most recently Carney v. Adams (2020). defending a provision of the Delaware Constitution requiring political balance on that state’s courts. More recently, he was co-counsel in Gonzalez v. Google. He earned his B.A. from Michigan State University and his J.D. from the University of Chicago, and has received honorary degrees from Notre Dame University and Michigan State. He served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. and D.C. Circuit Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright. He has been Assistant General Counsel of the Office of Management & Budget, Assistant to the Solicitor General of the Department of Justice, and a member of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board. He is Senior of Counsel to the law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, and is co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Review Board.
Associate Attorney, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Branton Nestor is an associate in the Orange County office of Gibson Dunn. He practices in the firm’s Litigation Department and is a member of the firm’s Appellate and Constitutional Law Practice Group.
Branton has represented clients in appellate, regulatory, and complex litigation matters across various industries. His experience spans a wide range of subject matters, including constitutional law and administrative law.
He clerked for Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and Judge Julius N. Richardson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 2019, and Westmont College in 2016. His scholarship has been cited at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Branton is a member of the California bar.
Assistant Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Lael Weinberger is an assistant professor of law at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School. Previously, Lael clerked for Justice Neil Gorsuch on the United States Supreme Court, Judge Frank Easterbrook on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and Chief Justice Daniel Eismann on the Idaho Supreme Court. Lael also practiced law at the Washington, D.C., office of Gibson Dunn and held fellowships at Stanford and Harvard law schools. Lael earned a law degree and a Ph.D. in history, both from the University of Chicago. Lael's academic work has appeared in journals such as the University of Chicago Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, and Constitutional Commentary, among others. He has also written widely for broader public audiences, with his writings and reviews appearing in publications including Newsweek, National Review, Claremont Review, First Things, Christianity Today, LA Review of Books, World, and the New Rambler Review.
General Counsel, United States Senator Jim Banks
Elle Bernstein serves as General Counsel to United States Senator Jim Banks (R-IN). In her capacity as General Counsel, Elle handles immigration policy, pro-life issues, and judicial nominations. Elle has served as counsel for amicus briefs on abortion and the Constitution, Title IX, and religious liberty. Her article, “Beyond Barbara: Towards A Jurisprudence of Nationhood,” is forthcoming in the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy.
Elle co-founded the Pro-Life Lawyers Caucus and is an executive committee member of the Federalist Society’s Immigration Practice Group. She has also held fellowships with the Claremont Institute, the James Wilson Institute, and Alliance Defending Freedom.
Previously, Elle was an Associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and clerked for the Honorable James C. Ho of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Elle holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the King’s College and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.
Senior Editor, National Review
Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and the author of several books, including Founders’ Son, Right Time, Right Place, George Washington on Leadership, What Would the Founders Do?, Gentleman Revolutionary, Rules of Civility, America’s First Dynasty, Alexander Hamilton, American, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, Way of the WASP, and The Outside Story.
Professor of Law & Helen L. Crocker Faculty Scholar, Stanford Law School
Jud Campbell joined the faculty of Stanford Law School in 2023. He previously served as a professor of law at the University of Richmond School of Law and as a visiting professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School and at Harvard Law School. His academic focus is constitutional history and First Amendment law. His publications include articles in the Stanford Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Texas Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, and Law and History Review. After completing his J.D. at Stanford Law School, he clerked for Judge Diane S. Sykes on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and for Judge José A. Cabranes on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He then served as the Executive Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and two master’s degrees from the London School of Economics, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar.
Leitner Family Professor of International Law and Co-Founder & Co-Director of the Center on Asian Americans & the Law, Fordham University School of Law
Thomas H. Lee is the Leitner Family Professor of International Law at Fordham, where he teaches civil procedure, constitutional law, federal courts, international law, and the U.S. law of civil-military relations. His meticulously researched and historically-grounded scholarship has argued that the Eleventh Amendment reflected the classical international law principle that only a sovereign state—not its citizens or subjects— has rights against other sovereign states; that the Alien Tort Statute was a national-security peacekeeping statute, not an international human-rights statute, enacted in 1789 when the United States was a militarily weak state; and that the Natural Born Citizen Clause regarding presidential eligibility reflected natural-law principles of membership by descent as well as domestic birthplace. His current research examines the nature of Article III judicial power and the role of the federal courts in American society.
He is Co-Director of the Center on Asian Americans and the Law, Special Counsel at Hughes Hubbard & Reed, and a Member of the American Law Institute. He was Special Counsel to the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense, a Member of the ICSID Panel of Conciliators, Adviser to the Constitutional Court of Korea, and Visiting Professor at Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Virginia law schools, as well as Faculty Director of International and Graduate Studies at Fordham from 2006 to 2019. Before his academic career, Lee clerked for Judge Michael Boudin of the First Circuit and Justice David Souter of the Supreme Court and served as an active-duty U.S. naval cryptology officer, afloat on submarines and surface combatants and ashore in Korea, Japan, and with the National Security Agency. He holds A.B. (summa cum laude), A.M. (Regional Studies—East Asia), and J.D. degrees from Harvard, where he was Articles Chair of the Harvard Law Review and a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in Government.
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Michael W. McConnell, Branton J. Nestor, Lael Weinberger
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