Earl Warren Professor of Public Law (Emeritus), UC Berkeley School of Law
Jesse Choper served as law clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court following graduation from law school. He taught at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from 1957 to 1960, and at the University of Minnesota Law School from 1961 to 1965. He joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 1965. Choper has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Fordham Law School, University of Milan, Free University in Amsterdam, Autonoma University in Barcelona, University of New South Wales in Sydney, University of Lucerne in Switzerland, and Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon and Porto. He served as Berkeley Law’s dean from 1982 to 1992.
From 1979 to 1998, Choper was one of the three major lecturers at U.S. Law Week’s Annual Constitutional Law Conference in Washington, D.C. He has delivered 20 titled lectures at major universities throughout the country, including the Cooley Lectures at Michigan, the Stevens Lecture at Cornell, the Baum Lecture at Illinois, and the Lockhart Lecture at Minnesota. He has served on the executive committee of the Association of American Law Schools, and on the executive council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (of which he was vice president for more than ten years). He was national president of the Order of the Coif and is a member of the American Law Institute. In 1998 he received the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award and the Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction at Berkeley Law in 2006. In 2005 the Berkeley Law Alumni Association presented Choper with the Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award and the University of Pennsylvania Law School gave him the James Wilson Award, its highest award for alumni.
Choper’s major publications include the books, Judicial Review and the National Political Process: A Functional Reconsideration of the Role of the Supreme Court, which received the Order of the Coif Triennial Book Award in 1982, and Securing Religious Liberty: Principles for Judicial Interpretation of the Religion Clauses. His recent publications include the thirteenth edition of his Constitutional Law casebooks; the eighth edition of his Corporations casebook; the second edition of The Supreme Court and Its Justices; “The Political Question Doctrine: Suggested Criteria,” in Duke Law Journal (2005); “Wartime Process: A Dialogue on Congressional Power to Remove Issues From the Federal Courts,” in California Law Review (2007) (co-author); and “Who’s Afraid of the Eleventh Amendment? The Limited Impact of the Court’s Sovereign Immunity Rulings,” in Columbia Law Review (2006) (co-author).
U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit
Frank H. Easterbrook is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a Senior Lecturer at the Law School of the University of Chicago. He was Chief Judge from 2006–2013. Before joining the court in 1985, he was the Lee andBrena Freeman Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, where he taught and wrote in antitrust, securities, corporate law, jurisprudence, and criminal procedure. He has published The Economic Structure of Corporate Law (with Daniel R. Fischel) and about 100 scholarly articles. He served as Co-Editor of the Journal of Law and Economics from 1982 to 1991 and as a member of the Judicial Conference’s Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure from 1991 to 1997. Before joining the faculty of the Law School in 1979, Judge Easterbrook was Deputy Solicitor General of the United States. He holds degrees from Swarthmore College (B.A. with high honors, 1970) and the University of Chicago (J.D. cum laude, 1973), and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute, the Mont Pelerin Society, Phi Beta Kappa, and the Order of the Coif.
Author
David F. Epstein is the author of The Political Theory of The Federalist.
Sam Harris Professor of Corporate Law, Corporate Finance, and Securities Law, Yale Law School
Jonathan R. Macey is Sam Harris Professor of Corporate Law, Corporate Finance, and Securities Law at Yale University, and Professor in the Yale School of Management. From 1991 – 2004, Professor Macey was J. DuPratt White Professor of Law, Director of the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics at Cornell Law School, and Professor of Law and Business at the Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Business. Professor Macey earned his B.A. cum laude from Harvard in 1977, and his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1982, where he was Article and Book Review editor of The Yale Law Journal. In 1996, Professor Macey received a Ph.D. honoris causa from the Stockholm School of Economics. Following law school, Professor Macey was law clerk to Judge Henry J. Friendly on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Professor Macey is the author of several books including the two-volume treatise, Macey on Corporation Laws, published in 1998 (Aspen Law & Business), and co-author of two leading casebooks, Corporations: Including Partnerships and Limited Liability Companies (2003 Thomson West), which is in its eighth edition, and Banking Law and Regulation (2002 Aspen Law & Business), which is now in its third edition. He also is the author of over 100 scholarly articles. His recent articles have appeared in the Banking Law Journal, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, The Yale Law Journal, the Cornell Law Review, the Journal of Law and Economics, and the Brookings Wharton Papers on Financial Institutions. He has published numerous editorials in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Los Angeles Times, and The National Law Journal.
Professor Macey has taught at major universities throughout the world, including Bocconi University (Milan), the University of Tokyo; the University of Toronto; the University of Turin, the University of Amsterdam Department of Finance, and the Stockholm School of Economics, Department of Law. He also has been Professor of Law at the University of Chicago (1990) and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (1999). Professor Macey is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for Economic Research (ICER) in Turin, Italy. Professor Macey also serves on the Academic Advisory Board (Comitato Scientifico) of the Associazione Disiano Preite for the study of corporate law (per lo studio del diritto dell’impresa). In 1995, Professor Macey was awarded the Paul M. Bator prize for excellence in Teaching, Scholarship and Public Service by the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy. In 1996, he received a Ph.D., honoris causa from the Stockholm School of Economics. And in 1998, he received the D.P. Jacobs prize for the most significant paper in volume 6 of the Journal of Financial Intermediation for his paper (co-authored with Maureen O’Hara), “The Law & Economics of Best Execution.”
In 1999 Professor Macey was made an honorary Fellow of the Society For Advanced Legal Studies. In 2000, Professor Macey became a member of the Legal Advisory Committee to the Board of Directors of the New York Stock Exchange. In 2001 Professor Macey was appointed a Bertil Daniellson Distinguished Visiting Professor in Banking and Finance at the Stockholm School of Economics. In 2002 Professor Macey was appointed to the Economic Advisory Board of the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD). In 2004 Professor Macey was awarded a Teaching Award by the Yale Law Women in recognition of his “commitment to excellence in teaching, mentoring and inspiring.” In 2005 Professor Macey became a member of the Board of Editors of Thomson West Publishing Company.
Judge (ret.), United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
James Leo Ryan is a federal judge on senior status with the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. He joined the court in 1985 after being nominated by President Ronald Reagan.
Professor Emeritus, Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University
In memoriam
Dr. John Baker is Professor Emeritus of Law, and previously the Dale E. Bennett Professor of Law, at Louisiana State University Law School. He is currently Visiting Professor at Peking University School of Transnational Law (via Zoom) and has been Visiting Professor at The Center for the Constitution, Georgetown Law School (2013-2020). He has also been a Visiting Fellow at Oriel College, the University of Oxford (2012-2014) and taught at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford in 2014. Dr. Baker has also been an adjunct Fellow at the Heritage Foundation (Spring, 2008) and a Distinguished Scholar at the Catholic University of America Law School (2011-12). He has taught at Tulane Law School, George Mason Law School, Pepperdine Law School, New York Law School, Hong Kong University, and the University of Dallas, School of Management and also taught and/or lectured in 17 foreign countries. Notable among his foreign visits are the
following: Visiting Professor at the University of Lyon III (France) (1999-2011); Visiting Professor at the Universidad de los Andes, Chile (2012), as a Fulbright Specialist (2006); and a Fulbright Scholar at various universities in the Philippines. Dr. Baker received his J.D., with honors, from the University of Michigan Law School and his B.A., magna cum laude, from the University of Dallas. He also earned a Ph.D. in Political Thought from the University of London. Baker has taught over a dozen different subjects, mostly courses in public law. His main areas of interest are Constitutional Law (particularly federalism and separation of powers), Criminal Law, Anti-Terrorism Law, International Law, Health Care Law, Mediation, and Comparative Law.
In addition to law review articles and book chapters, Dr. Baker’s academic publications include Hall's Criminal Law: Cases and Materials (with Benson, Force and George; 5th ed. Michie, 1993); An Introduction to the Law of the United States (ed. with Levasseur; University Press of America, 1992). He has also published on Forbes.com, FoxNews.com, in The Washington Times, and a number of times in The Wall Street Journal. He argues in federal court, including two oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court. For many years, he co-taught courses for the Federalist Society on separation of powers with the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In September 2016, he co-taught a Supreme Court seminar in China with Justice Samuel Alito. Following law school, he served as a law clerk in federal district court and as an assistant district attorney in New Orleans before joining LSU in 1975. While a professor, he has been as a consultant to USAID, USIA (since rolled into the State Department), the Justice Department, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Separation of Powers, and the Office of Planning in the White House. He served on an ABA Task Force which issued the report, The Federalization of Crime (1998) and later as a consultant to the “Bi-Partisan Task Force on the Over- federalization of Crime” (2012-2014) created by the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime. Dr. Baker was a co-founder of the first iteration (1995) of Stratfor Inc., a global intelligence agency. He co-authored its first book: The Intelligence Edge (with Friedman, Friedman and Chapman; Crown Books/Random House 1997). In 2022, he began a short, weekly video podcast available on YouTube and Rumble, The Baker Brief.
U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit
Frank H. Easterbrook is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a Senior Lecturer at the Law School of the University of Chicago. He was Chief Judge from 2006–2013. Before joining the court in 1985, he was the Lee andBrena Freeman Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, where he taught and wrote in antitrust, securities, corporate law, jurisprudence, and criminal procedure. He has published The Economic Structure of Corporate Law (with Daniel R. Fischel) and about 100 scholarly articles. He served as Co-Editor of the Journal of Law and Economics from 1982 to 1991 and as a member of the Judicial Conference’s Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure from 1991 to 1997. Before joining the faculty of the Law School in 1979, Judge Easterbrook was Deputy Solicitor General of the United States. He holds degrees from Swarthmore College (B.A. with high honors, 1970) and the University of Chicago (J.D. cum laude, 1973), and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute, the Mont Pelerin Society, Phi Beta Kappa, and the Order of the Coif.
Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
THOMAS W. MERRILL is the Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He previously taught at Northwestern University School of Law and Yale Law School. He has undergraduate degrees from Grinnell College and Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and a law degree from the University of Chicago. He clerked on the D.C. Circuit (for Chief Judge David Bazelon) and the U.S. Supreme Court (for Justice Harry Blackmun). From 1987-1990 he served as Deputy Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Merrill’s writings related to property include Property: Principles and Policies (Foundation Press Second Edition, 2012) (with Henry E. Smith); Property: The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law (Oxford U. Press, 2010); Property: Takings (Foundation Press, 2002)(with David Dana); and numerous articles, including “The Economics of Public Use” (Cornell Law Review 1986); “The Landscape of Constitutional Property” (Virginia Law Review 2000); and “The Character of the Governmental Action” (Vermont Law Review 2012). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Partner, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Theodore B. Olson is a Partner in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Washington, D.C. office; a founder of the Firm’s Crisis Management, Sports Law, and Appellate and Constitutional Law Practice Groups.
Mr. Olson was Solicitor General of the United States during the period 2001-2004. From 1981-1984, he was Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. Except for those two intervals, he has been a lawyer with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. since 1965.
Selected by Time magazine in 2010 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, Mr. Olson is one of the nation’s premier appellate and United States Supreme Court advocates. He has argued 65 cases in the Supreme Court and has prevailed in over 75% of those cases. These include the two Bush v Gore cases arising out of the 2000 presidential election; Citizens United v Federal Election Commission; Hollingsworth v Perry, the case affirming the overturning of California’s Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriages; Murphy v NCAA, overturning a federal law prohibiting states from authorizing sports betting; and U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security v Regents of the Univ. of Calif., challenging the Trump Administration’s rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”). Mr. Olson’s practice is concentrated on appellate and constitutional law, federal legislation, media and commercial disputes, and assisting clients with strategies for the containment, management and resolution of major legal crises. He has handled cases at all levels of state and federal court systems throughout the United States. Mr. Olson co-authored “Redeeming the Dream, the Case for Marriage Equality” with David Boies. Both were featured in HBO’s award-winning documentary, “The Case Against 8.”
Mr. Olson's Supreme Court arguments have included cases involving separation of powers; federalism; voting rights; the Tenth Amendment; the First Amendment; the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses; jury trial rights; punitive damages; takings of property; the Commerce Clause; administrative law; taxation; criminal law; sports wagering; copyright, patent and antitrust; securities; campaign finance; foreign sovereign immunities; telecommunications; the environment; the internet; the Supremacy Clause; and other federal constitutional and statutory questions. As Solicitor General, during the presidency of George W. Bush, Mr. Olson was the Government's principal advocate in the United States Supreme Court, responsible for supervising and coordinating all appellate litigation of the United States, and a legal adviser to the President and the Attorney General. As Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel during the Reagan Administration, Mr. Olson was the Executive Branch's principal legal adviser, rendering legal guidance to the President and to the heads of the Executive Branch departments on a wide range of constitutional and federal statutory questions, and assisting in formulating and articulating the Executive Branch's position on constitutional issues.
Mr. Olson has served as private counsel to two Presidents, Ronald W. Reagan and George W. Bush, in addition to serving those two Presidents in high-level positions in the Department of Justice. He has twice been awarded the United States Department of Justice's Edmund J. Randolph Award, its highest award for public service and leadership, and also received the Department of Defense's Distinguished Public Service Award, its highest civilian award, for his advocacy in the courts of the United States, including the Supreme Court. He also received the American Bar Association Medal, its highest award for “exceptionally distinguished service by a lawyer or lawyers to the cause of American jurisprudence.” Mr. Olson is to receive the 2021 Jack Valenti Friend of the White House Fellows Award in the Fall of 2021 to be presented by the White House Fellows Foundation and Association.
Mr. Olson is a member of the Commission on White House Fellowships; a member of the Board of Trustees of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation; a member of the Board of Visitors of the Federalist Society; the Board of Directors of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University; and the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial Foundation. He was a visiting scholar at the National Constitution Center in 2007. He served on the President's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board from 2006 to 2008; and of the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States from 2010 to 2020. He was Co-Chair of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy from 2008-2009, and served two terms on the Board of Directors of the National Center for State Courts.
Mr. Olson is a Fellow of both the American College of Trial Lawyers and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers. He has been repeatedly listed in legal publications as one of the nation’s leading appellate lawyers. The late New York Times columnist William Safire described Mr. Olson as his generation's "most persuasive advocate" before the Supreme Court and "the most effective Solicitor General in decades.”
Mr. Olson received his law degree in 1965 from the University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall) where he was a member of the California Law Review and Order of the Coif. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of the Pacific, where he was recognized as the outstanding graduating student in both forensics and journalism. He has written and lectured extensively on appellate advocacy, oral communication in the courtroom, civil justice reform, and constitutional and administrative law.
Professor of Law Emeritus, American University Washington College of Law
Herman Schwartz is a Professor of Law Emeritus at American University Washington College of Law. Throughout a long career in academia, publishing and community service, he has focused his attention and the world's on issues of civil rights and civil liberties as they have played out in courts and prisons across the globe. He has worked with the United Nations, the human rights advocacy group Helsinki Watch, the U.S./Israel Civil Liberties Law Program (which he founded), the ACLU Prison Project (which he founded), Washington College of Law's Human Rights Center and other organizations. In May 2006 he was awarded the 2006 Champion of Justice Award by the Alliance for Justice.
Schwartz's special interest in recent years has been the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe. He has served as an adviser to numerous Central and Eastern European nations, as well as former Soviet Union nations, on constitutional and human rights reform; recently he has been called up on to comment and advise on constitutional reform in Afghanistan, Iraq and several African countries. He also co-chaired a project on transitional justice in emerging democracies. He is currently a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of the Open Society Institute Justice Initiative.
Current work includes hunger issues and particularly the expansion of programs for school children during the summer. Schwartz formerly chaired the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, and has developed a course in which students work with national and local public interest organizations that deal with poverty issues. He also is continuing to pursue a lifelong interest in the operations of America's courts, and frequently is called upon to analyze and write about Supreme Court decisions. He has published Right Wing Justice: The Conservative Campaign to Take Over the Courts (May 2004), a study of the judgeship controversies since Ronald Reagan.
From 1963 to 1976, Schwartz was heavily involved in studying and monitoring New York State's criminal justice system. During the tragic inmate uprising at Attica State Prison in 1971, he served as the first intermediary between the prisoners and the prison administration, and represented numerous prisoners thereafter, founded the ACLU Prison Project and argued two cases in the Supreme Court relating to prisoners rights. Throughout the 1960's and 1970's, he was active in civil rights and civil liberties litigation and advocacy, serving as chief counsel in school desegregation cases in the North and the South. He was also the ACLU expert on the law and policy of electronic surveillance and the author of numerous studies of the operation of the wiretap laws.
Schwartz has authored three books: Right-Wing Justice: The Conservative Campaign to Take over the Courts (May 2004), The Struggle for Constitutional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (2000) and Packing the Courts: The Conservative Campaign to Rewrite the Constitution (1988); edited and contributed to The Rehnquist Court: Judicial Activism on the Right (2002), and The Burger Years Rights and Wrongs in the Supreme Court 1969-1986 (1987). He has written numerous reports, articles, chapters and scholarly papers.
His work on the frontiers of civil rights and civil liberties has been recognized with such honors as the 2006 “Champion of Justice” award from the Alliance for Justice, a Citation of Appreciation by the Common Council of the City of Buffalo, an American Jewish Congress - Washington Capital area award, the William Conable Award for Civil Rights, the Citizens Counsel for Human Rights Award and The ACLU-Niagara Frontier Award for Civil Liberties.
His undergraduate degree is from Harvard University, magna cum laude, and his Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School, magna cum laude. For most of his professional career he has been a professor of law. He has also served in state and federal government, including service as Chief Counsel of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, and Chief Counsel for Revenue Sharing, U.S. Treasury.
Professor Emeritus, Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University
In memoriam
Dr. John Baker is Professor Emeritus of Law, and previously the Dale E. Bennett Professor of Law, at Louisiana State University Law School. He is currently Visiting Professor at Peking University School of Transnational Law (via Zoom) and has been Visiting Professor at The Center for the Constitution, Georgetown Law School (2013-2020). He has also been a Visiting Fellow at Oriel College, the University of Oxford (2012-2014) and taught at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford in 2014. Dr. Baker has also been an adjunct Fellow at the Heritage Foundation (Spring, 2008) and a Distinguished Scholar at the Catholic University of America Law School (2011-12). He has taught at Tulane Law School, George Mason Law School, Pepperdine Law School, New York Law School, Hong Kong University, and the University of Dallas, School of Management and also taught and/or lectured in 17 foreign countries. Notable among his foreign visits are the
following: Visiting Professor at the University of Lyon III (France) (1999-2011); Visiting Professor at the Universidad de los Andes, Chile (2012), as a Fulbright Specialist (2006); and a Fulbright Scholar at various universities in the Philippines. Dr. Baker received his J.D., with honors, from the University of Michigan Law School and his B.A., magna cum laude, from the University of Dallas. He also earned a Ph.D. in Political Thought from the University of London. Baker has taught over a dozen different subjects, mostly courses in public law. His main areas of interest are Constitutional Law (particularly federalism and separation of powers), Criminal Law, Anti-Terrorism Law, International Law, Health Care Law, Mediation, and Comparative Law.
In addition to law review articles and book chapters, Dr. Baker’s academic publications include Hall's Criminal Law: Cases and Materials (with Benson, Force and George; 5th ed. Michie, 1993); An Introduction to the Law of the United States (ed. with Levasseur; University Press of America, 1992). He has also published on Forbes.com, FoxNews.com, in The Washington Times, and a number of times in The Wall Street Journal. He argues in federal court, including two oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court. For many years, he co-taught courses for the Federalist Society on separation of powers with the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In September 2016, he co-taught a Supreme Court seminar in China with Justice Samuel Alito. Following law school, he served as a law clerk in federal district court and as an assistant district attorney in New Orleans before joining LSU in 1975. While a professor, he has been as a consultant to USAID, USIA (since rolled into the State Department), the Justice Department, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Separation of Powers, and the Office of Planning in the White House. He served on an ABA Task Force which issued the report, The Federalization of Crime (1998) and later as a consultant to the “Bi-Partisan Task Force on the Over- federalization of Crime” (2012-2014) created by the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime. Dr. Baker was a co-founder of the first iteration (1995) of Stratfor Inc., a global intelligence agency. He co-authored its first book: The Intelligence Edge (with Friedman, Friedman and Chapman; Crown Books/Random House 1997). In 2022, he began a short, weekly video podcast available on YouTube and Rumble, The Baker Brief.
U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit
Frank H. Easterbrook is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a Senior Lecturer at the Law School of the University of Chicago. He was Chief Judge from 2006–2013. Before joining the court in 1985, he was the Lee andBrena Freeman Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, where he taught and wrote in antitrust, securities, corporate law, jurisprudence, and criminal procedure. He has published The Economic Structure of Corporate Law (with Daniel R. Fischel) and about 100 scholarly articles. He served as Co-Editor of the Journal of Law and Economics from 1982 to 1991 and as a member of the Judicial Conference’s Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure from 1991 to 1997. Before joining the faculty of the Law School in 1979, Judge Easterbrook was Deputy Solicitor General of the United States. He holds degrees from Swarthmore College (B.A. with high honors, 1970) and the University of Chicago (J.D. cum laude, 1973), and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute, the Mont Pelerin Society, Phi Beta Kappa, and the Order of the Coif.
Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
THOMAS W. MERRILL is the Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He previously taught at Northwestern University School of Law and Yale Law School. He has undergraduate degrees from Grinnell College and Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and a law degree from the University of Chicago. He clerked on the D.C. Circuit (for Chief Judge David Bazelon) and the U.S. Supreme Court (for Justice Harry Blackmun). From 1987-1990 he served as Deputy Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Merrill’s writings related to property include Property: Principles and Policies (Foundation Press Second Edition, 2012) (with Henry E. Smith); Property: The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law (Oxford U. Press, 2010); Property: Takings (Foundation Press, 2002)(with David Dana); and numerous articles, including “The Economics of Public Use” (Cornell Law Review 1986); “The Landscape of Constitutional Property” (Virginia Law Review 2000); and “The Character of the Governmental Action” (Vermont Law Review 2012). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Partner, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Theodore B. Olson is a Partner in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Washington, D.C. office; a founder of the Firm’s Crisis Management, Sports Law, and Appellate and Constitutional Law Practice Groups.
Mr. Olson was Solicitor General of the United States during the period 2001-2004. From 1981-1984, he was Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. Except for those two intervals, he has been a lawyer with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. since 1965.
Selected by Time magazine in 2010 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, Mr. Olson is one of the nation’s premier appellate and United States Supreme Court advocates. He has argued 65 cases in the Supreme Court and has prevailed in over 75% of those cases. These include the two Bush v Gore cases arising out of the 2000 presidential election; Citizens United v Federal Election Commission; Hollingsworth v Perry, the case affirming the overturning of California’s Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriages; Murphy v NCAA, overturning a federal law prohibiting states from authorizing sports betting; and U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security v Regents of the Univ. of Calif., challenging the Trump Administration’s rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”). Mr. Olson’s practice is concentrated on appellate and constitutional law, federal legislation, media and commercial disputes, and assisting clients with strategies for the containment, management and resolution of major legal crises. He has handled cases at all levels of state and federal court systems throughout the United States. Mr. Olson co-authored “Redeeming the Dream, the Case for Marriage Equality” with David Boies. Both were featured in HBO’s award-winning documentary, “The Case Against 8.”
Mr. Olson's Supreme Court arguments have included cases involving separation of powers; federalism; voting rights; the Tenth Amendment; the First Amendment; the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses; jury trial rights; punitive damages; takings of property; the Commerce Clause; administrative law; taxation; criminal law; sports wagering; copyright, patent and antitrust; securities; campaign finance; foreign sovereign immunities; telecommunications; the environment; the internet; the Supremacy Clause; and other federal constitutional and statutory questions. As Solicitor General, during the presidency of George W. Bush, Mr. Olson was the Government's principal advocate in the United States Supreme Court, responsible for supervising and coordinating all appellate litigation of the United States, and a legal adviser to the President and the Attorney General. As Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel during the Reagan Administration, Mr. Olson was the Executive Branch's principal legal adviser, rendering legal guidance to the President and to the heads of the Executive Branch departments on a wide range of constitutional and federal statutory questions, and assisting in formulating and articulating the Executive Branch's position on constitutional issues.
Mr. Olson has served as private counsel to two Presidents, Ronald W. Reagan and George W. Bush, in addition to serving those two Presidents in high-level positions in the Department of Justice. He has twice been awarded the United States Department of Justice's Edmund J. Randolph Award, its highest award for public service and leadership, and also received the Department of Defense's Distinguished Public Service Award, its highest civilian award, for his advocacy in the courts of the United States, including the Supreme Court. He also received the American Bar Association Medal, its highest award for “exceptionally distinguished service by a lawyer or lawyers to the cause of American jurisprudence.” Mr. Olson is to receive the 2021 Jack Valenti Friend of the White House Fellows Award in the Fall of 2021 to be presented by the White House Fellows Foundation and Association.
Mr. Olson is a member of the Commission on White House Fellowships; a member of the Board of Trustees of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation; a member of the Board of Visitors of the Federalist Society; the Board of Directors of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University; and the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial Foundation. He was a visiting scholar at the National Constitution Center in 2007. He served on the President's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board from 2006 to 2008; and of the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States from 2010 to 2020. He was Co-Chair of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy from 2008-2009, and served two terms on the Board of Directors of the National Center for State Courts.
Mr. Olson is a Fellow of both the American College of Trial Lawyers and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers. He has been repeatedly listed in legal publications as one of the nation’s leading appellate lawyers. The late New York Times columnist William Safire described Mr. Olson as his generation's "most persuasive advocate" before the Supreme Court and "the most effective Solicitor General in decades.”
Mr. Olson received his law degree in 1965 from the University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall) where he was a member of the California Law Review and Order of the Coif. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of the Pacific, where he was recognized as the outstanding graduating student in both forensics and journalism. He has written and lectured extensively on appellate advocacy, oral communication in the courtroom, civil justice reform, and constitutional and administrative law.
Professor of Law Emeritus, American University Washington College of Law
Herman Schwartz is a Professor of Law Emeritus at American University Washington College of Law. Throughout a long career in academia, publishing and community service, he has focused his attention and the world's on issues of civil rights and civil liberties as they have played out in courts and prisons across the globe. He has worked with the United Nations, the human rights advocacy group Helsinki Watch, the U.S./Israel Civil Liberties Law Program (which he founded), the ACLU Prison Project (which he founded), Washington College of Law's Human Rights Center and other organizations. In May 2006 he was awarded the 2006 Champion of Justice Award by the Alliance for Justice.
Schwartz's special interest in recent years has been the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe. He has served as an adviser to numerous Central and Eastern European nations, as well as former Soviet Union nations, on constitutional and human rights reform; recently he has been called up on to comment and advise on constitutional reform in Afghanistan, Iraq and several African countries. He also co-chaired a project on transitional justice in emerging democracies. He is currently a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of the Open Society Institute Justice Initiative.
Current work includes hunger issues and particularly the expansion of programs for school children during the summer. Schwartz formerly chaired the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, and has developed a course in which students work with national and local public interest organizations that deal with poverty issues. He also is continuing to pursue a lifelong interest in the operations of America's courts, and frequently is called upon to analyze and write about Supreme Court decisions. He has published Right Wing Justice: The Conservative Campaign to Take Over the Courts (May 2004), a study of the judgeship controversies since Ronald Reagan.
From 1963 to 1976, Schwartz was heavily involved in studying and monitoring New York State's criminal justice system. During the tragic inmate uprising at Attica State Prison in 1971, he served as the first intermediary between the prisoners and the prison administration, and represented numerous prisoners thereafter, founded the ACLU Prison Project and argued two cases in the Supreme Court relating to prisoners rights. Throughout the 1960's and 1970's, he was active in civil rights and civil liberties litigation and advocacy, serving as chief counsel in school desegregation cases in the North and the South. He was also the ACLU expert on the law and policy of electronic surveillance and the author of numerous studies of the operation of the wiretap laws.
Schwartz has authored three books: Right-Wing Justice: The Conservative Campaign to Take over the Courts (May 2004), The Struggle for Constitutional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (2000) and Packing the Courts: The Conservative Campaign to Rewrite the Constitution (1988); edited and contributed to The Rehnquist Court: Judicial Activism on the Right (2002), and The Burger Years Rights and Wrongs in the Supreme Court 1969-1986 (1987). He has written numerous reports, articles, chapters and scholarly papers.
His work on the frontiers of civil rights and civil liberties has been recognized with such honors as the 2006 “Champion of Justice” award from the Alliance for Justice, a Citation of Appreciation by the Common Council of the City of Buffalo, an American Jewish Congress - Washington Capital area award, the William Conable Award for Civil Rights, the Citizens Counsel for Human Rights Award and The ACLU-Niagara Frontier Award for Civil Liberties.
His undergraduate degree is from Harvard University, magna cum laude, and his Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School, magna cum laude. For most of his professional career he has been a professor of law. He has also served in state and federal government, including service as Chief Counsel of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, and Chief Counsel for Revenue Sharing, U.S. Treasury.
Partner, King & Spalding PLLC
Will Barnette is a partner in the Atlanta office of King & Spalding, where he is a member of the firm’s business litigation practice and class action defense group. During his 30-year career, Will has consistently led clients to successful outcomes in their most sensitive and high exposure class action, MDL, and related regulatory matters. From litigating high-stakes tobacco class actions at the turn of the century, to defending massive data breach litigation in the last decade, and winning several lucrative antitrust opt-out settlements more recently, Will has played a key role in much of the leading complex litigation of the era and led clients to tremendous success on both sides of the “v.” In particular, he has deep experience in litigating consumer, products, and antitrust class actions, commercial disputes, and managing internal investigations.
Prior to rejoining King & Spalding, where he worked earlier in his career, Will served as Associate General Counsel for The Home Depot and was a member of the company’s Legal Senior Leadership Team. As leader of The Home Depot’s commercial litigation team for more than ten years, he was responsible for the company’s most significant commercial and business litigation, which frequently challenged core aspects of the company’s business. During his 21-year tenure with The Home Depot, Will led the successful defense of several hundred class actions, created and led the company’s recovery litigation program, and successfully managed multiple high-profile investigations and favorably resolved significant related regulatory matters, including with the United States Department of Justice, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and multi-state Attorney General groups.
A recognized thought leader in complex litigation, Will argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2019 term—one of the few in-house counsel to do so. He received the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s Corporate Counsel Award for Advocacy in 2016 and has authored seven law review articles. His recent works, Misunderstanding Original Jurisdiction and There Is No Conservative Case for Class Actions, ranked among the top SSRN downloads in Federal Courts and Jurisdiction. He frequently lectures on class actions, MDL litigation, and internal investigations, and teaches Complex Litigation at the University of Tennessee Winston College of Law, where he earned the Harold C. Warner Outstanding Adjunct Professor Award in 2025.
Will chairs the Board of Georgians for Lawsuit Reform, which was instrumental in passing Georgia’s 2025 tort reform legislation. He also serves as Chair of the Class Actions Section for the State Bar of Georgia and is a former President of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. Will played varsity college basketball at Sewanee.
Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Professor Emeritus of Public Policy, Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County
George R. La Noue is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He has served as a trial expert in twenty cases involving public procurement preferences. For thirty years, he was Director of the Project on Civil Rights and Public Contracts at UMBC which recently contributed 289 public contracting disparity studies to the Library of Congress. He has been a consultant to nine governments and trial expert in thirty cases where the validity of disparity studies was at issue.
Prof. La Noue can be reached by email at glanoue@umbc.edu.
President, Columbia University
Lee C. Bollinger became Columbia University’s 19th president in 2002 and is the longest serving Ivy League president. Under his leadership, Columbia stands again at the very top rank of great research universities, distinguished by comprehensive academic excellence, an innovative and sustainable approach to global engagement, two of the largest capital campaigns in the history of higher education, and the institution’s most ambitious campus expansion in over a century.
President Bollinger is Columbia’s first Seth Low Professor of the University, a member of the Columbia Law School faculty, and one of the nation's foremost First Amendment scholars. Each fall semester, he teaches “Freedom of Speech and Press” to Columbia undergraduate students. He has two books coming out in 2021: National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press: The Pentagon Papers Fifty Years On, co-edited with Geoffrey R. Stone, which will be published by Oxford University Press; and Regardless of Frontiers: Global Freedom of Expression in a Troubled World, co-edited with Agnès Callamard, which will be published by Columbia University Press.
As president of the University of Michigan, Bollinger led the school’s historic litigation in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, Supreme Court decisions that upheld and clarified the importance of diversity as a compelling justification for affirmative action in higher education. He speaks and writes frequently about the value of racial, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity to American society through opinion columns, media interviews, and public appearances around the country. Columbia remains one of the most diverse universities among its peer institutions and has seen the number of applicants to Columbia College and the selectivity of admissions at the school reach record levels.
As Columbia’s president, Bollinger conceived and led the University’s most ambitious expansion in over a century with the creation of the Manhattanville campus in West Harlem, the first campus plan in the nation to receive the U.S. Green Building Council’s highest certification for sustainable development. An historic community benefits agreement emerging from the city and state review process for the new campus provides Columbia’s local neighborhoods with decades of investment in the community’s health, education and economic growth. The first two buildings, the Jerome L. Greene Science Center and the Lenfest Center for the Arts, opened in the spring of 2017. The third, the Forum, which hosts conferences, meetings, and symposia, opened in September of 2018.
Bollinger’s commitment to excellence in architecture is evident across Columbia’s campuses, from Renzo Piano’s master plan for Manhattanville, to the recently opened Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, to Rafael Moneo’s design for the Northwest Corner Building on the historic Morningside campus, to the Campbell Sports Center at Baker Field designed by Steven Holl.
Among Bollinger’s signal achievements at Columbia are the development of a network of nine Columbia Global Centers on four continents and the creation of new venues on the University’s home campus supporting global conversations and scholarship, including the World Leaders Forum and the Committee on Global Thought.
From November 1996 to 2002, Bollinger was president of the University of Michigan, where he also served as a law professor and dean of the law school.
He is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He is widely published on legal and constitutional issues involving free speech and press, and his books include: The Free Press Century, Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century; Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era; Images of a Free Press; and The Tolerant Society: Freedom of Speech and Extremist Speech in America.
Bollinger has received the National Humanitarian Award from the National Conference for Community and Justice and the National Equal Justice Award from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund for his leadership on affirmative action. He also received the Clark Kerr Award, the highest award conferred by the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, for his service to higher education, especially on matters of freedom of speech and diversity. He is the recipient of multiple honorary degrees from universities in this country and abroad.
Bollinger is a director of Graham Holdings Company (formerly The Washington Post Company) and serves as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. From 2007 to 2012, he was director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he also served as chair from 2010 to 2012.
After graduating from the University of Oregon and Columbia Law School, where he was an Articles Editor of Columbia Law Review, Bollinger served as law clerk for Judge Wilfred Feinberg on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for Chief Justice Warren Burger on the United States Supreme Court. He joined the University of Michigan Law School faculty in 1973.
Bollinger was born in Santa Rosa, California and raised there and in Baker, Oregon. He is married to artist Jean Magnano Bollinger, and they have two children and five grandchildren.
William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Yale School of Law
Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1982. Among his recent courses are Contracts, Evidence, Law and Religion, the Ethics of War, Slavery and the Law, and Libertarian Legal Theory. He is the author of fifteen books, including, among others, The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama (2010); God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics (2000); Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy (1998); The Dissent of the Governed: A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty (1998); The Confirmation Mess: Cleaning up the Federal Appointments Process (1994); and The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (1993). His most recent volume, published in 2018, is Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer who Took Down America’s Biggest Mobster. He recently delivered the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard, which he is writing up for publication.
Professor Carter is also the author of six novels, including The Emperor of Ocean Park, which spent eleven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln, a fictional account of a trial of Lincoln in the Senate for high crimes and misdemeanors. In addition to his scholarship, he has published hundreds of opinion pieces. He was a long-time columnist for the Daily Beast and currently writes regularly for Bloomberg, mainly about law, but also about ethics and about popular culture. In addition, he formerly blogged about professional football for the Washington Post.
Professor Carter is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School. He served as a law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall at the United States Supreme Court, and earlier for Judge Spottswood W. Robinson, III, of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was the interviewer for Justice Marshall’s official oral history. Among the prizes Professor Carter’s work has received are the Louisville-Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction, and the Paul M. Bator Award. He has also served on the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury. Professor Carter is a fellow of several learned societies and a life member of the American Law Institute. He is a trustee of the Aspen Institute, where for fifteen years he moderated seminars. He has received eight honorary degrees.
U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit
Frank H. Easterbrook is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a Senior Lecturer at the Law School of the University of Chicago. He was Chief Judge from 2006–2013. Before joining the court in 1985, he was the Lee andBrena Freeman Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, where he taught and wrote in antitrust, securities, corporate law, jurisprudence, and criminal procedure. He has published The Economic Structure of Corporate Law (with Daniel R. Fischel) and about 100 scholarly articles. He served as Co-Editor of the Journal of Law and Economics from 1982 to 1991 and as a member of the Judicial Conference’s Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure from 1991 to 1997. Before joining the faculty of the Law School in 1979, Judge Easterbrook was Deputy Solicitor General of the United States. He holds degrees from Swarthmore College (B.A. with high honors, 1970) and the University of Chicago (J.D. cum laude, 1973), and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute, the Mont Pelerin Society, Phi Beta Kappa, and the Order of the Coif.
Mary and Daniel Loughran Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Edmund Kitch joined the faculty in 1982. His scholarly and teaching interests include agency, corporations, securities, antitrust, industrial and intellectual property, economic regulation and legal and economic history.
In law school Kitch was comment editor for the University of Chicago Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. After spending one year as an assistant professor at Indiana University, he taught at the University of Chicago from 1965 until 1982. During that time he served as reporter of the Illinois Supreme Court Committee on Pattern Jury Instructions, special assistant to the solicitor general of the United States, and executive director of the Civil Aeronautics Board Committee on Procedural Reform. He also has been a visiting professor of law at Stanford, Michigan, New York University, Brooklyn Law School and Georgetown University. In 1996 he was the Jack N. Pritzker Distinguished Visiting Professor at Northwestern University School of Law.
After he came to Virginia, he became a member of the Committee on Public-Private Sector Interactions in Vaccine Innovation of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences (1983-85). He also was a member of UVA's Center for Advanced Studies from 1982-85. He is a member of the American Bar Association and the American Law Institute.
President, Columbia University
Lee C. Bollinger became Columbia University’s 19th president in 2002 and is the longest serving Ivy League president. Under his leadership, Columbia stands again at the very top rank of great research universities, distinguished by comprehensive academic excellence, an innovative and sustainable approach to global engagement, two of the largest capital campaigns in the history of higher education, and the institution’s most ambitious campus expansion in over a century.
President Bollinger is Columbia’s first Seth Low Professor of the University, a member of the Columbia Law School faculty, and one of the nation's foremost First Amendment scholars. Each fall semester, he teaches “Freedom of Speech and Press” to Columbia undergraduate students. He has two books coming out in 2021: National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press: The Pentagon Papers Fifty Years On, co-edited with Geoffrey R. Stone, which will be published by Oxford University Press; and Regardless of Frontiers: Global Freedom of Expression in a Troubled World, co-edited with Agnès Callamard, which will be published by Columbia University Press.
As president of the University of Michigan, Bollinger led the school’s historic litigation in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, Supreme Court decisions that upheld and clarified the importance of diversity as a compelling justification for affirmative action in higher education. He speaks and writes frequently about the value of racial, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity to American society through opinion columns, media interviews, and public appearances around the country. Columbia remains one of the most diverse universities among its peer institutions and has seen the number of applicants to Columbia College and the selectivity of admissions at the school reach record levels.
As Columbia’s president, Bollinger conceived and led the University’s most ambitious expansion in over a century with the creation of the Manhattanville campus in West Harlem, the first campus plan in the nation to receive the U.S. Green Building Council’s highest certification for sustainable development. An historic community benefits agreement emerging from the city and state review process for the new campus provides Columbia’s local neighborhoods with decades of investment in the community’s health, education and economic growth. The first two buildings, the Jerome L. Greene Science Center and the Lenfest Center for the Arts, opened in the spring of 2017. The third, the Forum, which hosts conferences, meetings, and symposia, opened in September of 2018.
Bollinger’s commitment to excellence in architecture is evident across Columbia’s campuses, from Renzo Piano’s master plan for Manhattanville, to the recently opened Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, to Rafael Moneo’s design for the Northwest Corner Building on the historic Morningside campus, to the Campbell Sports Center at Baker Field designed by Steven Holl.
Among Bollinger’s signal achievements at Columbia are the development of a network of nine Columbia Global Centers on four continents and the creation of new venues on the University’s home campus supporting global conversations and scholarship, including the World Leaders Forum and the Committee on Global Thought.
From November 1996 to 2002, Bollinger was president of the University of Michigan, where he also served as a law professor and dean of the law school.
He is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He is widely published on legal and constitutional issues involving free speech and press, and his books include: The Free Press Century, Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century; Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era; Images of a Free Press; and The Tolerant Society: Freedom of Speech and Extremist Speech in America.
Bollinger has received the National Humanitarian Award from the National Conference for Community and Justice and the National Equal Justice Award from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund for his leadership on affirmative action. He also received the Clark Kerr Award, the highest award conferred by the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, for his service to higher education, especially on matters of freedom of speech and diversity. He is the recipient of multiple honorary degrees from universities in this country and abroad.
Bollinger is a director of Graham Holdings Company (formerly The Washington Post Company) and serves as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. From 2007 to 2012, he was director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he also served as chair from 2010 to 2012.
After graduating from the University of Oregon and Columbia Law School, where he was an Articles Editor of Columbia Law Review, Bollinger served as law clerk for Judge Wilfred Feinberg on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for Chief Justice Warren Burger on the United States Supreme Court. He joined the University of Michigan Law School faculty in 1973.
Bollinger was born in Santa Rosa, California and raised there and in Baker, Oregon. He is married to artist Jean Magnano Bollinger, and they have two children and five grandchildren.
William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Yale School of Law
Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1982. Among his recent courses are Contracts, Evidence, Law and Religion, the Ethics of War, Slavery and the Law, and Libertarian Legal Theory. He is the author of fifteen books, including, among others, The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama (2010); God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics (2000); Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy (1998); The Dissent of the Governed: A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty (1998); The Confirmation Mess: Cleaning up the Federal Appointments Process (1994); and The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (1993). His most recent volume, published in 2018, is Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer who Took Down America’s Biggest Mobster. He recently delivered the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard, which he is writing up for publication.
Professor Carter is also the author of six novels, including The Emperor of Ocean Park, which spent eleven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln, a fictional account of a trial of Lincoln in the Senate for high crimes and misdemeanors. In addition to his scholarship, he has published hundreds of opinion pieces. He was a long-time columnist for the Daily Beast and currently writes regularly for Bloomberg, mainly about law, but also about ethics and about popular culture. In addition, he formerly blogged about professional football for the Washington Post.
Professor Carter is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School. He served as a law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall at the United States Supreme Court, and earlier for Judge Spottswood W. Robinson, III, of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was the interviewer for Justice Marshall’s official oral history. Among the prizes Professor Carter’s work has received are the Louisville-Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction, and the Paul M. Bator Award. He has also served on the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury. Professor Carter is a fellow of several learned societies and a life member of the American Law Institute. He is a trustee of the Aspen Institute, where for fifteen years he moderated seminars. He has received eight honorary degrees.
U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit
Frank H. Easterbrook is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a Senior Lecturer at the Law School of the University of Chicago. He was Chief Judge from 2006–2013. Before joining the court in 1985, he was the Lee andBrena Freeman Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, where he taught and wrote in antitrust, securities, corporate law, jurisprudence, and criminal procedure. He has published The Economic Structure of Corporate Law (with Daniel R. Fischel) and about 100 scholarly articles. He served as Co-Editor of the Journal of Law and Economics from 1982 to 1991 and as a member of the Judicial Conference’s Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure from 1991 to 1997. Before joining the faculty of the Law School in 1979, Judge Easterbrook was Deputy Solicitor General of the United States. He holds degrees from Swarthmore College (B.A. with high honors, 1970) and the University of Chicago (J.D. cum laude, 1973), and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute, the Mont Pelerin Society, Phi Beta Kappa, and the Order of the Coif.
Mary and Daniel Loughran Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Edmund Kitch joined the faculty in 1982. His scholarly and teaching interests include agency, corporations, securities, antitrust, industrial and intellectual property, economic regulation and legal and economic history.
In law school Kitch was comment editor for the University of Chicago Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. After spending one year as an assistant professor at Indiana University, he taught at the University of Chicago from 1965 until 1982. During that time he served as reporter of the Illinois Supreme Court Committee on Pattern Jury Instructions, special assistant to the solicitor general of the United States, and executive director of the Civil Aeronautics Board Committee on Procedural Reform. He also has been a visiting professor of law at Stanford, Michigan, New York University, Brooklyn Law School and Georgetown University. In 1996 he was the Jack N. Pritzker Distinguished Visiting Professor at Northwestern University School of Law.
After he came to Virginia, he became a member of the Committee on Public-Private Sector Interactions in Vaccine Innovation of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences (1983-85). He also was a member of UVA's Center for Advanced Studies from 1982-85. He is a member of the American Bar Association and the American Law Institute.
Shareholder & Co-Chair of the Workplace Policy Institute, Littler Mendelson P.C.
Alexander T. MacDonald advises employers on all aspects of the employment and labor landscape, focusing on emerging legislation and regulation. He has extensive experience advising businesses on worker classification, arbitration, the administrative and regulatory process, and the future of work. He frequently writes, publishes, and speaks on these subjects. His work has been cited by scholars and appellate courts. He is a recognized voice for the management perspective.
Alexander is a co-chair of the Workplace Policy Institute (WPI) team. With WPI, he advises employers on legislative, administrative, and regulatory developments at the state and federal level. He advocates for employers in the regulatory and administrative process. He also helps employers protect their businesses by understanding and anticipating cutting-edge legal developments.
Alexander also has extensive experience in traditional labor law. He represents management in all aspects of labor-management relations, including unfair labor practice charges, grievance arbitrations, representation elections, contract negotiations, and related litigation, including litigation in the U.S. courts of appeals.
Before joining Littler, Alexander served as the director, future of work, for a major technology company. He also worked in a national labor and employment law firm and a major public-sector general counsel’s office. He was a law clerk to the senior judges in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
He is also a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. He served in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. In law school, he graduated first in his class
Panel II: To Govern and Be Governed: The Federalist's Vision of Representative Democracy [Archive Collection]
Jesse H. Choper, Frank H. Easterbrook, David F. Epstein, Jonathan R. Macey, James L. Ryan
On February 28-29, 1992, the Federalist Society held its eleventh annual National Student Symposium at...
Topics
The Search for a Workable Free Exercise Framework
Under Employment Division v. Smith, the Free Exercise Clause functions more like an antidiscrimination statute...
Panel II: How Effective Are Bills of Rights in Protecting Freedom and Civil Liberties? [Archive Collection]
John S. Baker, Frank H. Easterbrook, Thomas W. Merrill, Theodore B. Olson, Herman Schwartz
On March 1-2, 1991, the Federalist Society's Yale Law School student chapter hosted the annual...
Panel II: How Effective Are Bills of Rights in Protecting Freedom and Civil Liberties? [Archive Collection]
John S. Baker, Frank H. Easterbrook, Thomas W. Merrill, Theodore B. Olson, Herman Schwartz
On March 1-2, 1991, the Federalist Society's Yale Law School student chapter hosted the annual...
Topics
En Banc Seventh Circuit Rules that Ministerial Exception Applies to Hostile Work Environment Claims
The en banc Seventh Circuit recently held that the First Amendment prohibits a minister from...
There Is No Conservative Case for Class Actions
William P. Barnette
A review of The Conservative Case for Class Actions, by Brian T. Fitzpatrick (Chicago), https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo43233299.html (Read...
The Race Card in ARPA’s Food Supply Deck
George R. La Noue
It is an old aphorism that a prudent person should not watch the making of...
Panel IV: Intellectual and Informational Property Rights [Archive Collection]
Lee C. Bollinger, Stephen L. Carter, Frank H. Easterbrook, Edmund W. Kitch
On March 10-11, 1989, the Federalist Society's University of Michigan student chapter hosted the eighth...
Panel IV: Intellectual and Informational Property Rights [Archive Collection]
Lee C. Bollinger, Stephen L. Carter, Frank H. Easterbrook, Edmund W. Kitch
On March 10-11, 1989, the Federalist Society's University of Michigan student chapter hosted the eighth...
Religious Schools, Collective Bargaining, & the Constitutional Legacy of NLRB v. Catholic Bishop
Alexander T. MacDonald
It would be difficult to find a corner of American labor law more anomalous than...