Ashe Family Chair Professor of Law, Georgia State University College of Law
Eric J. Segall graduated from Emory University, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, and from Vanderbilt Law School, where he was the research editor for the Law Review and member of Order of the Coif. He clerked for the Chief Judge Charles Moye Jr. for the Northern District of Georgia, and Albert J. Henderson of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. After his clerkships, Segall worked for Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and the U.S. Department of Justice, before joining the Georgia State faculty in 1991.
Segall teaches federal courts and constitutional law I and II. He is the author of the books Originalism as Faith and Supreme Myths: Why the Supreme Court is not a Court and its Justices are not Judges. His articles on constitutional law have appeared in, among others, the Harvard Law Review Forum, the Stanford Law Review On Line, the UCLA Law Review, the George Washington Law Review, the Washington University Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, the Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy, and Constitutional Commentary among many others.
Segall’s op-eds and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, The Atlantic, SLATE, Vox, Salon, and the Daily Beast, among others. He has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and France 24 and all four of Atlanta’s local television stations. He has also appeared on numerous local and national radio shows.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Lawrence VanDyke serves as a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Prior to that appointment in January 2020, he served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the United States Department of Justice. Before that, he served consecutively as the Solicitor General of two western states – Nevada and Montana. At the beginning of his legal career, he worked as an attorney in the Appellate and Constitutional Issues practice group at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, LLP.
Judge VanDyke received his law degree magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor on the Harvard Law Review. He has engineering and theology undergraduate degrees and a masters degree in engineering management. He served as a law clerk to the Honorable Janice Rogers Brown of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Judge VanDyke and his wife Cheryl live in Reno, Nevada, and they have three children.
Professor, University of Minnesota Law School
Ilan Wurman is the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches administrative law and constitutional law. He previously taught at Arizona State University. He writes primarily on the Fourteenth Amendment, administrative law, separation of powers, and constitutionalism. His academic writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Minnesota Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the Texas Law Review among other journals.
Professor Wurman is the author of the new book The Constitution of 1789: A New Introduction (Cambridge 2026). His previous books include A Debt Against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism (Cambridge 2017), and The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment (Cambridge 2020). He is also the author of the casebook, Administrative Law Theory and Fundamentals: An Integrated Approach (Foundation Press 3d ed. 2025).
Professor Wurman practices law with the firm Tully Bailey. He has litigated a variety of administrative law and constitutional law cases, including cases involving COVID-19 restrictions, transmission lines, and Appointments Clause challenges. He also devised winning public nuisance theories to force city governments to address the increasingly challenging public camping crises throughout the country.
Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
JEFFREY S. SUTTON is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He has served as Chair of the Federal Judicial Conference Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, Chair of the Advisory Committee on Appellate Rules, and Chair of the Supreme Court Fellows Commission. He currently serves as Chair of the Executive Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States. Since 1993, Chief Judge Sutton has been an adjunct professor at The Ohio State University College of Law, where he teaches seminars on State Constitutional Law, the United States Supreme Court, and Appellate Advocacy. He also teaches a class on State Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. Among other publications, he is the author of Who Decides? States as Laboratories of Constitutional Experimentation and 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law. He is the co-author of a casebook, State Constitutional Law: The Modern Experience, as well as The Law of Judicial Precedent. He is also the co-editor of The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law. In 2006, Chief Judge Sutton was elected to the American Law Institute, and in 2017 he was elected to its Council.
Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise, Vanderbilt University Law School
Brian Fitzpatrick is the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School, where his research focuses on class action litigation, federal courts, judicial selection, and constitutional law. He is best known for his empirical studies of class action settlements as well as his book The Conservative Case for Class Actions (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Professor Fitzpatrick joined Vanderbilt's law faculty in 2007 after serving as the John M. Olin Fellow at New York University School of Law. He graduated first in his class from Harvard Law School and went on to clerk for Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. After his clerkships, Professor Fitzpatrick practiced commercial and appellate litigation for several years at Sidley Austin in Washington, D.C., and served as Special Counsel for Supreme Court Nominations to U.S. Senator John Cornyn. Before earning his law degree, Fitzpatrick graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's of science in chemical engineering from the University of Notre Dame. He has received the Hall-Hartman Outstanding Professor Award, which recognizes excellence in classroom teaching, for his Civil Procedure and Federal Courts courses.
Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
JEFFREY S. SUTTON is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He has served as Chair of the Federal Judicial Conference Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, Chair of the Advisory Committee on Appellate Rules, and Chair of the Supreme Court Fellows Commission. He currently serves as Chair of the Executive Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States. Since 1993, Chief Judge Sutton has been an adjunct professor at The Ohio State University College of Law, where he teaches seminars on State Constitutional Law, the United States Supreme Court, and Appellate Advocacy. He also teaches a class on State Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. Among other publications, he is the author of Who Decides? States as Laboratories of Constitutional Experimentation and 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law. He is the co-author of a casebook, State Constitutional Law: The Modern Experience, as well as The Law of Judicial Precedent. He is also the co-editor of The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law. In 2006, Chief Judge Sutton was elected to the American Law Institute, and in 2017 he was elected to its Council.
Distinguished Senior Fellow and Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Edward Whelan is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and holds EPPC’s Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies. He is the longest-serving President in EPPC’s history, having held that position from March 2004 through January 2021.
Mr. Whelan directs EPPC’s program on The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture. His areas of expertise include constitutional law and the judicial confirmation process. As a contributor to National Review Online’s Bench Memos blog, he has been a leading commentator on nominations to the Supreme Court and the lower courts and on issues of constitutional law. He has written essays and op-eds for leading newspapers—including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post—opinion journals, and academic symposia and law reviews. The National Law Journal has named Mr. Whelan among its “Champions and Visionaries” in the practice of law in D.C.
Mr. Whelan is co-editor of three volumes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s work: Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived (Crown Forum, 2017), a New York Times bestselling collection of speeches by Justice Scalia; On Faith: Lessons from an American Believer (Crown Forum, 2019), a collection of Justice Scalia’s writings on faith and religion; and The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law (Crown Forum, 2020), a collection of Justice Scalia’s views on legal issues.
Mr. Whelan, a lawyer and a former law clerk to Justice Scalia, has served in positions of responsibility in all three branches of the federal government. From just before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, until joining EPPC in 2004, Mr. Whelan was the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. In that capacity, he advised the White House Counsel’s Office, the Attorney General and other senior DOJ officials, and departments and agencies throughout the executive branch on difficult and sensitive legal questions. Mr. Whelan previously served on Capitol Hill as General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In addition to clerking for Justice Scalia, he was a law clerk to Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
In 1981 Mr. Whelan graduated with honors from Harvard College and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He received his J.D. magna cum laude in 1985 from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Board of Editors of the Harvard Law Review.
For more on Mr. Whelan’s background, see this interview.
United States Magistrate Judge, Eastern District of North Carolina
Robert T. Numbers, II serves as a United States Magistrate Judge in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina.
Judge Numbers received degrees in Political Science and Economics, with honors, from Wake Forest University. After completing his undergraduate work, Judge Numbers obtained his law degree from the University of Notre Dame where he served on the Notre Dame Law Review.
Upon his graduation from law school, Judge Numbers joined the Winston-Salem office of a large, regional law firm. From 2005 until 2010, Judge Numbers’ practice focused on civil rights claims against local municipalities and government contractors. In 2010, Judge Numbers joined the firm’s Raleigh office and concentrated his practice on complex business litigation in state and federal courts.
Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
JEFFREY S. SUTTON is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He has served as Chair of the Federal Judicial Conference Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, Chair of the Advisory Committee on Appellate Rules, and Chair of the Supreme Court Fellows Commission. He currently serves as Chair of the Executive Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States. Since 1993, Chief Judge Sutton has been an adjunct professor at The Ohio State University College of Law, where he teaches seminars on State Constitutional Law, the United States Supreme Court, and Appellate Advocacy. He also teaches a class on State Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. Among other publications, he is the author of Who Decides? States as Laboratories of Constitutional Experimentation and 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law. He is the co-author of a casebook, State Constitutional Law: The Modern Experience, as well as The Law of Judicial Precedent. He is also the co-editor of The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law. In 2006, Chief Judge Sutton was elected to the American Law Institute, and in 2017 he was elected to its Council.
Distinguished Senior Fellow and Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Edward Whelan is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and holds EPPC’s Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies. He is the longest-serving President in EPPC’s history, having held that position from March 2004 through January 2021.
Mr. Whelan directs EPPC’s program on The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture. His areas of expertise include constitutional law and the judicial confirmation process. As a contributor to National Review Online’s Bench Memos blog, he has been a leading commentator on nominations to the Supreme Court and the lower courts and on issues of constitutional law. He has written essays and op-eds for leading newspapers—including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post—opinion journals, and academic symposia and law reviews. The National Law Journal has named Mr. Whelan among its “Champions and Visionaries” in the practice of law in D.C.
Mr. Whelan is co-editor of three volumes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s work: Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived (Crown Forum, 2017), a New York Times bestselling collection of speeches by Justice Scalia; On Faith: Lessons from an American Believer (Crown Forum, 2019), a collection of Justice Scalia’s writings on faith and religion; and The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law (Crown Forum, 2020), a collection of Justice Scalia’s views on legal issues.
Mr. Whelan, a lawyer and a former law clerk to Justice Scalia, has served in positions of responsibility in all three branches of the federal government. From just before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, until joining EPPC in 2004, Mr. Whelan was the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. In that capacity, he advised the White House Counsel’s Office, the Attorney General and other senior DOJ officials, and departments and agencies throughout the executive branch on difficult and sensitive legal questions. Mr. Whelan previously served on Capitol Hill as General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In addition to clerking for Justice Scalia, he was a law clerk to Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
In 1981 Mr. Whelan graduated with honors from Harvard College and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He received his J.D. magna cum laude in 1985 from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Board of Editors of the Harvard Law Review.
For more on Mr. Whelan’s background, see this interview.
Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
JEFFREY S. SUTTON is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He has served as Chair of the Federal Judicial Conference Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, Chair of the Advisory Committee on Appellate Rules, and Chair of the Supreme Court Fellows Commission. He currently serves as Chair of the Executive Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States. Since 1993, Chief Judge Sutton has been an adjunct professor at The Ohio State University College of Law, where he teaches seminars on State Constitutional Law, the United States Supreme Court, and Appellate Advocacy. He also teaches a class on State Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. Among other publications, he is the author of Who Decides? States as Laboratories of Constitutional Experimentation and 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law. He is the co-author of a casebook, State Constitutional Law: The Modern Experience, as well as The Law of Judicial Precedent. He is also the co-editor of The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law. In 2006, Chief Judge Sutton was elected to the American Law Institute, and in 2017 he was elected to its Council.
Distinguished Senior Fellow and Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Edward Whelan is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and holds EPPC’s Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies. He is the longest-serving President in EPPC’s history, having held that position from March 2004 through January 2021.
Mr. Whelan directs EPPC’s program on The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture. His areas of expertise include constitutional law and the judicial confirmation process. As a contributor to National Review Online’s Bench Memos blog, he has been a leading commentator on nominations to the Supreme Court and the lower courts and on issues of constitutional law. He has written essays and op-eds for leading newspapers—including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post—opinion journals, and academic symposia and law reviews. The National Law Journal has named Mr. Whelan among its “Champions and Visionaries” in the practice of law in D.C.
Mr. Whelan is co-editor of three volumes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s work: Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived (Crown Forum, 2017), a New York Times bestselling collection of speeches by Justice Scalia; On Faith: Lessons from an American Believer (Crown Forum, 2019), a collection of Justice Scalia’s writings on faith and religion; and The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law (Crown Forum, 2020), a collection of Justice Scalia’s views on legal issues.
Mr. Whelan, a lawyer and a former law clerk to Justice Scalia, has served in positions of responsibility in all three branches of the federal government. From just before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, until joining EPPC in 2004, Mr. Whelan was the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. In that capacity, he advised the White House Counsel’s Office, the Attorney General and other senior DOJ officials, and departments and agencies throughout the executive branch on difficult and sensitive legal questions. Mr. Whelan previously served on Capitol Hill as General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In addition to clerking for Justice Scalia, he was a law clerk to Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
In 1981 Mr. Whelan graduated with honors from Harvard College and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He received his J.D. magna cum laude in 1985 from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Board of Editors of the Harvard Law Review.
For more on Mr. Whelan’s background, see this interview.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
Eric Murphy has been a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit since March 2019. He previously served as the ninth State Solicitor of Ohio. In that role, Eric briefed and argued appellate cases on behalf of Ohio and its state agencies and officers in the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and the Ohio Supreme Court. Before his appointment as State Solicitor, Eric practiced appellate litigation at Jones Day. After graduation from law school, he served as a law clerk for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States, and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He received his law degree from the University of Chicago and his undergraduate degree from Miami University.
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.
Scholar and former Deputy Solicitor General of the United States
Paul Michael Bator (June 2, 1929 – February 24, 1989) was an American legal academic, Supreme Court advocate and expert on United States federal courts. In addition to teaching for almost 30 years at Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago Law School, Bator served as Deputy Solicitor General of the United States during the Reagan Administration.
Beneficial Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Educated at Princeton, Oxford and Columbia Law School, Charles Fried, the Beneficial Professor of Law, has been teaching at Harvard Law School since 1961. He was Solicitor General of the United States, 1985-89, and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, 1995-99. His scholarly and teaching interests have been moved by the connection between normative theory and the concrete institutions of public and private law. During his career at Harvard he has taught Criminal Law, Commercial Law, Roman Law, Torts, Contracts, Labor Law, Constitutional Law and Federal Courts, Appellate and Supreme Court Advocacy. The author of many books and articles, his Anatomy of Values (1970), Right and Wrong (1978), and Modern Liberty (2006) develop themes in moral and political philosophy with applications to law. Contract as Promise (1980), Making Tort Law (2003, with David Rosenberg) and Saying What the Law Is: The Constitution in the Supreme Court (2004) are fundamental inquiries into broad legal institutions. Order & Law: Arguing the Reagan Revolution (1991) discusses major themes developed in Fried's time as Solicitor General. In recent years Fried has taught Constitutional Law and Contracts. During his time as a teacher he has also argued a number of major cases in state and federal courts, most notably Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, in which the Supreme Court established the standards for the use of expert and scientific evidence in federal courts.
Sterling Professor of Law, Yale Law School
Anthony Kronman is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School. A former Dean of Yale Law School, Professor Kronman teaches in the areas of contracts, bankruptcy, jurisprudence, social theory, and professional responsibility. Before coming to Yale, he taught at the University of Chicago. Among his books are Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, Max Weber, Contracts: Cases and Materials (with F. Kessler and G. Gilmore), and Lost Lawyer. His latest book, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, was published by Yale University Press in 2016. Professor Kronman received his B.A. from Williams College, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy and J.D. from Yale.
Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Chicago Law School
Following his graduation from Harvard Law School, Judge Posner clerked for Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. From 1963 to 1965, he was assistant to Commissioner Philip Elman of the Federal Trade Commission. For the next two years, he was assistant to the solicitor general of the United States. Prior to going to Stanford Law School in 1968 as Associate Professor, Judge Posner served as general counsel of the President's Task Force on Communications Policy. He first came to the University of Chicago Law School in 1969, and was Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law prior to his appointment in 1981 as a judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He was the chief judge of the court from 1993 to 2000.
Judge Posner has written a number of books, including Economic Analysis of Law (9th ed., 2014); The Economics of Justice (1981); Law and Literature (3rd ed. 2009); The Problems of Jurisprudence (1990); Cardozo: A Study in Reputation (1990); The Essential Holmes (1992); Sex and Reason (1992); Overcoming Law (1995); The Federal Courts: Challenge and Reform (1996); Law and Legal Theory in England and America (1996); The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory (1999); Antitrust Law (2d ed. 2001); Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (2003); Catastrophe: Risk and Response (2004); Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11 (2005); How Judges Think (2008); A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression (2009); The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy (2010); The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice (coauthored with Lee Epstein and William M. Landes) (2013); and Reflections on Judging (2013). He also wrote books on the Clinton impeachment and Bush v. Gore, many articles in legal and economic journals, and book reviews in the popular press.
He has taught administrative law, antitrust, economic analysis of law, history of legal thought, conflict of laws, regulated industries, law and literature, the legislative process, family law, primitive law, torts, civil procedure, evidence, health law and economics, law and science, and jurisprudence. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Legal Studies and (with Orley Ashenfelter) the American Law and Economics Review. He is an Honorary Bencher of the Inner Temple and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and he was the President of the American Law and Economics Association from 1995 to 1996 and the honorary President of the Bentham Club of University College, London, for 1998. He has received honorary degrees from leading American and foreign universities, along with a number of awards, including the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Award in Law from the University of Virginia in 1994, the Marshall-Wythe Medallion from the College of William and Mary in 1998, the 2003 Research Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation, the 2003 John Sherman Award from the US Department of Justice, the Learned Hand Medal for Excellence in Federal Jurisprudence from the Federal bar Council in 2005, the Thomas C. Schelling Award from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2005, and the Ronald H. Coase Medal from the American Law and Economics Association in 2010.
Scholar and former Deputy Solicitor General of the United States
Paul Michael Bator (June 2, 1929 – February 24, 1989) was an American legal academic, Supreme Court advocate and expert on United States federal courts. In addition to teaching for almost 30 years at Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago Law School, Bator served as Deputy Solicitor General of the United States during the Reagan Administration.
Beneficial Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Educated at Princeton, Oxford and Columbia Law School, Charles Fried, the Beneficial Professor of Law, has been teaching at Harvard Law School since 1961. He was Solicitor General of the United States, 1985-89, and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, 1995-99. His scholarly and teaching interests have been moved by the connection between normative theory and the concrete institutions of public and private law. During his career at Harvard he has taught Criminal Law, Commercial Law, Roman Law, Torts, Contracts, Labor Law, Constitutional Law and Federal Courts, Appellate and Supreme Court Advocacy. The author of many books and articles, his Anatomy of Values (1970), Right and Wrong (1978), and Modern Liberty (2006) develop themes in moral and political philosophy with applications to law. Contract as Promise (1980), Making Tort Law (2003, with David Rosenberg) and Saying What the Law Is: The Constitution in the Supreme Court (2004) are fundamental inquiries into broad legal institutions. Order & Law: Arguing the Reagan Revolution (1991) discusses major themes developed in Fried's time as Solicitor General. In recent years Fried has taught Constitutional Law and Contracts. During his time as a teacher he has also argued a number of major cases in state and federal courts, most notably Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, in which the Supreme Court established the standards for the use of expert and scientific evidence in federal courts.
Sterling Professor of Law, Yale Law School
Anthony Kronman is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School. A former Dean of Yale Law School, Professor Kronman teaches in the areas of contracts, bankruptcy, jurisprudence, social theory, and professional responsibility. Before coming to Yale, he taught at the University of Chicago. Among his books are Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, Max Weber, Contracts: Cases and Materials (with F. Kessler and G. Gilmore), and Lost Lawyer. His latest book, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, was published by Yale University Press in 2016. Professor Kronman received his B.A. from Williams College, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy and J.D. from Yale.
Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Chicago Law School
Following his graduation from Harvard Law School, Judge Posner clerked for Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. From 1963 to 1965, he was assistant to Commissioner Philip Elman of the Federal Trade Commission. For the next two years, he was assistant to the solicitor general of the United States. Prior to going to Stanford Law School in 1968 as Associate Professor, Judge Posner served as general counsel of the President's Task Force on Communications Policy. He first came to the University of Chicago Law School in 1969, and was Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law prior to his appointment in 1981 as a judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He was the chief judge of the court from 1993 to 2000.
Judge Posner has written a number of books, including Economic Analysis of Law (9th ed., 2014); The Economics of Justice (1981); Law and Literature (3rd ed. 2009); The Problems of Jurisprudence (1990); Cardozo: A Study in Reputation (1990); The Essential Holmes (1992); Sex and Reason (1992); Overcoming Law (1995); The Federal Courts: Challenge and Reform (1996); Law and Legal Theory in England and America (1996); The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory (1999); Antitrust Law (2d ed. 2001); Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (2003); Catastrophe: Risk and Response (2004); Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11 (2005); How Judges Think (2008); A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression (2009); The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy (2010); The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice (coauthored with Lee Epstein and William M. Landes) (2013); and Reflections on Judging (2013). He also wrote books on the Clinton impeachment and Bush v. Gore, many articles in legal and economic journals, and book reviews in the popular press.
He has taught administrative law, antitrust, economic analysis of law, history of legal thought, conflict of laws, regulated industries, law and literature, the legislative process, family law, primitive law, torts, civil procedure, evidence, health law and economics, law and science, and jurisprudence. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Legal Studies and (with Orley Ashenfelter) the American Law and Economics Review. He is an Honorary Bencher of the Inner Temple and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and he was the President of the American Law and Economics Association from 1995 to 1996 and the honorary President of the Bentham Club of University College, London, for 1998. He has received honorary degrees from leading American and foreign universities, along with a number of awards, including the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Award in Law from the University of Virginia in 1994, the Marshall-Wythe Medallion from the College of William and Mary in 1998, the 2003 Research Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation, the 2003 John Sherman Award from the US Department of Justice, the Learned Hand Medal for Excellence in Federal Jurisprudence from the Federal bar Council in 2005, the Thomas C. Schelling Award from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2005, and the Ronald H. Coase Medal from the American Law and Economics Association in 2010.
Former Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court
Stephen G. Breyer was born in San Francisco, California, August 15, 1938. He married Joanna Hare in 1967, and has three children - Chloe, Nell, and Michael. He received an A.B. from Stanford University, a B.A. from Magdalen College, Oxford, and an LL.B. from Harvard Law School. He served as a law clerk to Justice Arthur Goldberg of the Supreme Court of the United States during the 1964 Term, as a Special Assistant to the Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Antitrust, 1965–1967, as an Assistant Special Prosecutor of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, 1973, as Special Counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, 1974–1975, and as Chief Counsel of the committee, 1979–1980. He was an Assistant Professor, Professor of Law, and Lecturer at Harvard Law School, 1967–1994, a Professor at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, 1977–1980, and a Visiting Professor at the College of Law, Sydney, Australia and at the University of Rome. From 1980–1990, he served as a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and as its Chief Judge, 1990–1994. He also served as a member of the Judicial Conference of the United States, 1990–1994, and of the United States Sentencing Commission, 1985–1989. President Clinton nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and he took his seat August 3, 1994. Justice Breyer retired from the Supreme Court on June 30, 2022.
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.
Former Executive Director, Federal Defender Program
Mr. MacCarthy graduated at the top of his class from St. Joseph's College in 1955, with a B.A. in Philosophy. After serving as a Lieutenant in the Marines, he attended law school at DePaul, graduating again in the top ten percent of his class in 1960. Following graduation, he served as an Assistant Professor of contracts and real property before beginning a clerkship to former Chief Judge William J. Campbell of the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and serving as Illinois Special Assistant Attorney General, specializing in civil trials and appeals. In 1966, he began serving as Executive Director of the Federal Defender Program in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. He was selected for the position by the judges of the District Court and the deans of the six Chicago law schools. As Executive Director, Mr. MacCarthy was primarily responsible for the administration of the unique and highly successful program that provides counsel for some 1500 defendants each year who are charged with federal crimes but are unable to afford private counsel. Since its beginning, the office is frequently reported as being one of the best defender offices in the nation. Always a strong believer in mentoring, Mr. MacCarthy has authored and published over twenty legal articles. Terrence MacCarthy is a member of the American, Illinois, Chicago, Federal and Seventh Circuit Bar Associations, the Illinois Attorneys for Criminal Justice, the National College of Criminal Defense, the National Legal Aid & Defender Association and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers serving on the Board of each. He has been awarded the DePaul University College of Law 1994 Alumni Service Award, the 1993 National Association of Criminal Lawyers Distinguished Service Award, the Illinois Attorneys for Criminal Justice 1993 Annual Award for Extraordinary Contribution to the Goals and Ideals of the Association, the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice 1990 Annual Award for Significant Contribution to Criminal Justice and the 1989 University of Virginia School of Law William J. Brennan, Jr. Award, presented to him by Justice Brennan.
President, Education Executives, LLC
Ilene H. Nagel is President of Education Executives, LLC, a consulting firm that specializes in the search for AAU and research university presidents, provosts, and deans, as well as the search for senior leaders of distinguished scientific organizations. In addition, Ilene has led the search for the VP for Health Sciences and/or Dean of Medicine for Hopkins, Stanford, UCLA, the University of Michigan, Harvard, Emory, UVA, Brown, UT Southwestern, UAB, Stony Brook, SUNY Buffalo, Indiana University, among others, as well as a variety of chair searches for academic medical centers, and the search for the CEO of the hospital systems for Stanford and for UCLA.
From 2005-2016, Ilene led the Higher Education practice for Russell Reynolds Associates, an internationally renowned executive search firm; her clients included Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Lehigh, USC, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania, NYU, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Georgetown, Washington University, Brown, Emory, UCLA, UVA, UCSD, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, UT Austin, the University of Minnesota, and a host of others, including, but not limited to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the Smithsonian, the Moore Foundation, and Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Before becoming a search consultant, Ilene had more than 30 years’ experience as an academic, with professorial appointments in several AAU research universities. Most recently, Ilene served as the Executive Vice Chancellor (chief academic officer) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before joining the University of California, Ilene was Dean of the Graduate School and Associate Provost for Research at the University of Maryland, College Park. Previously, she was on the law faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she was a tenured Full Professor, with a joint appointment in the College of Arts and Sciences. During her 20+ year tenure at Indiana University, Ilene took several leaves of absence to accept a variety of visiting faculty appointments at Yale Law School, Cambridge University, Columbia University School of Law, and George Washington University’s National Law Center.
Ilene received her B.A., magna cum laude, from Hunter College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University. She did a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Minnesota, and received her Master’s of Legal Studies from Stanford Law School. She was a Guggenheim Fellow at Yale Law School, a Visiting Scholar at the Bellagio Conference Center in Italy, and a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University.
In addition to her academic appointments, Ilene was nominated by the President, and confirmed by the United States Senate to serve a 6-year term in the federal judiciary, as a Member of the United States Sentencing Commission. She ultimately served for 9 years, full time, from 1985-1994, under three United States presidents, while retaining her faculty appointments on a part time basis.
Ilene serves as a corporate board member of Strada Education Network, an Indiana based Higher Education company, as well as a member of the Board of CGS (the Celerian Group), a subsidiary of Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina. In addition, Ilene served for several terms on the Board of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and on the Board of Santa Barbara Visiting Nurse and Hospice Association. She is a past and now honorary member of the Board of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, and a prior member of the Alfred University Board of Trustees. She is also presently serving as a Board member of the Cape Ann Museum, and the Birnam Wood Golf Club.
Ilene and her husband, contemporary sculptor Aristides Burton Demetrios, reside in Montecito, California. Aris is a graduate of Harvard University; he is the son of Virginia Lee Burton, renowned children’s book author and illustrator, and George Demetrios, a classical sculptor.
Feddie Night Frights: Originalism: Trick or Treat?
University of Texas Student Chapter
The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law
Montgomery Lawyers Chapter Event
Montgomery, ALThe Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law
Tennessee Lawyers Chapters - Online Event
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Kent Scheidegger
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The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law
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Paul M. Bator, Charles Fried, Anthony Kronman, Richard Posner
On April 3-5, 1987, the Federalist Society's Chicago Student Chapter hosted the sixth annual National...
Panel II: Jurisprudential Responses to Legal Realism [Archive Collection]
Paul M. Bator, Charles Fried, Anthony Kronman, Richard Posner
On April 3-5, 1987, the Federalist Society's Chicago Student Chapter hosted the sixth annual National...
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A Conversation with Judge Eric Murphy
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On September 9-10, 1988, The Federalist Society hosted its second annual National Lawyers Convention at...